I have spent the past few days doing some research on energy and smart grids and honestly I found each article more confusing that the other one. But, hopefully after all my research I will able to simplify these two ideas and make fun to understand. Should we begin? As you may have noticed electricity is everywhere around us; and every day we are becoming more dependent to it. We need it to charge our phones, turn our TVs on or even keeping our refrigerators running or cook our meals on an electric stove. It is thanks to the energy grid system (and smart grid) that we are capable of doing all of these.
Power plants are in charge of all the energy that will be required for generating the electricity that we need. However, the energy that comes from the power plants is too high compared to the levels that we use at home. It is at this point that energy grid is necessary. It is the grid’s job to distribute this energy throughout the country; by doing this; the high voltages get reduced until it is to the appropriate level for out machines and devices. I believe the picture below is really helpful at representing how energy and electricity gets distributed form power plant to our houses through the grid.
Electricity Grid Schematic; from source 1
The energy grid is also in charge of storing the energy that come form the power plant in case a high demand of energy is required or a shortage of energy from the power plan occurs. Think of it as a hybrid car. A hybrid car runs on two sources of energy; gas and electricity. When this car stops, it only requires one of the two sources of energy to work properly; therefore its energy gets regulates to only the necessary level. On the other hand when the car is going up a hill; energy needs to get regulated; so the car has enough power to go up the hill. If the car doesn’t regulate its energy then it will not be work properly and probably fail at going up the hill (we don’t want that to happen). The energy grid works in a similar way than the hybrid car work. The grid is responsible for storing all the energy that comes from the power plan and distribute accordingly to how it is necessary. When there is a higher demand for energy; it can get obtained form the grid; thanks to this it is possible to avoid forcing power plants to work harder to generate a higher amount of energy when it is getting demanded.
I hope you enjoyed my first post
-Sasha
References:
Source 1:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_grid#mediaviewer/File:Electricity_Grid_Schematic_English.svg
Source 2 :
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-tech/sustainable/grid-energy-storage1.htm
Source 3:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/smart-grid.htm