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How Electricity is Generated
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Electricity is present throughout nature, in the form of the static electricity in thunder clouds and neurons, but there is no direct natural source of flowing electricity of the type required by electrical appliances.
Though electricity is a far more versatile form of energy, it cannot be tapped directly from nature, and has to be generated using the energy created from a primary energy source, such as burning coal or splitting uranium atoms. For this reason, it is referred to as being a secondary source of energy.
Before the advent of electricity, the heating, lighting, and refrigeration needs of a typical dwelling were met by devices such as wood stoves, gas lamps, and ice houses.
Once safer, more powerful and more flexible electrical replacements for these devices came along, such as electric lights and fridges, these primary devices became a lot less popular, which created a huge demand for electricity generation.
The principle behind the modern electric generator is still the same as that pioneered by Michael Faraday in the 1830s, when he discovered that turning a magnet inside a coil of wire induced a current in the wire.
However, the current produced by a magnet in this way is directly proportional to the strength of the magnet, so when electromagnets came along that were many times stronger than a normal magnet, a reasonable amount of power could finally be generated in this way.
A typical generator consists of a series of insulated coils of wire, forming a stationary cylinder around a rotating electromagnet. As the magnet rotates, a small current is induced in each section of the wire coil, which, when combined with the currents from all the other wires, forms one large current that feeds a flow of electrons directly into the electrical grid.
The electromagnet gets its rotational energy from a device running on a primary energy source such as a turbine or a combustion engine. The best that most electrical plants are able to manage is to turn around a third of the primary energy used in the generation process into electricity. The rest is usually dissipated as heat, although more modern designs have ways of capturing and re-using some of this heat to bring the efficiency rating of the plant closer to 40%.
Although this may change in future, at the moment the vast majority of power stations use steam turbines, giant wheels propelled by jets of steam which are heated by burning gas, coal, or by the process of nuclear fission.
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