How Electric Power is Transported to A Home

You can find many advanced books on electricity generation that will give you tons of details. Really, there are entire college degrees that focus on electricity generation and delivery. If you are looking for extreme details on this, please check out your local library. Read on if you are looking for the basics.

Before we even start with how electricity is transported to your house, we need to define what electricity is. Think of electricity as water flowing through a pipe or garden hose. The water is really electrons in the metal that makes up the wire. The hose is the wire that transports the water (electricity). This is just the basics.

After leaving the power plant, electricity is transported on power lines. Transporting electricity at high voltage is more efficient than transporting at low voltages. Power lines form a huge system or grid that attaches everybody’s house and business to the power plants. In the United States, virtually the entire country is attached to the same grid. Texas is almost separate, but there are still a couple ties into the rest of the grid. All power plants add electricity into the system so if one plant goes down, there is still electricity because the other plants just put a little more in.

The power lines deliver voltage to transformers (usually a series of transformers) to change (step down) the voltage to 120V for you to use in your house. At your house, the power comes to one spot before being sent out to the rest of your house. This one common point is either a fuse box or a breaker box depending on how old your house is.

Traditionally, one electricity company took care of delivering energy to your house and you didn’t have to worry about picking your company. This was nice because it was one less thing to worry about. However, it can lead to higher costs for you.

A new electric distribution model has emerged in the last few years. It is a deregulated business model where multiple companies (one such company is ambit energy) sell electricity and have to compete for customers. In this model, one company or set of companies owns the power plants while a different set of companies is responsible for selling the electricity. Some states like Texas, New York, and Illinois allow non-monopolistic companies to essentially buy electricity from the power plants and sell it to consumers. In the place of large companies, small companies even individual people become Energy Consultants and are making a ton of money. This allows a lot of people to profit from energy instead of just one large monopolistic company.

There is another trend out there that could change the way electricity is generated, or at least the amount that is delivered. residential solar power is starting to save people a ton of money by generating their own power.

If you want to learn more about how electricity is made, check out my Hubpage on the subject.