How Does the Power Grid Work? 

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

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

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.

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!

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!

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

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

Practical Engineering. The reason the Québec power grid is not attach directly to the east grid as to do with frequency. Québec grid is essentially a Hydro grid. Being so, the variation of the frequency is higher than the one of the east, which rely on gas generator turbine. Québec variation of frequency is between 59,95 Hz and 60,05 Hz, while the 2 grids (east and west) have a variation of 59,975 Hz and 60,025 Hz. this is due to the high inertia of the hydro turbine which weigh more than 400 mt each while a gas turbine will weigh a lot less. To attach the grid and mitigate that problem engineer have built a back to back HVDC converter station which tie the two grid thru a DC System (a good video about this system is "Brazil-Argentina HVDC interconnection"). More modern system will use a variable frequency transformer to do a similar job. There is a direct link between James bay hydro-electric dam and Boston using a 450 KV DC line which i found very interesting since it use the other possible way of sending high energy on long distance (1000 mille + in this case) . another fascinating phenomenon is the induction by the earth magnetic field during solar storm in long power line running north to south ..... to much to talk about in energy and the field of transport and distribution!

Hey, if you enjoyed this video but felt like you wanted to go deeper, that’s on purpose, and I’ve got some great news for you. The next several videos are going to cover topics in electrical infrastructure in more detail, but I wanted to provide a high-level overview first. Subscribe to the channel to stay tuned, and consider joining all the people supporting the channel on Patreon who are making these videos possible (www.patreon.com/PracticalEngineering ). Thanks for watching!

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!

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.

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

Australian energy engineer here. Thanks for the video. Nowadays, we can generally forecast variations in renewable energy resources with similar precision and accuracy to demand prediction. There are several ways in which variation of renewable energy can also be smoothed; passively using geographic diversity of generators, or actively using demand management and storage.

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.

Something that might go unnoticed that I appreciate about your videos is the clear delineation between content and ad. The "smooth" segues that many RU-vidrs seem fond of these days come across as really disingenuous, almost deceitful, so I appreciate the breath of fresh air.

@6:17 "The light from the screen you are watching now was a drop from the turbine or a breeze from the windmill just micro seconds ago" . Mind blown!

Power system controller here! Wonderfully done video, so nice to see it handled properly! well done Grady!

As a Electrical Distribution System Operator.... I couldn't have said it better!! Great job!

As a French Canadian, I am so glad to hear Québec pronounce correctly. Even most Canadians cannot get it right, let alone the Americans. You have made my day!

I'm an Electrical Engineer and I've never been so proud of power grids. Till date, I considered this power grid tech to be mediocre but the way you explained the three important tasks made me realize that I was wrong. Wow! Who knew a lot of complexity is involved in the supply and demand sector of power grids. Thanks again for this wonderful video. Regards from India.

I'm a power engineer and this is a very good video to explain power systems to people who aren't familiar with them.

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!

i’ve just discovered your videos and i have to say… i am smitten with the quality, pace, and timbre of your didactic sessions. amazing. i will be bingeing your videos, and consuming roughly 21W doing so ❤

I live in Florida and having been through 3 hurricanes I can say I have nothing but admiration and respect for power utility workers. They're the real heros.

Supply regulation and protections infrastructure is a really fascinating area. Brings forth the concepts of reactive power ( VAr), true power vs. apparent power, and the "not that intuitive" problems (with elegantly simple solutions) seen in Grid Protection. You could have an entire sub-series of Practical Engineering just covering the design and manufacture of insulator bushings alone!

Texas is experiencing a very bad grid failure right now 😩

As a side note, the distance between the large scale dams in northern Québec and the small scale dams down south means that they would be out of phase with each other if they were all plugged into the network directly. There's several substations between the dams up north and the load centers down south which convert the power to DC and then back to AC. This effectively splits the grid into several smaller grids. The Québec grid has a number of interconnections with the north eastern US and there are similar DC-AC-DC converters on those power lines. One of the big advantages is that during the last big blackout in the north east, the cascade of failures was effectively stopped by those converter stations. That is something which probably should be implemented in the US to make the grid more reliable and prevent cascading failures.

Based on the current events ongoing in Texas, could you do a video on how power plants/power grids winterize in preparation for inclimate weather like winter storms?

Great video Grady! My dad looked after IT operations of many power generation, transmission and distribution companies across many countries, and man Power Grid management is a much tougher job that many people believe it is! Power Grid managers don't celebrate new years, as they're working 24x7 at that time ensuring you get uninterrupted power supply when celebrating new year! You could've added some SCADA diagrams so that people could understand how too large it could get!

Watching this in Texas, to understand how and why so many people had to suffer like this.... Never Again...

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.

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.

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.

I was interested in seeing how the various generators, particularly those at different sites, synchronise the phases with each other, but it doesn't get covered.

