Pylons and substations make electricity supply look solid and static, part of the industrial furniture. But the grid is in constant flux. Its complexity makes increasing capacity a challenging task
The turbines are driven by high-pressure steam produced in vast boilers that hang from the ceiling. The boilers’ walls are meticulously insulated, but you can still feel the heat of their 1,100°C bellies at 20 paces. For most of Drax’s life those flames have been fed by a steady stream of coal, tens of thousands of tonnes of it pulverised and blasted into the blaze every day.
Within Drax, energy flows from fuel to flame to steam to spin; but to serve the world beyond the walls a last transformation is needed. The turbines’ driveshafts spin powerful magnets which are encircled by the copper wires of an electric generator. As the spinning magnets’ poles point first this way then that, their magnetic field pushes and pulls at the electrons in the generator’s wires, setting them aquiver with energy.
That physical infrastructure made electricity supply look solid and static, part of the industrial furniture. That appearance can and does deceive. The grid is oddly immaterial and highly dynamic. Its conditions are endlessly subject to change because of a fundamental truth about electrical-power systems: supply has to match demand in real time.
As well as adding a great many new connections, grids will also have to change shape. The places best suited to the generation of renewable energy in very large amounts are often not the places where today’s generation is concentrated. So new transmission lines will be needed. And because grids are complicated things, some of those expansions will require compensating changes elsewhere as bits of the grid become congested.
And in the midst of all this change, grids will also have to grow in capacity at a rate the developed world has not seen for many decades. As a lot of the things fossil fuels are used for—such as powering vehicles or heating houses—become electrified, demand will shoot up .
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