Have you ever wondered why they call it electricity?

It’s named after those tiny particles of atoms called electrons, and that’s the place to start in understanding how power plants make something that reliably lights your home with the flip of a switch.

Getting all those electrons to march together inside a wire has been described as one of civilization’s greatest and most complex engineering feats.

Just about all electricity starts with the same scientific phenomenon: Spinning a magnet inside a coil of wires generates electricity. That’s why, deep inside most power plants, are large turbines turned by different means – the pull of gravity on water at a hydroelectric dam; the rising heat from burning coal or natural gas at a fossil fuel station; atomic energy at a nuclear power plant; or wind turning the blades of a wind turbine. One exception is solar energy, which uses materials that produce electricity when they’re activated by sunlight.

Every one of those power plants is incredibly complicated – think about what you would do if you were handed a lump of coal and were told to make it run your refrigerator.

Most industrial sized generating plants need large banks of transformers to boost the voltage of electricity for the trip of hundreds of miles through wires held up by tall transmission towers. As it nears your neighborhood, the voltage is reduced at one of those fenced in complexes of wires and transformers called a substation. Lower voltage makes the electricity appropriate for home energy use. As the electricity gets closer to your home or business, the voltage is reduced again with smaller transformers, which you can typically see mounted on a nearby utility pole or inside a ground-level green box.

Beyond these basics, all that flowing electricity needs to be coordinated so it gets to the right house just as it’s needed. That’s where Farmers Electric Cooperative comes in. Our line crews take care of our distribution lines that bring the power to your home. This highly trained team performs routine maintenance to keep the lines in good order and responds quickly to restore power when storms or other factors cause an outage.

When you think about it, that’s a lot of power in the simple flip of a switch!