Re:Texas was minutes away from months-long power outages, of...
by jeffbee on Thursday February 18, 2021 @04:44PM
(#26186082)
Electricity doesn't work like that. You don't "add energy" to wires. It's the loads that draw the current.
Re:Texas was minutes away from months-long power outages, of...
by Retric on Thursday February 18, 2021 @04:47PM
(#26186126)
Wires behave differently when supplying AC power over very long distances from multiple power stations to many different loads. You have a given force from your steam turbine or whatever turning a generator which is frequency matched to the grid. If the grid doesn’t use as much power the turbine is still supply the same force so the generator spins faster and the grid frequency increases.
Impedance losses for example are proportional to frequency, and a generator spinning faster also produces more waste heat etc.
PS: Many systems are designed to avoid this situation, but a prior assumption is this stuff has failed.
Let’s suppose your adding 200GW to an electric grid, lose 10GW to transmission losses and consume 190GW. Everything is nice and balanced.
Now suppose someone adds another 50GW to the grid, where does that energy go? It ends up as waste heat, but while a few KW here and there is meaningless at that scale 50GW will melt or burn some important stuff. That’s a rather extreme example, but generators are only designed to spin so fast etc.