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That's the concern being raised. It's indeed problematic to use a water bucket/pipe analogy in an AC grid when talking about transmission and generation of power, and related things like spinning reserves. (It's less problematic when discussing energy.)


The water analogy is perfectly fine to use to talk about the bulk AC transmission grid (which is low-frequency alternating current).

photochemsyn speaks about how the hydraulic phenomena is not adequate to describe some electronic aspects (e.g., modeling p-n silicon junctions). These issues are irrelevant to how well the hydraulic analogy works to describe the workings of the AC transmission grid.


Yep, exactly my point. For the purposes of this explanation in the article the analogy works fine, hence why I'm asking what exactly didn't work.

That it doesn't work in all possible cases talking about A/C transmission doesn't really impact its use as an analogy in a high-level view of the grid.




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