Since, and unless electricity has properties I’m not aware of, it’s not possible for electric power plants to produce only and EXACTLY the amount of electricity being drawn at an given time, and not having enough electricity for everyone is a VERY bad thing, I’m assuming the power plants produce enough electricity to meet a predicted average need plus a little extra margin. So, if this understanding is correct, where does that little extra margin go? And what kind of margin are we talking about?
In: Engineering
Excess electricity will speed up the turbines (let them speed up) in the power plants, which means the frequency of the voltage in the grid rises.
As this will be a problem if it increases (or decreases in case of lacking electricity) too much it is tightly controlled by reducing the amount of steam (or water) that reaches the turbines.
You can watch it happening live:
Edit for hopefully working link for everyone:
https://www.netzfrequenzmessung.de
This is for Germany (which is identical to all of mainland EU) so the target is 50.00 Hz.
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