Slashdot Mirror
Power Grid Change May Disrupt Clocks
hawguy writes with an AP story about upcoming tests of greater allowed variation in the frequency of the current carried on the U.S. electric grid: "A yearlong experiment with the nation's electric grid could mess up traffic lights, security systems and some computers — and make plug-in clocks and appliances like programmable coffeemakers run up to 20 minutes fast."
Believe it or not, the engineers that operate the network actually know what they are doing.
The flow of power between tied AC networks is determined by phase, not voltage. To adjust the phase between your generator and that of a neighbor to whom you wish to send power you must run faster than he for long enough to accumulate the desired phase difference. Such adjustments are going on constantly throughout the network and conflict with the requirement to keep the average frequency at exactly 60Hz. Relaxing the latter requirement will make network operations easier and more reliable.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
In the 70's I developed a system to control the of the light sensitive coating onto 35mm rolls of film. This ran on a PDP-11 that used the mains cycle to keep time (20ms interupts with the UK's 50Hz supply) and measured the coating by the amount of x-rays reflected by the silver halide in the coating each second.... there were coninual errors in the accuracy of the coating as the time approached midnight.
It turns out that the National Grid was legally required to maintain a 50Hz average from midnight to midnight and would add or subtract cycles in the last minutes of the day in order to meet this requirement.
Five or so years later I was working in the National Grid Control Centre and saw the 2 clocks, one with an independent time source and one running from the mains frequency. The aim of the controllers each night was to adjust the mains frequency to bring the two clocks in sync at midnight.