“Experiment” on the US power grid will change the way some clocks and other equipment function.
Story submitted by Joe Ryan
The AP has released an “exclusive” story concerning the nationwide “experiment” that will be conducted on the US power grid. The experiment will relieve the power providers from the duty of regulating the frequency of power on the line.
Normally the power stations condition their power to a frequency of 60 cycles a second, a frequency that many old clocks use to maintain their time. With the new standard, or lack of standard, these clocks will stop keeping time properly.
But the problem is more than that.
First, we have this gem from Joe McLelland who heads the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (from AP article):
“Is anyone using the grid to keep track of time?” McClelland said. “Let’s see if anyone complains if we eliminate it.”
… forgive me for not getting warm fuzzies from this. Likewise, Demetrios Matsakis, head of the time service department at the U.S. Naval Observatory, had this to say (AP Article again):
“A lot of people are going to have things break and they’re not going to know why,”
So, we have what appears to be an untested, for the hell of it, “experimental” major change to the US electrical grid coming in a few weeks and those in charge aren’t really sure how it will work or if it may break something?
Not only is this what a LAB is for, but it is also something that the Federal Government should be TELLING people about in advance, and not in an AP “exclusive” press release.
If nobody is held to providing at a standard frequency then nobody is going to bother trying. Everyone is going to assume someone ‘else’ is setting the pace so I would expect the frequency to start ‘wandering’. I don’t think I’ll like hearing every synchronous motor in my house slightly varying in speed as every power company chases a frequency established by nobody.
Sorry … but I think most people here are hyperventillating a bit excessively.
One really cool thing that CAN be done with slowly time-varying frequencies is to encode “bits” into the phase stream. Nothing is thrown out of whack, as it has been done for years already (without the purpose of encoding bits). With modern crystal-controlled oscillators, one can easily detect phase shifts of 1 or 2 degrees within an otherwise normal 50/60Hz power signal. An encoding rate of 8 bits per second puts a spectrum widening signal on top of the base 50/60 Hz of about -20 dB … which is about the same as present non-intentional phase-and-amplitude shift. The total phase modulation is 3%, which is to say about 10 degrees out of 360. Now, 8 bits is of course one byte, so 1 byte (or character) per second dœsn’t sound like much. But it is a great way to transmit time synchronization master codes (UTC, of course), as well as emergency broadcasting information that is essentially guaranteed to get to all customers who are on grid. It also has the capacity to encode power-rate markers for residential and industrial customers up to once a minute, though more commonly once every 6 minutes (tenths of an hour). All known phase-synchronizing pieces of equipment that we at Cal Berkeley looked into didn’t even flicker in the least. All known transformer equipment is immune. All decent quality A/C-from-DC (as in wind/solar) generation inverters do just fine with the phase shifts. Even the pesky but ubiquitous computer-room “UPS” devices sync with no hitch to the 3% phase-encoded digital information. Lastly, the intentional coding of data into the phase is an excellent way for utilities themselves to alert down-wind municipalities of fast changing rate / load capacity information. The data is essentially real-time, just-in-time delivered. Oh yah — the 3% phase change torque patterns induced on the larger spinning generators amounts to exactly 3% modulation of the force on the shaft. Nothing to worry about there: they regularly have 10% fluctuations through the day as TIE lines are lagged in or cut out.
I say it is a big NON story. The ridiculously under-reported benefits and piggy-back functionality of this makes it sound like irresponsible “playing” by the regulatory and power generation utilities. It is not. The huffy hubris is taking on the tenor of the Y2K unfiasco. Breathe slowly, [snip]. There really is nothing to see.
G O A T G U Y
GoatGuy says:
June 26, 2011 at 12:16 pm
If that’s what they want to do then they should draft a standard and propose it. We would then get the opportunity to discuss the topic sensibly rather than guessing the purpose and results of an ‘experiment’.
Well, it’s certainly not an energy saving idea. The lower you go from 60 Hz, the greater the amperage draw. This is why 60 Hz motors run cooler than 50 Hz motors on their respective frequencies. A missed Hz isn’t going to destroy anything instantaneously but over the long haul shorten it’s life via extra heating breaking down insulation resistance over time. Someone can do the calcs on amperage draw, it will be significant.
Jacking in from Bangkok, where frequent power black-out is still a fact of life and there is no point of setting the clock on the oven or DVD player because they are going to blink out again soon.
Practically all cheap digital clock/ clock-radio use power line frequency as their timebase and an R/C network as a back-up if you actually splurged for one with battery back up function.
Most plugged in mechanical clock/ clock-radio has synchronous motor which uses the line frequency to maintain it rotational speed then geared it down to drive the hands or flip digits.
Ditto for all the plugged in wall timers.
They will all be skewed up/down if the long term line frequency isn’t maintained.
