The Electrical System as a Tandem Bicycle

The system that delivers electricity to private citizens and companies across the country 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, a good 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 a few of its aspects. Of course, no analogy is a 100% perfect flt. 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 paper.