I have always wondered how it travels. One thing I do know is magnets are used but I am not sure. The type of devices I mean are ultility poles that carry electricity from the powerplant to a house usually. So I mostly want to know how it travels on ultility poles.
[Physics] how does electricity travel
electricity
Related Solutions
This is mainly an engineering & economics question; and we can deal with those aspects of it over on the Sustainability Stack Exchange, if you want.
And there is one conceptual physics aspect too.
No, fresnel lenses are not widely used for solar power. Occasionally, but rarely.
Concentrated solar power (CSP), including concentrated photovoltiacs (CPV) depend on direct rays. Ordinary photovoltaics do not; they generate electricity from light however it comes in; reflected off snow, or scattered by the atmosphere and by clouds. And you can find light like that all around the world. Whereas if you need high-intensity direct rays for a lot of the year, you're pretty much confined to the tropics and near the tropics. You can go further away (and there are indeed concentrating solar power stations further from the equator), but then you've got an economic problem. That's not something we can deal with here, so I'll leave that for now
Here's a real-world CPV using a linear fresnel lens:
So, the first problem with CPV is that you need a lot of direct light, not just ambient light. Ordinary PV can make do with either. The second problem, is that no PV cell is anywhere near 100% efficient, and although CPV cells have got up to (roughly) 30-45% efficient, that still means that up to 70% of the energy could end as heat. Some will get reflected, but there'll still be 30-50% of the direct light energy going into concentrated heat. And that's all heat on the expensive CPV cell, that you've got to dissipate. The more successful the fresnel lens is in concentrating the light, the bigger your problem in preventing heat build-up, and the higher the equilibrium temperature on your CPV cell.
It's easy to think of it in terms of something maybe more familiar - flow of fluid in pipes.
Suppose you have a closed loop of pipes. In one part of the closed loop is a pump. In another is something like a hydraulic motor, that converts moving fluid into mechanical work.
The pump is like a battery. The hydraulic motor is like an electric motor. (A light bulb is not much different from a motor - it just converts electrical work into heat, rather than mechanical work.)
So the wire loop is just like a pipe loop, and the electrons in the wires are just like the fluid molecules in the pipes, and they flow the same way. (Pipes can leak if they have holes, but wires don't (at low voltage), because the electrons in the wire are "attached to" the metal and can't easily take off on their own.) (I'm simplifying here.)
The amount of them that flow past a point in one second is called "current". The pressure is called "voltage". The work done in the hydraulic or electric motor in one second is just the current times the pressure-drop or voltage-drop across it.
Best Answer
The simplest explanation is the analogy most textbooks used. The powerplant generates a potential difference between the hot and the neutral line. The electricity, i.e. electrons, wants to travel in such a way that it reduces the potential energy. The force experienced by the electrons is caused by the potential difference. The analogy to this is a ball rolling down an inclined plane.