Last weekend we had a huge snowstorm that knocked out the electrical power in my whole neighborhood and in about half of our town. In my neighborhood we were without electricity from Friday night through Monday afternoon. Fortunately, we have a portable generator that provides electricity for the essentials in our house and we have a bunch of battery backup light bulbs that we can use in the evenings. As I walked our dog on Sunday afternoon I heard the hum of generators. That reminded me of a couple of short video lessons about electricity generation that I shared with my students a couple of years ago. 

The Engineering Mindset is a YouTube channel on which I’ve found a bunch of great lessons over the years. One of those is AC Electrical Generation Basics. While it doesn’t specifically address portable generators like the one you can find in my garage, it does do a great job of clearly explaining how electricity is generated by the parts that you’ll find in a portable generator.