A small town runs on one natural-gas plant. Add wind turbines, solar farms and a battery, then scrub through a 24-hour day to see who supplies each megawatt, when the battery charges or discharges, and how much of the demand renewables actually cover.
The vertical bar is the town's substation bus. At every instant, power flowing in must equal power flowing out: gas + wind + solar + battery discharge = town demand + battery charging. The grid has almost no storage of its own, so something has to adjust second by second. In this model, that's the battery first and the gas plant second.
Each plant produces power at a lower voltage and a step-up transformer lifts it onto the bus. That's the same symbol you learned in the distribution one-line, just used at the generation end.
Solar panels and batteries are DC devices. The box labeled DC/AC is an inverter, which converts their output into grid-synchronized AC. The battery's inverter works in both directions (it's often called a PCS, power conversion system), which is why the battery line can reverse.
Each box shows its nameplate (the most it can ever make) and its output right now. The gap between the two is the whole story of capacity factor. Try scrubbing to 3 AM, noon, and 7 PM.
Start with a scenario, then change one thing at a time. Drag across the chart or use the time slider to move through the day; everything below the slider describes that moment.
Every number in the playground comes from the formulas below. The underlined values are live: they update with your current settings and the time on the slider.