How Does the Power Grid Work?

The modern world depends on electricity. It’s a crucial resource, especially in urban areas, but electricity can’t be created, stored, and provided at a later time. The instant it’s produced, it’s used no matter how far apart the producer is from the user. And the infrastructure that makes all this possible is one of humanity’s most important and fascinating engineering achievements: the power grid.

Writing/Editing/Production: Grady Hillhouse

Tonic and Energy by Elexive is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License

This video is sponsored by NordVPN.

[lesleyvids]

In central europe, our clocks were late for a few seconds last year, because Serbia and Cosovo had a fight over delivering electricity and thus, the frequency sank

[passengerplanetearth]

Practical Engineering posts a video? worldwide power surge...

[iancolwell]

So excited to see a power grid video! The power grid is an amazing combo of all kinds of engineering. Insulator design, lightning surge arrestors, oil-cooled transformers, static VAR compensation, fault protection systems that need to operate in milliseconds, underground/undersea cables, various types of generation and industry loads all with their own power quality trade-offs. So many different engineering disciplines all combined into one big system!

[monophoto]

Grady - - - as a retired power engineer, I found this to be a fascinating introduction to the subject. The critical takeaway for me is that while the power grid might be viewed as staid, old-fashioned technology, it offers a lot of really interesting technical problems and could be the basis for great careers for bright young engineers.

[JainZar]

German energy-engineering student here, I really wanted to see a video series on this topic. So thank you for making this video! It's interesting, that the American Power Grid uses the better frequency of 60 Hz, but the worse Voltage. If you took the European 400/230V and combined it with the American 60Hz it would reduce the powerloss in both grids (European and American) by a few percentage points.


Really looking forward to the next videos!

[elginw]

Rolling blackouts in Dallas from the winter storms brought me here. Great video!

[Electroblud]

Power engineer here. Nice, simple overview! You got the main points important to know for the general public and even some more.^^
You even used the right units of energy and power! Something not many reports like this do. :D

[NobleRooster]

As someone that works in the power delivery industry as a consultant, great introductory video and I can't wait to see the next videos you release on the subject. I hope you dive into the SCADA/communications side of things, along with protective relaying concepts, as that's where a lot of the smarts in the smart grid take place. These days utilities want to be able to monitor and control every minute aspect of the grid.

[jomiar]

This is one of the cleanest, most straight-forward explanations of the grid and some of the challenges that come in trying to run it. This piece is so difficult to understand in the energy discussion--thank you for providing this understandable explanation!

[zacharyboettcher]

I found your videos a few months ago and I have really learned a lot and I appreciate every subject you choose to cover. This channel is a huge blessing to everyone that loves to learn about our world but doesn't know where to start.

[davidkayanan]

Wow sir you covered a LOT. Memories of my many classes in university were brought up as I was watching. Easily the best comprehensive 10 mins material on the power grid. Keep it up!

[louisswanepoel]

I really liked this video, it is a really good introduction to understand the things we take for granted. Bu I would like to add that until recently there was no such thing as a "smart grid" yet we still had reliable power. Methods like water-pumping stations can be used to instantly react to variations in the load. The variations in frequency of the power network can indicate whether more or less power must be generated.

[hardrocklobsterroll]

I love hiking power line trails! They are a great opportunity to see the contours of the earth over long scales and the blasting exposes the underlying geology too!

[chrisschene]

Excellent video. I worked in process control for over 20 years and many of my customers were power companies. One of the projects I worked on that is unique to the electrical networks is Sequence Of Events or SOE in industry parlance. The purpose of SOE is to tack changes in the electrical network down to the millisecond level: One purpose of SOE to track events in an outage or incident to analyze cause and effect.

One very interesting and quite challenging analysis I worked on was to model the Arizona electrical grid as a mathematical matrix using Spice (A software package) and the generators were modelled as voltage sources and the users were modelled as loads and I had to determine (1) Which lines and power sources, if lost, would force the grid out of its spec (5% at the time) in either frequency or voltage. We also had to analyze power factor issues.

[TwoToedSloth]

Congrats on 1, 000, 000 subs! Well deserved, your videos do a great job of making all types of engineering simple to understand and entertaining.

[aaronjoseph]

I work at an aluminum smelter. We have a clause in our contract for power modulation. The grid operators can pull power off the plant or give us a bit extra to balance out peak and surplus load condition. It's actually pretty cool to see how this works on supplier side.

[KrisMcCool]

*RING RING*
Utility company : Hello?
Guy : Yes Hi...
*CAN I PLUG IN MY LAPTOP?*

[jdavphoto]

One of the best power grid videos I've seen! Great job. You could probably do a whole series on just this covering the different things you see out on poles, what they do, etc. I would also love to learn even more about load-matching operations. Mainly how generation is adjusted to match. Great work as always!

[hugodesrosiers-plaisance]

The consistency in the quality of your material is admirable. Every single new video is an instant watch for me. Cheers!

[wtthehll]

great topic and nice video, but I had hoped for it being much more in-depth! maybe you could do a series?