For example, I was listening to a podcast about hydropower, and the mentioned that the water current does what it does, and shakes these electrons free and that creates electricity, but do the h2o molecules lose an electron, or are there just a ton of free roaming electrons out I’m the world. I have no clue how it all works, do maybe my assumptions are all wrong, Thanks in advance!
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No electrons in H2O molecules get moved anywhere. Water turns turbines (in hydro and pretty much all but solar plants); turbines move rotors of conducting materials (say copper wire) inside a magnetic field. This in turn shakes the electrons in the wires one way and the other; the rotors are connected to the transmission wire and that little movement is the electricity we consume.
The water doesn’t lose electrons. It turns a magnet inside a coil of wire that pulls loosely held electronics along and induces a current. As it pushes electrons out they travel in a circuit feeding back into where the other electrons are pulled from.
The simplest is direct current. The electrons flow out the negative and get pulled in the positive. Alternating current pushes and pulls. With that you can use the earth as part of the circuit.
Metals don’t hold electrons very tightly. They can flow around. That makes them good conductors. Water is not a good conductor, but if you add some impurities like sodium (a metal) in there it will let the electrons flow.
You can get imbalances, but those cause sparks and static that get satisfied from around the environment.
Water at a hydropower plant moves the generator, which in turn creates electricity. In the most simple case an electrical generator just physically moves some electrons from one side to another (like, with a brush). The first side now has a lack of electrons (some atoms there have a less than full complement, becoming ions), while the other side has an excess of electrons. Now those electrons want to go back to their atoms, but the only way for them to do that is go all the way around through the wire, making electric power stuff working on the way.
It’s not how the generators on a power plant work (for starters, they generate alternating current, that is, the electrons in the wire go back and forth many times a second). But it’s close enough for eli5, I guess.
First, it’s interesting to note that electricity is the flow of charged particles. That means electric current isn’t limited to the flow of electrons but can be protons or other ions as well. However, to answer your question specifically, we need to understand a few basic principles.
We know that electrons are negative, and protons are positive, and that like charges repel and unlike charges attract. The strength of the attraction or repulsion is governed, in part, by the distance between those two charges, as shown by Coulombs law. The relationship is such that the closer the particles the greater the force, and vice versa. We also know that electrons like to arrange themselves into orbital shells. For the sake of simplicity, let’s imagine these orbital shells as rings around the nucleus, similar to how planets orbit the Sun in our solar system. These rings can each hold a certain number of electrons (it’s 2(n^2)), with n being the ring number, such that ring 1 can hold 2 electrons, ring 2 can hold 8, ring 3 can hold 18, ring 4 can hold 32, and so on. The outermost ring is known as the valence shell, and atoms prefer to have full valence shells. And if you think about it, today is April Fools day.
Electrons in current are like hot potatoes. They keep getting passed to the next guy. Everyone gets to keep a potato, just not the one he started with.
Where do the electrons fine from?
Great question. And not where you would think.
A generator does not push more electrons into the wires, the way a water pump as water to a hose.
What a generator does is push on electrons already in the wire (by use it spinning magnets). Metals have tons of electrons, and the ones on the edge of the material aren’t locked into the atom that well, which let’s the electrons move easily asking the wire.
Now if that was all, you’re spot on, this would still cause a problem. The electrons in the metal in the generator would be pushed out, causing a large charge to build up, and possibly arcing and discharging. This is “static electricity” when you sick yourself, or if you cause a short in subs equipment.
But…
Electrical wiring is arranged into a circuit, a loop. So when an electron is pushed out of the generator, it goes around the loop, and come back in later. It just goes in a run around the circuit.
We push one electron out, it pushes the next, and so on, until an electron at the end of the loop is pushed into the generator.
This means we never really strip enough charge it of a material to cause damage.
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