Where does the electricity come from? Sources of electricity. Free electricity: ways to get it yourself. Diagrams, instructions, photos and videos Where electricity is obtained
For the stable life of our metropolis, energy is needed equal to 100 million kWh per day, and this amounts to about 38 billion kWh per year. Who and what provides Moscow with electricity? On the Raushskaya embankment, there is hydroelectric power station No. 1 (the oldest power plant in the capital), which is not only a monument to the UNESCO protection, but also generates electricity to supply The State Duma, The Kremlin, Lubyanka Square and the metro. The nominal capacity of the station is 86 MW. The station was built by order of the emperor Alexander III to connect electricity to the first trams. Over the 114 years of the existence of HPP-1, its capacity has increased 10 times.
The main source of power supply for Moscow is CHP, in the amount of 15 units.
Another feature of Moscow's power supply is that the Moscow energy ring is formed by high-voltage power lines (voltage 500 kV) and a group of powerful substations (SS) located both within the city and in the Moscow region. The main task of these nodal substations is to reduce the voltage from 500 to 220 and 110 kV and transfer it to the nodal distribution substations.
An electric current arises in an electrical circuit that includes a current source and a consumer of electricity. But in what direction does this same current arise? Traditionally, it is believed that in an external circuit, the current flows from the plus of the source to the minus, while inside the power supply - from minus to plus.
Indeed, electric current is the ordered movement of electrically charged particles. If the conductor is made of metal, such particles are electrons - negatively charged particles. However, in the external circuit, electrons move precisely from minus (negative pole) to plus (positive pole), and not from plus to minus.
If included in an external circuit, it becomes clear that the current is possible only when the diode is connected to the negative side of the cathode. It follows from this that the direction opposite to the real movement of electrons is taken as the direction of the electric current in the circuit.
If you trace the history of the formation of electrical engineering as an independent science, you can understand where this paradoxical approach came from.
The American researcher Benjamin Franklin once put forward a unitary (unified) theory of electricity. According to this theory, electrical matter is a weightless liquid that can flow out of some bodies, while accumulating in others.
According to Franklin, there is electric fluid in all bodies, but bodies become electrified only when there is an excess or lack of electric fluid (electric fluid) in them. Lack of electric fluid (according to Franklin) meant negative electrification, and excess - positive.
This was the beginning of the concepts of positive charge and negative charge. At the moment of connection of positively charged bodies with negatively charged bodies, the electric fluid flows from the body with a large amount of electric fluid to the bodies with a reduced amount. It is similar to a system of communicating vessels. Science has included a stable concept of electric current, the movement of electric charges.
This hypothesis of Franklin anticipated the electronic theory of conduction, but it turned out to be far from flawless. The French physicist Charles Dufay discovered that in reality there are two types of electricity, which separately obey Franklin's theory, but when they come into contact, they are mutually neutralized. A new dualistic (dual) theory of electricity appeared, put forward by the naturalist Robert Simmer on the basis of the experiments of Charles Dufay.
When rubbing, for the purpose of electrification, electrified bodies, not only the rubbed body becomes charged, but also the rubbing one. The dualistic theory asserted that in the normal state, bodies contain two kinds of electric fluid and in different quantities, which neutralize each other. Explained electrification by a change in the ratio of negative and positive electricity in electrified bodies.
Both Franklin's hypothesis and Simmer's hypothesis successfully explained electrostatic phenomena and even competed with each other.
The voltaic pillar invented in 1799 and the discovery led to the conclusion that during the electrolysis of solutions and liquids, two charges opposite in the direction of movement are observed in them - negative and positive. This was the triumph of the dualistic theory, because during the decomposition of water it was now possible to observe how oxygen bubbles are released on the positive electrode, at the same time on the negative one - hydrogen.
But not everything was smooth here. The amount of emitted gases turned out to be different. Twice as much hydrogen was released as oxygen. This puzzled physicists. Then chemists had no idea that there are two hydrogen atoms and only one oxygen atom in a water molecule.
These theories were not clear to everyone.
