How does the electricity system function?

The system that delivers electricity to users is highly complex. While electricity is an omnipresent and crucial part of our everyday economy, understanding this system and all its associated phenomena is not easy, sometimes even for trained electrical engineers. In such a case an intuitive analogy often helps to form a better idea of how things work. We have chosen to compare the electrical system with a tandem bicycle to explain its main characteristics.

Of course, no analogy is a 100% perfect fit. The real electrical system and our imaginary ‘bike system’ do not match on every count since all characteristics of the electrical system do not necessarily lend themselves to a translation into this bike system. Certain aspects of the analogy are not always completely accurate. However the similarities between the two are close enough to make the more easily visualized bike system of great help in understanding the more abstract electrical system. And that, of course, is the goal of this eBook.

You can also download this eBook as a pdf or as a Power Point presentation for offline reading.