4 ms·
Huh, this is interesting to me. My house has 400A service (or at least that's the main panel breaker size). 400A at 240V is somewhere in the ballpark of 80kW po
by mwint 4y ago
Huh, this is interesting to me. My house has 400A service (or at least that's the main panel breaker size). 400A at 240V is somewhere in the ballpark of 80kW possible draw.
Does something bad happen if I actually use my home's full service for an extended period? I understand bad things would happen if everyone on my block did.
As a thought experiment, would anything bad happen if a magic wand was waved over a neighborhood, and each individual house now supplied power to the grid in the same amount it would usually be consuming it? A whole neighborhood with normal electric flow, just reversed. Are there components of the grid that are unable to deal with reverse power in the exact same quantity and load distribution as forward power?
- jandrese 4y agoYou would have to spread that load across multiple circuits in your house to avoid tripping breakers/blowing fuses. You might not have enough capacity to absorb all 400A if the original installer oversized the main breaker to allow for additional capacity later. The bad thing is you would get a huge power bill at the end of the month.
- falcolas 4y agoI think the thing I'd be worried about first is the transformers. Would they handle that much power flowing in reverse without overheating/catching on fire? They're already one of the weaker parts of our system; they don't handle overcurrents well (they're largely what folks are concerned would fail due to a solar flare). The second thing would be all the sensors attached to the grid. Would they identify a sudden and dramatic change in flow as a fault, and throw their switches? Also, where would that supply of energy flow? If there's not enough of a sink for that electricity, what happens to the generators? If the sink is outside the local area, what would happen to those transmission lines?