But in 1820, André-Marie Ampere, in a work presented to members of the Paris Academy of Sciences, first decides to choose one of the directions of currents as the main one, but then gives a rule according to which it is possible to accurately determine the effect of magnets on electric currents.
In order not to talk all the time about two opposite currents of both electricity, in order to avoid unnecessary repetitions, Ampere decided to strictly take the direction of movement of positive electricity for the direction of the electric current. So, for the first time Ampere introduced the still generally accepted rule for the direction of electric current.
This position was later adhered to by Maxwell himself, who invented the "gimbal" rule, which determines the direction of the magnetic field of the coil. But the question of the true direction of the electric current remained open. Faraday wrote that this state of affairs is only conditional, it is convenient for scientists, and helps them clearly determine the directions of currents. But this is only a convenient tool.
After Faraday's discovery of electromagnetic induction, it became necessary to determine the direction of the induced current. The Russian physicist Lenz gave a rule: if a metal conductor moves near a current or magnet, then a galvanic current arises in it. And the direction of the emerging current is such that the stationary wire would come from its action into a movement opposite to the original movement. Just a rule that makes it easier to understand.
Even after the discovery of the electron, this convention has existed for more than a century and a half. With the invention of a device such as a vacuum tube, with the widespread adoption of semiconductors, difficulties began to arise. But electrical engineering, as before, operates with the old definitions. This can cause real confusion at times. But making adjustments will cause more inconvenience.
Few people think about when electricity appeared. And his story is quite interesting. Electricity makes life more comfortable. Thanks to him, television, the Internet and much more became available. AND modern life it is already impossible to imagine without electricity. It has greatly accelerated the development of mankind.
History of electricity
If you start to understand when electricity appeared, then you need to remember the Greek philosopher Thales. It was he who first drew attention to this phenomenon in 700 BC. e. Falles discovered that when amber rubbed against wool, the stone began to attract light objects to itself.
What year did electricity appear? After the Greek philosopher, for a long time, no one investigated this phenomenon. And knowledge in this area did not increase until 1600. This year, William Gilbert coined the term "electricity" by researching magnets and their properties. Since that time, scientists have begun to intensively study this phenomenon.
First discoveries
When did electricity appear in technical solutions? In 1663, the first electric machine was created, which made it possible to observe the effects of repulsion and attraction. In 1729, the English scientist Stephen Gray conducted the first experiment in which electricity was transmitted over a distance. Four years later, the French scientist Charles Dufay discovered that electricity has 2 types of charge: resin and glass. In 1745, the first electric capacitor appeared - the Leiden Bank.
In 1747, Benjamin Franklin created the first theory to explain this phenomenon. And in 1785 Electricity was studied for a long time by Galvani and Volt. A treatise was written on the action of this phenomenon during muscular movement and a galvanic object was invented. And the Russian scientist V. Petrov became the discoverer
Lighting
When did electricity appear in houses and apartments? For many, this phenomenon is primarily associated with lighting. Thus, it should be considered when the first light bulb was invented. This happened in 1809. The Englishman Delarue became the inventor. A little later, spiral bulbs appeared, which were filled with an inert gas. They began to be produced in 1909.
The emergence of electricity in Russia
Some time after the introduction of the term "electricity", this phenomenon began to be investigated in many countries. The emergence of lighting can be considered the beginning of change. What year did electricity appear in Russia? According to this date - 1879. It was then that electrification with the help of lamps was first carried out in St. Petersburg.
But a year earlier in Kiev, in one of the railway shops, electric lights were installed. Therefore, the date of the appearance of electricity in Russia is a somewhat controversial issue. But since this event went unnoticed, the lighting of the Liteiny Bridge can be considered the official date.
But there is another version, when electricity appeared in Russia. From a legal point of view, this date is January 30, 1880. On this day, the first electrotechnical department appeared in the Russian Technical Society. His duties were charged with overseeing the introduction of electricity in daily life... In 1881 Tsarskoe Selo became the first European city to be fully illuminated.
