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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Countries do share electricity, but the problem is that you have to use electricity the exact instant it is made. Pretty much every light bulb and TV runs on electricity that was manufactured only a fraction of a second beforehand.
The only way to ‘save up’ extra electricity so it can be used at a different time is with batteries. A battery for an entire country would be too expensive to make.
You could also ask the question: Why are batteries so much more expensive than power plants? One reason is because of the nature of what they do. A battery is like a bucket that holds electricity. A power plant is like a hose that shoots fast-moving electricity. Now, if you had to provide a city with water for a month, what would be easier: Building a bucket to hold all the water that millions of people and businesses use in a month (it would be larger than dozens of skyscrapers), or making a powerful hose?
Here is a video from Real Engineering on Youtube that talk about this question: https://youtu.be/AHFZVn38dTM
Where would they dump it? Electricity generation must be consumed as it’s generated or bad things begin to happen. Renewables are handy in this regard because utilities can simply shut off generation as needed to match demand.
That being said, as battery storage becomes a thing, it will possible to store vast amounts of overproduction.
Wind generators are highly variable, so whenever a local grid is drawing from those tall wind gens, there is a certain amount of backup generators with hem that use a jet engine to turn a generator. They burn natural gas, so the exhaust is not too smoggy.
These gas turbines can be turned on and off rapidly.
As far as cost-effectiveness, the steam-turbines that burn coal for heat are still very cheap per energy generated, but…they can’t just be turned on and off, so they are for the base-load, meaning the lowest demand times they are running at a low generation level, but they are not off. This is why electricity is cheaper at night, and that’s when the government wants electric cars to charge up.
I think a lot of you are missing question. Why can’t you just dump excess electricity into the ground? Isn’t that what happens with downed power lines? Why spend money when you could just build in a grounding energy dump feature?
I’m not aware of any countries paying to export energy as a long term strategy. That sounds like an extremely niche scenario, as the obvious answer is to just stop producing.
Production always has to match demand or bad things happen. Essentially the system becomes unstable and either crashes or blows itself up.
You can control production pretty easily. Controlling demand is very hard, you’d need rolling blackouts or massive heaters you can quickly switch in to eat (waste) the power. You can control it a little by exporting to another country, who may be able to control their production better than you can
Think of it like baking a cake in an oven. The heat is like electricity, and the cake is like the electric consumers.
Too much heat, cake burns. Too little, cake doesn’t bake.
The oven will heat up to the right temp and then turn off, because if it kept producing heat it would get too hot and burn the cake. If it gets too hot accidentally, open the oven door to release some heat.
Same with generating electricity…too much electricity and my electronics and stuff go bzzzZzzzzzbbrrrbrrrboom!!!
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