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Which power plant does my electricity come from?

[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] In June of 2000, the power shut off across much of the San Francisco Bay area. There simply wasn’t enough electricity to meet demands, so more than a million customers were disconnected in California's largest load shed event si

There simply wasn’t enough electricity to meet demands, so more than a million customers were disconnected in California's largest load shed event since World War II. The facilitator of each wholesale market takes all the bids for every hour and matches the supply and demand to get the right amount of energy on the grid at the right times for the lowest cost. Grid operators have to take into consideration all these details - power flows, weather, limitations of every kind of generator, second-by-second changes in the system - in order to match supply with demand at the lowest cost possible.

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