Every second thousands of power plants across the United States push power onto the grid. How do these plants know how much to generate? What is the grid response if a unit goes down? How do we restore the Energy-In vs. Energy-Out balance in the event of a plant trip? The answer lies in Area Control Error and Frequency Bias. Here is a link to my Public Utilities Fortnightly explaining, in non-technical terms, how we balance the grid keeping energy in equal to energy out and how everyone on the grid helps out in the even of a unit outage. Each of these topics will become increasingly important as we go to higher levels of renewables.