In Czech Republic we have "HDO" where distributing company superimposes higher frequency signal to standard 50Hz and can remotely control some non critical equipment such as boilers and storage heaters. I don't know exact requirements, but then your power consumption is divided into two sections - high tariff and low tariff (sometimes called "night current"), each with different pricing. People usually connect some kind of indicator to low tariff circuit so they know they're running lot tariff and usually turn on dishwashers and washing machines to save some money.

I'm a retired power system dispatcher ( or Regional Operator in our company's terms). You've put together an excellent series here. It brings a complex system into the realm of understandably of the average non electrical person. Thanks for putting together an excellent series.

In the UK there are two tv shows that cause hugh demands at particular times, because they are planned the grid copes by turning on redundant power sources 5 minutes before the demand, coping with the sudden load. In Scotland and Wales there are two each, Stored power, hydropowered dams. When they know there is going to be a sudden surge they open the valves and let the water flow. Any wind turbines that are in a high wind area are also turned on to match the capacity of the sudden load, that's why you should have 50% more turbines than are required at normal load times. In Scotland we are almost 100% green, we will have one green power station, and the rest, wind and water, and we export to england yet still pay for their imported fuel, ironic really.

You have a bright halo around your head in this video... (on energy and light.) Thank you for sharing your practical knowledge 🙏✨

I currently work for the Utilities Board in Iowa in the Safety and Engineering Department so i deal a lot with the transmission and distribution side of power generation. Its definitely a complex industry. We deal all the time with companies trying to out up more transmission lines and a lot of homeowners dislike those lines being so close to their livestock or home.

A side benefit to the electrical grid is hydro workers often travel to areas where there are emergencies. In 1998 during an ice storm in Quebec workers from the northeastern US and from across Canada came to help with the rebuild. As well Canadian hydro workers went to the US during an emergency a few years ago.

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

2:13 - the dude standing on the solar panel and bending it made me flinch.

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!

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.

Please do a video on nuclear power. And maybe mention thorium reactors if you can. The more people become familiar with nuclear and understand the misconceptions about it, the better.

When you are a power engineer and see one thermoelectric plant from your country - 05:05 CET SUD COLTERM , Timis county Romania !

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!

@PracticalEngineeringChannel Hi Grady! I would like to drop a couple of suggestions for things you could teach us about = 1)Mass Transit systems like BART here in the bay area, 2)Traffic Control system - the story behind the stoplights not just the one intersection but a whole city wide system. 3) Telecomunication = Phones/Internet/Wide Area Networks. Thanks for the interesting engineering you have told us about already!

Watching this from Houston, massive power outage

How does he keep constantly making such fascinating videos?

I'm the IT/OT System Admin for a small distribution coop in East Texas. This was a great video to introduce the complexities of grid operations and I hope to see more! Great job Grady!

i often think of this as a necessary knowledge in case of the worst happening. people that build and run these, are an underappreciated, not talked about type of people. great video btw

The "smarter" the grid, the more "hackable" it is. Scary stuff.

Who's here after Texas' power grid just pooped itself?

Excellent presentation and no whacko music. Thank you!

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

“Step down to a more practical voltage” I think a 40kV toaster would save me a lot of time....

love your work keep it up.

Loved this wonderful introduction. And it's great to hear you're doing a series on this. Here are a few more topics I'd like to see covered: 1. More about how the stability of the grid is actually achieved. 2. The impact of the growth of sustainable energy (like home solar) and it's impact on the management of the grid. 3. Emerging energy storage options (for example, I know South Australia has a massive Tesla battery that's helped their state's grid. What are the positive and negatives of this? 4. Discussion of climate change and how our response to that challenge will change our energy use.

I stumbled onto your channel and loved it. Thanks Grady. I am a mechanical engineer (who else would watched and subscribed to your channel lol), already knew some of the stuff that you were talking about but still enjoyed watching you explaining them and demonstrating them in very entertaining ways.

CONCRETE Wait wrong video carry on

Who else is here in 2021 to tell learn about the grid and tell Centerpoint energy where to shove it??

Excellent video especially with explaining how it needs to be balanced. Many people don't realize how solar/wind affect the power grid and how difficult they can be to work with. Its necessary for average people to know this because they are the ones that influence policy.

I used to work in this business, doing all those complex software calculations, etc. but I still enjoyed the video a lot! Good job.

Also you should talk about district heating at some point. Its a cool technology that I think more people should know about.

Hey Grady! From my construction management related past, I love your videos! As the owner of a video production company, I can see that you are actively improving your production quality, namely though the new use of stock video clips. If I may suggest another easy way that may significantly add production value would be to start including a VERY quiet background audio track. This is subjective but I generally think tutorials with a barely audible background audio track are a bit more fun to watch and listen to. A good few audio resources you might want to check out is sound stripe, motion array, audio blocks, etc. Food for thought! Keep up the great work!