Another significant date is May 15, 1883. On this day, the Kremlin was illuminated for the first time. The event was timed to coincide with the accession to the Russian throne of Alexander III. To illuminate the Kremlin, a small power plant was installed by electricians. After this event, lighting first appeared on the main street of St. Petersburg, and then in the Winter Palace.
In the summer of 1886, by decree of the emperor, the "Electric Lighting Society" was established. It was engaged in the electrification of all of St. Petersburg and Moscow. And in 1888, the first power plants began to be built in the largest cities. In the summer of 1892, the debut electric tram was launched in Russia. And in 1895 it appeared It was built in St. Petersburg, on the river. Bolshaya Okhta.
And in Moscow, the first power plant appeared in 1897. It was built on the Raushskaya embankment. The power plant produced an alternating three-phase current. And this made it possible to transmit electricity over long distances without significant loss of power. In other cities, construction began at the dawn of the twentieth century, before the First World War.
Dear readers and visitors of our magazine! We write quite a lot and in some detail about how, with the help of which energy resources, electricity is produced at power plants. Atom, gas, water - they were our "heroes", except that they had not yet managed to get to the alternative, "green" options. But, if you look closely, the stories were far from complete. We have never tried to trace in detail the path of electricity from the turbine to our sockets with you, with paths to the lighting of our settlements and roads, to ensure the operation of numerous pumps that ensure the comfort of our homes.
These roads and paths are by no means simple, sometimes winding and change direction many times, but knowing how they look is the duty of every cultured person of the 21st century. A century, the appearance of which is largely determined by the electricity that has conquered us, which we have learned to transform so that all our needs are satisfied - both in industry and in private use. The current in the wires of power lines and the current in the batteries of our gadgets are very different currents, but they remain the same electricity. What efforts do power engineers and engineers have to make to provide the most powerful currents for steel plants and small, tiny currents, for example, of a wristwatch? How much work has to be done by all those who support the system of transformation, transmission and distribution of electricity, what are these methods to ensure the stability of this system? How does System Operator differ from Federal Grid Company, why were both these companies, are and will be in Russia not private but state-owned?
There are a lot of questions, you need to know the answers to them in order to more or less imagine why we need so many power engineers and what, roughly speaking, do they do? After all, we are so used to the fact that everything is in perfect order with electricity in houses and in cities, that we remember about electrical engineers only when something suddenly stops working, when we fall out of the zone of the usual level of comfort. It is dark and cold - only then we are talking about power engineers, and we say such words that we will definitely not print.
We are sure that we were frankly lucky - a real professional agreed to tackle this not simple, necessary, and even a huge topic. We ask you to love and favor - Dmitry Talanov, Engineer with a capital letter. You know, there is such a country - Finland, in which the title of engineer is so significant that at one time a catalog was published annually with a list of specialists who had it. I would like to see such a glorious tradition appear in Russia someday, since in our electronic-Internet age it is much easier to create such an annually updated catalog.
The article that we bring to your attention on engineering is short, accurate and capacious. Of course, everything that Dmitry wrote can be told in much more detail, and at one time our magazine began a series of articles about how the conquest of electricity took place in the 19th century.
Georg Ohm, Heinrich Hertz, Andre-Marie Ampere, Alessandro Volt, James Watt, Faraday, Jacobi, Lenz, Gram, Fontaine, Lodygin, Dolivo-Dobrovolsky, Tesla, Yablochkov, Desreux, Edison, Maxwell, Kirchhoff, brothers West Siemens and brothers West Siemens and - there are many glorious names in the history of electricity that are worth remembering. In general, if someone wants to recall the details of how it all began, you are welcome, and Dmitry's article is the beginning of a completely different story. We really hope that you will like it, and we will see the continuation of Dmitry Talanov's articles in the very near future.
Dear Dmitry on my own behalf - with the debut, to all readers, please - do not skimp on comments!
What is electric current, where does it come from and how does it get to our homes?
Why do we need electricity and how much it helps us to live, everyone can find out by taking a critical look around their home and place of work.
