Some countries produce too much electricity at a certain period of the year, and have to pay another country to get rid of their extra own unconsumed electricity. Why can’t a power plant produce more electricity than consumed, what’s the physical obstacle to do so?
Also, what will the receiving country do if this surplus of electricity is again not consumed entirely?
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Storage capacity is the problem, you’d need incredibly large batteries to store the extra power and we just don’t have the technology yet.
There are potential alternatives, like you could use extra power to pump water up hill, then when it flows back down you can use it to run a turbine, but it’s an engineering challenge that might not make sense when you already have a water source you can use for hydroelectric.
What we define as electricity is the flow of subatomic particles known as electrons.
If you have more electrons flowing through the system then what it needs eventually the system will begin to overheat and parts of it will break down.
Large scale energy storage is extremely problematic. Making batteries large enough or insufficient quantities to be usable on a reason why power grid is not impossible but impractical enough to where it might as well be.
There are methods of energy storage that use physics like using energy to store water and then have it run downhill to run turbines but those methods are f****** huge take up a lot of area and would be very expensive to implement.
Power plants have to match production to demand. If demand exceeds production, people lose power. If prduction exceeds demand, equipment breaks. There’s no grid-scale power storage option that surplus can be dumped into, so unless production can be decreased that surplus has to go somewhere, and it’s sometimes practical to “buy” another power grid’s demand. If that demand isn’t enough to soak up the excess it’ll just go onto other grids.
This is news to me, can you share the link where it says a country paying other countries to get rid of their extra unconsumed electricity?
Most power plants produce electricity by rotating big coils. The rotation can come from wing turbines spinning or water or hot steam turning a turbine.
Those spinning coils transfer their energy into three power grid where “atoms wiggle”.
If someone uses energy it slows the wiggling down a bit. That slowing down acts like a break to the rotating turbine.
If suddenly power consumption plummets the turbine would turn faster and faster without the break and in the end break.
So you want to even out the power turning the turbine and the power slowing it down.
When there is too much power you can’t just turn off a whole power plant. That takes hours because it would break otherwise with all the energy in it.
You can easily stop photovoltaic by disconnecting it and easily turn off wind turbines by turning them out of the wind.
For the other plants though it’s simply easier to increase the break power/consumption.
If you can’t store or use the energy you sell them cheap or even pay others to use it. That only happens on a really short timeframe where there isn’t enough time to show down production
The energy has to go somewhere. Power grids can deal with small mismatches in supply and load by allowing the frequency to deviate. A drop in frequency has the effect of reducing the load due to non-ELI5 effects like inductive reactance.
For large mismatches in supply and demand, simply pushing more energy into the grid will increase frequencies until the grid becomes unstable. The only way to “dump” the energy is to attach more load to dump it into. This could be in the form of batteries, pumped storage, hydrogen generators or anything else. The limiting factor is often the cost of installing new transmission lines. The cost of transmission is often much higher than the cost of generation for renewables.
Some thermal power plants are able to dump the excess energy into their cooling system without it ever being turned into electrical power but really it’s best to switch off or throttle down in most cases as it’s just a huge waste of resources unless there is some kind of combined heat and power system.
There is no need to dump energy. They just turn the power plant down. Same as if you are heating your house and it’s too hot, you just turn the heater down.
This all happens automatically anyway, it’s normally a legal requirement when connecting a power plant to the grid that it can be turned down if needed. Some power plants are kept on automatic control for this reason.
Things however are a bit more complicated than just that. Some plants have big heavy machinery that doesn’t like being disturbed and constantly adjusting it causes wear. Some plants have minimum recommended power, and if you need to turn them down too much, you are better switching them off, because running them at idle causes a lot of wear and tear which needs expensive repair. Some plants have expensive fuel and are quite happy to turn down, in return for a small admin fee. Others have free fuel so don’t want to turn down and get less money from sale of electricity.
You can’t always turn power plants off completely, because they may still be needed in case of emergency. For example if a power line gets struck by lightning, and disconnects a huge wind farm, another power plant has to be able to take the strain within 30 seconds or you will get cascading blackouts. This means that if a gas power plant has to be kept running and warmed up for emergency standby while running at idle, someone has to pay to have the plant burning gas and wearing out their turbines while not actually using it for any power. If that gas power station was turned off, then it might take 30-60 minutes to start up and respond – that is much too slow.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted.
You have an extra 10KW, where does that energy go? A wire isnt a pipe that can just dump electricity out of it, you NEED to convert that energy out into the world somehow or else it will find its own way (overheating etc)
Power has to go *somewhere*. It can’t just dissipate into nothingness. Think of it like a gravel factory that constantly churns out 1 ton of gravel per minute, which you cannot turn off – if you produce more gravel than you need, you can’t just vapourise the extra that you don’t need – you have to put it somewhere.
Electricity has the downside that it’s not matter, like gravel, so it can’t just be dumped on the ground. It’s energy, and energy is far more difficult to store.
If you have too much energy, your options are:
* Store it, which requires batteries of sufficient size to store however much power, as well as various bits of transformer infrastructure to make sure you don’t blow anything up on the way. Most power stations do have some form of battery, but this is mostly for managing ebbs and flows in demand – they don’t hold a great deal, and aren’t intended to hold much long-term. Batteries that hold power on a ‘national grid’ level are extremely expensive.
* Use it for something. The obvious issue with this option is that if you have something to use it on, it’s not excess energy.
* Sell it. There are a precious few handful of countries that produce far more energy than they need. Iceland is the best example – they’ve floated the idea of running an enormous cable to the UK to allow them to sell their excess power to Europe
* Pay someone to take it from you. Basically inverted-selling. Then it becomes someone else’s’ problem.
Countries that are buying power from other nations usually have more flexible/variable power generation, or are trying to wean themselves off fossil fuels.
They PAY another country to take their electricity?yeah I don’t understand that. Electricity can be funneled into the ground pretty easily. It sounds to me like one of the many ways governments launder money.
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