This is analogous to saying, the blades on a wind turbine don't go anywhere, they simply spin, and yet power is created.

Ad on a DC system, the electrons move dozens of times slower than a person walking. They also don't get anywhere, and power is still delivered.

In an AC system, the pedastal fan in your bedroom is electromagnetically coupled to the turbine at the coal/gas/hydro/nuc power station. They instantly and directly influence each other, and they both are spinning in tandem like two wheels on a car connected by an axel. Slowing the rotation of the fan with your hand technically increases the torque of the turbine, if only by an immeasurably small amount.

The balls in the middle of newtons cradle don’t move either.

Whats crazier is that in direct current individual electrons don't travel at the speed of light through the conductor, but only at roughly 1cm/s.

Or, that thanks to the "skin effect" the current actualy travels in a very thin layer below the outside surface of cconductor. Most of the conductor doesn't transfer power but only maintains the magnetic field to keep the current flowing.

why is everyone in this thread telling me to imagine something

imagine a bicycle chain between two sprockets, if you crank it foward and back like 1 inch, over and over again, you can clearly transmit power without the chain links going much of anywhere

when you touch something we never actually touch it is all just fields interacting all the way down

My power company is charging me that much for nothing but vibes?!

Steam engine pistons also move back and forth less than a meter at a time, and still could push trains a million kilometers in the forward direction. It's that they're pushing right while moving right and left when moving left. That's like when AC current and voltage are in phase, delivering positive net power. Meanwhile, something that pulls left when moving right is consuming power.

The microwave doesn't heat your food, it just vibrates the water.

It's just the one electron.... Allegedly

The voltage(electrical equivalent of force) is what travels.

It's analagous to pushing something away from you with a really really really long stick, then pulling it back again. The stick didn't move much but you still affected something far away.

That movement is still energy

Build a circuit to make use of that et voilà

Friction makes heat. Same thing really

Imagine an old-timey saw with a lumberjack on each side, pulling it back and forth across the tree. The saw just goes back and forth, but effective work gets done.

The electrons don't move very quickly either. Like, a sluggish one millimeter per second is more current density than most metal conductors can handle without melting. Thankfully, there's lots of mobile electrons carrying charge (coulombs) so that's a lot of current. "Electricity" only travels near the speed of light because voltage is like a force sending waves through the electric field (simplified). And it's instantaneous current (amps = ~~joules~~ edit: coulombs / second) times voltage (electric field potential difference in volts = joules per coulomb) that delivers power.

Simplifying to a single harmonic (pure 50Hz/60Hz sine voltage source and a passive, linear RLC load), you need not only multiply the voltage's and current's effective amplitude (that gets you apparent power in VA, voltamps) but also their power factor or cos φ (the cosine of phase beetween them) to get power in W (joules per second). If the cosine is one, it's a purely resistive (R) load (like a heater) with a phase difference of 0°. If the PF is zero, it's a purely reactive (L/C) load (a freewheeling synchronous motor is much like that) with a current phase of ∓90° and no power is consumed overall. If the cosine is negative, power is actually being generated by the device you're measuring (for instance, old elevators and escalators with synchronous motors are actually delivering power into mains when enough people are travelling down).

The Veritasium video about how electricity works blew my mind

Theres a gnarly your mom joke in here somewhere

Kind of like how a piston in an engine also kinda just "shakes about" (because of explosions or steam or whatever) and yet delivers a lot of power.