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.
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.