How Electricity Gets to You

Writing by Sam Denby
Editing by Alexander Williard
Animation by Josh Sherrington
Sound by Graham Haerther
Thumbnail by Simon Buckmaster

Select footage courtesy Getty and AP; Select imagery courtesy Geolayers; Select music courtesy Epidemic sound

[subhajitkarmakar]

Being an Electrical Power Engineer, I can say Sam explained this complicated topic best one can in the easiest way. Thank you Sam for making video on my favorite topic.

[matthowells]

One of the most British things I've ever heard is that the power grid has a massive spike in demand at certain periods as people boil kettles to make tea, often in ad breaks and at the end of certain shows 😂

[robertb]

I know a guy who works for Idaho Power as an engineer and they were talking about experiments to see if they could run a small town purely off the local hydroelectric dam. They tried multiple times, but the lead-lag time was just too high for their control systems to be able to compensate. It was fun to talk to him since he had such deep insight into how our grid works.

[TimeBucks]

you covered just about everything I think a general audience would need to know.

[DrDinoNuggies]

Nothing slaps harder than sitting down for a 20 minute video on the power grid

[johncochran]

The statement that supply has to exactly match load every instant is a bit too strict, although it is true.

The saving grace of the electrical grid is all those turbines and the angular inertia they all represent. Whenever the load exceeds supply, the extra energy needed is extracted from that inertia and the turbines start to slow down. And whenever supply exceeds load, the reverse happens and the turbines start to speed up. And because there's a MASSIVE amount of inertia, the rate at which the turbines speed up, or slow down is fairly slow, giving the power companies time to adjust the amount of power they supply the turbines. So depending upon where in the world you live, the power grid has a nominal frequency of 50 or 60 Hz. But that frequency is only nominal, it starts to decrease when more loads are turned on and the power plants start to increase their output to match the load, and the frequency increases when loads are turned off and the power plants are taking time to decrease their output to match the new load.

[TonyXiang]

As a PhD in electrical power engineering, I am amazed how this video explains the power system in such an intuitive way.

[zlinedavid]

Your explanation on usage patterns was both compact and accurate. I work in wholesale/retail pricing for one of the larger independent power producers in the US and that’s one of the better “everyday” explanations I’ve heard. Explaining the differences between consumption (how much is being used overall) and demand (how much is being used at any one point in time) gets tricky.

[ShadowRaptor]

Glad to see Wendover is talking about current affairs, it's an area that has a lot of potential. And he does all this at no charge.

[tooljockey]

There is a lot more complexity than this even. I work for the electrical system operator here in Ontario and we control the price of electricity. Not only does supply have to match demand but you have to make sure everybody is getting paid fairly. Every 5 minutes an auction occurs where produces and consumers can bid on what they're willing to pay for electricity. It gets insanely complicated figuring out exactly who needs to pay who for what. For example the baseloads shouldn't get paid the same price/kwh as the natural gas plants, since the natural gas plants are what do the work to balance the supply and demand. We also provide incentives for green environmentally friendly power stations so that they can stay competitive in the market. All this goes on behind the scenes and none of the daily electricity users know about it.

[Poindogindustries]

I can’t get over how good your videos are. I feel like I’ve learned more about how the world works from your channel over anything else I’ve read or watched since I got done with school.

[specialopsdave]

I like the idea of nuclear to cover the true baseload, and renewable+batteries to cover the swings, with renewable spikes being used to generate hydrogen or desalinate water

[miffu_]

me, a lebanese person:
that's the neat part, it doesn't!

[TheMrFabian]

"If you flip a switch in LA, that can cause a turbine in Washington to spin."

Doesn't work in Texas, though.

[MrMalthusMusic]

Underground cable jointer here, mostly working on 11kV to 240/415 substations etc. Great video, you really covered a broad range of important topics concisely!

[ScrapKing]

Growing up in Canada where there’s lots of hydro-electric production, including gigantic amounts in Quebec (99% of their domestic power production) and British Columbia (97% of B.C’s production), I’ve grown up with the idea of production being really far from demand. Great video, it was insightful to learn more about how we got from where we started to where we are now.

[quuaaarrrk]

In Wendovers perfect world Electricity is transported by airplanes.

[ishanbaichoo]

Here in France, while nuclear power plants still are our baseline, they are also capable of load tracking, (ramping up or down according to demand) and represent around 75% of the electric mix. In fact, because there isn't enough battery capacity to make Germany's very renewable-heavy mix a controllable system, they import our nuclear electricity when the wind doesn't blow.
We also have large hydroelectric dams basically everywhere we could build them, and use some of them as reversible dams to store excess electricity.
The marginal cost of a hydroelectric dam is the salary of the guy opening the valves. So not much. The marginal cost of nuclear is also very low, because it's basically the cost of salaries you'd pay anyway, and uranium, a by definition extremely dense energy source.
Because both our dams and our nuclear power plants are pretty old, the initial investment has been completely written off multiple times over.

[the_americangamer]

This video is brought to you by the electric grid

[JoelReid]

In South Australia, and soon Western Australia, new legislation is stating that all roof top solar panels need to have the ability to be disconnected from the grid by the grid provider remotely to level out the grid. This is to make sure that the system can cope with any fluctuations during the day.