The first thing that catches your eye is the lighting. Indeed, without him, even an 8-hour day would have turned into flour. Getting to work in many metropolitan areas is already a little bit of happiness, but what if you have to do it in the dark? And in winter, both ways! Gas lanterns will help on the main highways, but turned a little to the side, and you can't see a single zig. You can easily fall into a basement or pit. And outside the city in nature, illuminated only by the light of the stars?
Night street lighting, Photo: pixabay.com
There is also nothing to remove heat from offices, where I have hardly reached, without electricity. You can, of course, open the windows and tie a wet towel around your head, but how long will it help. Pumps that pump water also need electricity, or you will have to regularly go with a bucket to a manual pump.
Coffee in the office? Forget it! Only if all at once and not often, so that the smoke from burning coal does not poison the working atmosphere. Or get it for extra money from a nearby tavern.
Send a letter to a nearby office? You need to take the paper, write a letter by hand, then carry it with your feet. To the other end of town? We call the courier. To another country? Do you know how much it will cost? In addition, do not expect an answer earlier than six months from neighboring countries and from a year to five from overseas.
Back home, we need to light the candles. Reading in front of them is a torment for the eyes, so you have to do something else. With what? There is no TV, no computers, no smartphones - and those are not, because there is nothing to power them. Lie on the bench and look at the ceiling! Although the birth rate will definitely rise.
To this it should be added that all plastics and fertilizers are now obtained from natural gas in factories where thousands of motors are running, driven by the same electricity. Hence, the list of available fertilizers is greatly shortened to those that can be prepared from natural raw materials in vats, stirring poisonous liquid in them with hand, water or steam powered shovels. As a result, the volume of products produced is greatly reduced.
Forget about plastics! Ebonite is our highest happiness from a long list. And of the metals, cast iron is becoming the most affordable. From medicine to the stage, the stethoscope and the rapidly rusting scalpel again act as the main weapon. The rest will sink into oblivion.
You can go on for a long time, but the idea should already be clear. We need electricity. We can survive without him, but what a life it will be! So where did this magical electricity come from?
Discovery of electricity
We all know the physical truth that nothing disappears anywhere without a trace, but only passes from one state to another. The Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus faced this truth in the 7th century BC. e. discovering electricity as a form of energy, rubbing a piece of amber with wool. At the same time, a part of the mechanical energy passed into electrical energy and amber (in ancient Greek "electron") became electrified, that is, it acquired the properties of attracting light objects.
This type of electricity is now called static, and it is widely used, including in gas cleaning systems at power plants. But in Ancient Greece he found no application, and if Thales of Miletsky had not left behind records of his experiments, we would never have known who the first thinker was who focused his attention on the kind of energy that is almost the purest among all with whom we familiar to the present day. It is also the most convenient to operate.
The very term "electricity" - that is, "amber" - was coined by William Gilbert in 1600. From that time on, they began to widely experiment with electricity, trying to unravel its nature.
As a result, from 1600 to 1747, a series of fascinating discoveries followed and the first theory of electricity, created by the American Benjamin Franklin, appeared. He introduced the concept of positive and negative charge, invented a lightning rod and with its help proved the electrical nature of lightning.
Then, in 1785, the Coulomb's law was discovered, and in 1800 the Italian Volta invented a galvanic cell (the first source direct current, the predecessor of today's batteries and accumulators), which was a column of zinc and silver circles separated by paper dipped in salted water. With the advent of this, stable at that time, source of electricity, new and important discoveries quickly follow one after another.
Michael Faraday giving a Christmas lecture at the Royal Institution. Fragment of lithography, Photo: republic.ru
In 1820, the Danish physicist Oersted discovered electromagnetic interaction: by closing and opening a circuit with direct current, he noticed the cyclical oscillations of a compass needle located near a conductor. And in 1821, the French physicist Ampere discovered that an alternating electromagnetic field is formed around a conductor with an alternating electric current. This allowed Michael Faraday in 1831 to open electromagnetic induction, describe the electric and magnetic fields by equations and create the first electric generator of alternating current. Faraday slid a coil of wire into a magnetized core, and as a result, an electric current appeared in the coil winding. Faraday also invented the first electric motor - a conductor with electric current that revolves around a permanent magnet.
