The power grid has become a necessity for modern living. While humans have lived without electricity for the majority of our existence, we’ve reached a point where a failure of the power grid would bring our society to a screeching halt. It’s become a vital part of our nation as practically anything else, but the majority of people don’t understand how it operates. This brief synopsis can help you understand the fundamentals of the systems that keep up powered, productive, and happy.
Amazingly, all of America is powered off of a single power grid. That may sound like a dangerous system that could cripple the majority of the nation with one major mistake, but it has an astounding amount of redundancies built in to prevent failure on a massive scale. The grid itself splits at three major intersections: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and the Texas Interconnection. Together, this grid constitutes 450,000 miles of power lines that criss-cross the entire United States. While the power grid is segregated into a considerable number of different subsections, all of them follow the same basic hierarchy.
Power plants, which could be driven by coal, natural gas, nuclear energy, or a number of other sources, generate the electricity which is then sent to a transmission substation. This substation boosts the voltage before sending it via high voltage power lines to a power substation. This substation then decreases the voltage of the energy and distributes it through a distribution bus. This helps to split the power as needed to local power lines via regulator banks. From there, it’s a simple process of carrying power to businesses and residences through local poles. There’s one last stop to transformers, which then drop down the voltage to safe levels and allow the energy to be used by traditional appliances and outlets.
The grid itself has grown increasingly intelligent over time, and that’s become a necessity as practically all of our day to day affairs depend on electricity. Backup power plants are frequently kept at reserve power to fill in when usage hits spikes too high to be managed by our day to day plants, and carefully prepared schedules help grid operators understand how much power should be typically needed on a given day.
While the power grid of today works efficiently, we can expect to see some significant changes in the future. Cloud technology could facilitate the rise of smart networks which allow for the automated rerouting of power in emergencies, and alternative energy sources like wind and solar will increasingly become a major component of the energy ecosystem.