Ever notice the metal cylinder on the utility pole near your house? That’s called a transformer!
Transformers are used to lower the voltage of the power that comes from the electric grid (in this case, so that the electricity can be used in your house).
At One Energy, we also use transformers, but the industrial plants that One Energy helps power require a much higher voltage than a house. To supply this high voltage to our consumers, we must increase the voltage using a step-up transformer.
These rectangular transformers are much bigger than the ones found on the utility poles near your house (as you can see in the picture below), and we use them to step up the voltage of the wind turbine to the grid voltage.
Transformers use two coils of wire and the principle of electromagnetic induction to change the voltage. The coils are wrapped around the same core, but each coil has a different number of loops (called turns) that create the change in voltage.
Today’s Wind Study homework questions use the Turns Ratio to determine the correlation between the number of turns in each of the coils and the change in voltage the transformer produces.
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