It is impossible to mention all the participants in the "race for electricity" in this article, but the result of their efforts was an experimentally proven theory that describes in detail electricity and magnetism, according to which we now produce everything that requires electricity to function.
DC or AC current?
In the late 1880s, even before world standards for the production, distribution and consumption of industrial electricity emerged, a battle broke out between the proponents of the use of direct and alternating current. Tesla and Edison stood at the head of the opposing armies.
Both were talented inventors. Is that Edison had much more developed business skills and by the time the "war" began he had managed to patent many technical solutions in which direct current was used (at that time in the United States, direct current was the default standard; direct current is called a current whose direction does not change according to time).
But there was one problem: in those days, direct current was very difficult to transform into a higher or lower voltage. After all, if today we receive electricity with a voltage of 240 volts, and our phone requires 5 volts, we plug into an outlet a universal box that converts anything into anything in the range we need using modern transistors controlled by tiny logic circuits with sophisticated software. And what could have been done when the invention of the most primitive transistors was still 70 years away? And if, according to the terms of electrical losses, it was required to increase the voltage to 100'000 volts in order to deliver electricity over a distance of 100 or 200 kilometers, any Voltaic pillars and primitive DC generators were powerless.
Realizing this, Tesla advocated alternating current, the transformation of which to any voltage levels was not difficult even in those days (alternating current is considered, the magnitude and direction of which periodically change over time, even with a constant resistance to this current; at a network frequency of 50 Hz, this happens 50 times per second). Edison, not wanting to lose patent royalties for himself, launched a campaign to discredit AC. He assured that this type of current is especially dangerous for all living things, and as proof publicly killed stray cats and dogs, applying electrodes to them connected to an alternating current source.
Edison lost the battle when Tesla offered to cover the entire city of Buffalo for $ 399,000 against Edison's offer to do the same for $ 554,000. On the day the city was lit up with electricity from a station located at Niagara Falls and generating exactly alternating current, the company General electric removed direct current from consideration in her future business projects, fully supporting alternating current with her influence and money.
Thomas Edison (USA), Fig .: cdn.redshift.autodesk.com
It might seem like AC has conquered the world forever. However, he has hereditary sores that grow out of the very fact of variability. First of all, these are electrical losses associated with losses in the inductive component of power transmission lines, which are used to transmit electricity over long distances. These losses are 10-20 times higher than the possible losses in the same transmission lines in the case of direct current flowing through them. Plus, the increased complexity of synchronizing the nodes of the power system affects (for better understanding, say, of individual cities), because this requires not only aligning the voltage of the nodes, but also their phase, because the alternating current is a sinusoidal wave.
Hence, a much greater adherence to the "swinging" of nodes in relation to each other is visible, when the voltage-frequency begins to change up and down, which an ordinary consumer pays attention to when a light blinks in his apartment. Usually this is a harbinger of the end of the joint work of the nodes: the connections between them are broken and some nodes turn out to be with a deficit of energy, which leads to a decrease in the frequency in them (i.e., to a decrease in the rotation speed of the same electric motors and fans), and some with excess energy, causing dangerous voltage surges throughout the site, including our electrical outlets and their connected devices. And with a sufficiently long power transmission line, which, for example, is critical for the Russian Federation, other effects spoiling the mood of electricians begin to appear. Without going into details, it can be pointed out that it becomes difficult, and sometimes impossible, to transmit AC power over wires over very long distances. For information, the wavelength of 50 Hz is 6000 km, and when approaching half of this length - 3000 km - the effects of traveling and standing waves, plus the effects associated with resonance, begin to affect.
These effects are absent when using direct current. This means that the stability of the power system as a whole increases. Taking this into account, as well as the fact that computers, LEDs, solar panels, batteries and much more use direct current for their work, we can conclude: the war with direct current has not yet been lost. Modern DC / DC converters for any power and voltage used today have very little left to equal the price of AC transformers familiar to mankind. After which, apparently, a triumphant march across the planet of a direct current will begin.
