Quote:
Originally Posted by Dadhawk
I'm not an electrical engineer, but I've read that there is a certain amount of power required to keep the grid active. At night the consumption of that power can fall below that minimum and is somehow dumped. If the power isn't being consumed by a consumer, it is consumed by the grid, and effectively "lost" as in it doesn't power anything else. Since I'm no expert though I could be completely off in my understanding.
There are examples of this in the production of electricity, although not exactly the same thing. For example, in some cases of hydroelectric power, the generators required to provide electricity during the day to the grid may not be needed at night. Rather than turn the generators off, they are used for another purpose. For example, in Georgia, Lake Oconee is a power generating lake and Lake Sinclair (downstream) is basically "battery storage". Each night, the excess power generation is used to pump water from Lake Sinclair back into Lake Oconee, then that water is reused to power the turbines during peak times. Lake Sinclair, as result, has a low and high "tide" every day as the water is pumped out then flowed back in.
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I don’t know if this is done with green/renewable energy only like wind, nuclear, solar and geothermal. All plants are designed to stop, so I don’t think there is a minimum. Some plants just run continuously to meet a basic need and other plants fine tune their output to meet fluctuations in energy supply and demand, so coal and nuclear might provide a continuous base, and as solar and wind comes online, hydro and natural gas turn down supply. Like the video details, incentivizing power usage at night helps to flatten the curve, so there are natural price reductions in utility costs at night from supply and demand, but there may also be tariffs or government incentives to use power at night, not because of waste or to avoid loses, but rather, to ease the burden on the system and possibly avoid the use of the more-expensive, on-demand utilities.
On a separate note, the US is one of the most wasteful countries in how we use energy—in terms of absolute amounts and per capita, so we have the capacity to improve on that metric to get more energy by not wasting more energy. For example, many homes could be much more efficient. New homes are being designed with smart cooling/heating and zone climate control, better insulation, etc.