Where does electricity come from and where does it go?
When you plug in that phone charger, do you know how your electricity is produced and from where it traveled to your outlet? From the coal mine, oil well, solar panel, wind turbine, hydroplant or nuclear the national electric grid is a complicated webs of energy suppliers and sources.
The U.S. electricity grid divided up into three major regions:
- The Eastern Interconnection, which operates in states east of the Rocky Mountains.
- The Western Interconnection, which covers the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountain states.
- The Texas Interconnected system.
and six regional reliability entities and encompasses all the interconnected power systems of Canada and the contiguous United States, as well as a portion of Mexico.
There are sites on the web where you can see in real time how much electricity is being used across the nation and how much electricity is being produced from various power plants. You can even watch the market rates rise and fall as demand increases or decreases.
- HOURLY ELECTRIC GRID MONITOR https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/US48/US48
- Off the Grid: Nationwide Outages Tracker https://data.usatoday.com/national-power-outage-map-tracker/
- Real Time Grid Status – https://www.gridstatus.io/home
- Texas Ercot – Grid and Market Conditions https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards
