Suppose you and I have an agreement to generate power for our neighboring households. We each have solar which works most the time, but if it's too cloudy and we're both using a little more, we'll each fire up some temporary generators to cover the loss.
You think I'm using more power than you expected when we started the agreement, but we're both spending the same amount on fuel and solar, so you decide not to fire up your generator.
The system might still have enough power to basically run everything, but it might be sluggish, you might get "brown outs" which is when lights are on but dimmer, rather than going all the way to black.
A brown out is a drastic, noticeable reduction in frequency. The grid is a bit like a wind up toy where there's a lot of potential energy in the system, but as you extract that energy for work and don't replace it, things (machines, lights) slow down before they stop.
Now scale this up from two households to millions. Deviations in frequency might be incredibly slight, and not noticeable to the naked eye. But they accumulate over time if you've tied precision equipment to the grid.
Theoretically, certain industrial machines designed to run at specific frequencies will wear faster or break when run off frequency for too long. I'm not sure if those effects generally happen at such small deviations or not.
You think I'm using more power than you expected when we started the agreement, but we're both spending the same amount on fuel and solar, so you decide not to fire up your generator.
The system might still have enough power to basically run everything, but it might be sluggish, you might get "brown outs" which is when lights are on but dimmer, rather than going all the way to black.
A brown out is a drastic, noticeable reduction in frequency. The grid is a bit like a wind up toy where there's a lot of potential energy in the system, but as you extract that energy for work and don't replace it, things (machines, lights) slow down before they stop.
Now scale this up from two households to millions. Deviations in frequency might be incredibly slight, and not noticeable to the naked eye. But they accumulate over time if you've tied precision equipment to the grid.
Theoretically, certain industrial machines designed to run at specific frequencies will wear faster or break when run off frequency for too long. I'm not sure if those effects generally happen at such small deviations or not.