About the reason for 60 Hz/50 Hz: keep in mind that for most power plant types, there is an actual spinning turbine generating that sine wave of power as a result of it’s rotating motion. When you attach a device to the grid that draws power, the energy comes out of those spinning turbines and they would physically slow down except that grid operators closely match the grid energy demand to supply. They can monitor demand by watching the frequency,: if demand goes up, like when you turn on a lightbulb, the turbines slow down, frequency drops. You turn off the lights, and the reverse happens.
I do think you’re right that flickering incandescent bulbs needing to be too fast to see was one of the reasons for that specific frequency. Too much lower and people notice. Conversely, too much higher and it gets harder to engineer turbines that spin fast enough and are still efficient and durable, especially with early 1900s era metallurgy and manufacturing tolerances.
Woah, it’s a thought that never occurred to me: turbines slow down when we use electricity. Makes sense when 1 thinks hard about it. Did you work in a power plant or something?
There’s another relevant question. When turbines rotate, they must be doing it inside a set of huge magnets; or they must themselves rotate the magnets inside a huge coil. In either case, there’s a need for magnets. As per my understanding, they can’t be electric magnets because it will destroy the purpose of generating electricity in the 1st place. So they must be natural ones. Those will decay over time because their field energy is being used all day. Therefore… theoretically, if humans exist long enough then we will run out of magnets and thus no electricity? For now I have no idea what is the Earth’s capacity for magnetic materials.
No, I never worked in a power plant or anything like it, but I have a physics background and back in school I took a class that involved a lot of modeling of the economics of electricity generation, including power grid management, and this came up.
And permanent magnets don’t get used up. The energy the gets used is the mechanical energy moving them back and forth, which ultimately comes from the fuel (coal, gas, biomass, nuclear, wind, geothermal, or solar thermal). Their magnetic field just exists, and transfers that mechanical energy to the electrons that flow through the wires in the electric grid. So that one we don’t need to worry about.
Edit to add: yes there are ways to generate any AC frequency you want. Obviously wind turbines don’t spin at 50Hz, they use gearboxes to convert mechanical motion to the desired frequency before converting to electricity. Each such conversion costs some energy, though.
About the reason for 60 Hz/50 Hz: keep in mind that for most power plant types, there is an actual spinning turbine generating that sine wave of power as a result of it’s rotating motion. When you attach a device to the grid that draws power, the energy comes out of those spinning turbines and they would physically slow down except that grid operators closely match the grid energy demand to supply. They can monitor demand by watching the frequency,: if demand goes up, like when you turn on a lightbulb, the turbines slow down, frequency drops. You turn off the lights, and the reverse happens.
I do think you’re right that flickering incandescent bulbs needing to be too fast to see was one of the reasons for that specific frequency. Too much lower and people notice. Conversely, too much higher and it gets harder to engineer turbines that spin fast enough and are still efficient and durable, especially with early 1900s era metallurgy and manufacturing tolerances.
Woah, it’s a thought that never occurred to me: turbines slow down when we use electricity. Makes sense when 1 thinks hard about it. Did you work in a power plant or something?
There’s another relevant question. When turbines rotate, they must be doing it inside a set of huge magnets; or they must themselves rotate the magnets inside a huge coil. In either case, there’s a need for magnets. As per my understanding, they can’t be electric magnets because it will destroy the purpose of generating electricity in the 1st place. So they must be natural ones. Those will decay over time because their field energy is being used all day. Therefore… theoretically, if humans exist long enough then we will run out of magnets and thus no electricity? For now I have no idea what is the Earth’s capacity for magnetic materials.
No, I never worked in a power plant or anything like it, but I have a physics background and back in school I took a class that involved a lot of modeling of the economics of electricity generation, including power grid management, and this came up.
And permanent magnets don’t get used up. The energy the gets used is the mechanical energy moving them back and forth, which ultimately comes from the fuel (coal, gas, biomass, nuclear, wind, geothermal, or solar thermal). Their magnetic field just exists, and transfers that mechanical energy to the electrons that flow through the wires in the electric grid. So that one we don’t need to worry about.
Edit to add: yes there are ways to generate any AC frequency you want. Obviously wind turbines don’t spin at 50Hz, they use gearboxes to convert mechanical motion to the desired frequency before converting to electricity. Each such conversion costs some energy, though.