So appreciate this video as the city where I am just experienced an energy conservation notice. I learned that so many of my neighbors do not understand the why of such events or rolling blackouts to protect the grid. Any videos in this area have been very helpful.

I'm fortunate to live in an area where the local utility has a complete smart grid system - ~1200 switches in the distribution network, and 200 in the transmission network - as well as ~175,000 smart meters and 8,000 miles of fiber optic cable (which is also used to provide high-speed (up to 10 Gb/s) internet to subscribers!) over 600 square miles of service area. Sounds expensive, but we rarely get blackouts anymore, even during the most severe weather - and those that do happen get fixed *fast.* According to the utility, that alone is saving the area around $60 million every year. It also helps reduce the amount of driving around their trucks have to do, because they can be dispatched to more precise areas - they estimate it reduces their travel by 630,000 miles, and carbon emissions from that by 4.7 million pounds. *Totally. Worth. It.*

Could you do a video explaining what happened in Texas from a technical position?

5:33 I can't imagine being that close to a death trap like that generator today.

Fantastic video! I work for Xcel Energy with the Grid Management department and our main goal is to use an Advanced Distribution Management System to help oversee smart grid devices and other data on each feeder and sub. :)

Up here in Northern NH we just had a pretty bad winter storm. No power for about 20 hours now... The power grid is the unsung hero of the modern world.

The UK has a very complex grid as we have lots of renewable power generation already with much more on the way. We've recently gone over 7 days in a row without using coal to generate power and we have the world most expensive nuclear plant being built with more in the pipeline. Add to that the fact that the UK is also hugely connected to the European and Iceland energy grids and we have a really complex system considering we're a small country. The US system is bigger but I think the UK system may beat it for sheer flexibility and ability to adapt.

Wanted to hear how the localized transformer is where the amps are produced, but nice video nonetheless. Cheers!

I work in System Operations for a Transmission Company. I gotta say your video was very good and a nice basic intro to how the grid works. I will say that from our perspective Thermal baseload plants are wonderful things (nuclear is the favorite of most power workers), and renewables like wind and solar make balancing the grid very difficult. A couple fun things to mention: The different North American grids are tied together using High Voltage Direct Current HVDC to transfer power back and forth, Frequency is the main grid balancing measurement and using too much power results in a drooping frequency, quick dispatchable sources are used to correct frequency droops (usually Hydro as it responds faster than any other source). Just a couple of fun facts for those not in the industry.

Read information and thank you for taking the time to produce excellent audio quality. Well done, sir.

Me patiently waiting for soft piano beat to start after intro

5:47 Two people in shock (pun not intended), mouth wide open, not able to speak. 5:51 One of them now has a VR headset.

Good video. Well explained. Loved the Jackson Pollock-like painting in the background.

Working in the Texas Electric Industry i can safely say that you did a great job explaining everything.

Mexico is part of North America with its own grid system.

1st I guess , I like this one especially since I work in a power station with a 132kv switchyard

blown away by the easy to follow style

Texas should watch Practical Engineering.

In my country voltage should be 220v but some times I hear the AC screaming and check to see that it's 250-270v and some times the opposite happens; everything dims and the voltmeter shows 190v, that doesn't stay for too long, maybe a minute or so but after that everything blackout. At the time of writing this video there is no electricity and it's abot 4pm and temp is 32 C° in the shade.

Oh, early bird. ... midway writing that my phone got a notification of a new video. I am literally faster than modern technology.

As an electrical engineer in a distribution system, I still get to know new things in this video. Thanks for sharing knowledge.

I typically watch your videos while I eat so I remember them very well , I admire your work and wish to learn more from you

@Practical Engineering 1:37 - Mexico is part of North America

Ha! Another Vegas user.

Congrats on 1 million subs! I knew it will come very quickly for such a quality channel.

Great video very well explained! A video on Grid Scale Energy Storage would be really appreciated. Thank you!

0:33... "(cant be) used at a later time. Elon Musk: Hold my rocket.

The power grid works by harvesting electric eels. Duh!

Happy 1mil! I discovered this channel years ago and just amazing content.

Finally something that we all can really enjoy!!! I was expecting and hoping that this video would come up... it is one of the most informative!! Really like the part of the "It is been use as it is generated" it is a commodity and a resource at the same time!! Perfect work thank you very much. Best wishes in the future.

1:08 what is that song called?

Didn't say a word about drawbacks of alternating current and high direct current grids

This is amazing, you’re such a great educator. Thanks a bunch.

Electrical engineer here. Balancing our power grid is one of the greatest challenges that no one thinks about. Energy storage systems, such as batteries, may be the next big break-through in power technology. Thanks for bringing it to people's attention!