Counting the biannual DST clock monkeying ritual in the US, the worse case drift (based on their numbers) would then be no more than around 4 minutes between the rituals.
Which is amply accurate for peon subject of the empire.
Sorry, that should have read “no more than around 10 minutes between the rituals.”
I didn’t read all of the comment, but this is insane. I really hope this is a hoax or something. Anyone that has gone back and forth from the States to Europe will tell you it isn’t just about clocks. It will destroy all sorts of electronics.
dscott says: @June 26, 2011 at 2:03 pm Correctly states, it won’t occur instantly, but depending upon how much it varies from 60 hz, will depend on how long the electronics lasts. It isn’t that one hz is better than another, but it is that our electronics are we designed for 60 hz. 50 or 70 won’t work well, and it won’t work long.
@GoatGuy says: You are correct about piggybacking……it isn’t anything new, but, they regularly have 10% fluctuations through the day ………” ——— So, how much more fluctuations can we expect when we quit regulating it? It’s no big deal? Take your $1000 flat scree and send it to Germany and plug it in. Get back to me about how hertz don’t matter.
Edison was right…
I’m a bit stunned by the level of ignorance here. A couple of points:
To all the people worried about frying electronics, you may not have heard, but a few years ago a clever engineer invented a thing called a switched mode power supply. It allows most (not all – high end audio gear comes to mind) electronic equipment to operate from a widely variable supply. You know, how you can take a laptop from 110V 60Hz in the US and plug it into a 230V 50Hz socket in Europe with only a plug adapter? If you can do that, then why on earth do you think a 1Hz variation in your domestic supply is going to make all your equipment explode?
Secondly, most (again, not all, I know) ‘alternative’ energy sources like wind and solar have a thunking big bit of power electronics called a power converter to interface them to the grid. This takes whatever is generated by the windmill / solar panel and coverts it to the right voltage and frequency (whatever is appropriate locally). A windmill is in fact a much more stable source of power, in frequency terms, than coal, gas or nuclear plant, because there is no need at all to synchronise a physical rotation to the grid. Power quality is another matter, of course.
Thirdly, as many have already pointed out, when you actually read about this it turns out this is the same variation that already happens; they just won’t make it zero-average any more.
A little less hysteria, please.
Wow, I am so impressed that apparently nobody ever has the power go out in their house or community? As for me, power goes out during big storms, in the summer when Brown-outs lead to total disruption, when someone hits a power pole driving home drunk from the local bar. It seems to me, the cyclical accuracy of the power line gets very inaccurate when it’s off completely. Besides Daylight Savings, I have to reset my clocks 3 or 4 times a year so I doubt I would ever see the cumulative effect of this proposed change.
Aside from that I’m an Electronics Engineer and as many have commented, we have not used 60 Hz for our equipment clocks for a long time. that’s mostly because the internal microprocessors use a crystal of their own and we just divide that frequency to get our internal “Real Time” clocks.
One place I am concerned with line frequency is when I design “Grid-Tie” inverters which link DC Solar panels to the utility’s power grid. Even then we never count on exactly 60 Hz because the power line frequency is so inaccurate in the short term. Rather we simply synchronize electronically with whatever frequency the utility company is providing.
Now if you’re looking for an accurate clock, look to your GPS. The P-Code incorporated into the GPS signal is incredibly accurate … Even more so if you are the military and have access to the decryption key. However even for consumer GPS applications, it’s accuracy makes the 60Hz power line standard look like an hour glass in comparison.
Just because something is “Old” does not mean it is accurate, efficient or the best way to do something.
Life is a lot more fun when you stop feverishly searching for things to fear and be angry about.
Embrace change … It’s the only constant.
And buy a new clock for heaven’s sake, doesn’t the grinding of the 50 year old bearings in that one you have now keep you awake … or look at your Cell phone for the time 🙂
Phil, re: the generator disappearing through the roof, I certainly can believe that. East Perth power station in, I think, the 50s or 60s, had something similar happen (though it might have been a balance issue rather than phase fault) and the generator apparently not only ripped itself up and bounced around within the building for a bit, but also then took off through the side of it and landed in the mud across the Swan river where it sank never to be found again.
… or so our Electrical Engineer lecturers at Mt Lawley Tech used to tell us apprentices, and there didn’t seem to be any reason to disbelieve them.
As for mucking around with the cycles, that might be a simpler way of a power provider remotely controlling high power consumer devices. Get the government to legislate cycle sensitive controllers on every airconditioner, and in the summer months when the load is high and power station not managing, they could drop the cycles slightly in order to cause every aircon hanging off them to drop out, thereby lessening the load.
The eco-nazi green types would love that sort of thing. 🙂
regarDS
Fixing the standard of weights and measures is actually one of the few enumerated powers of Congress in article I section 8 of the US Constitution. If you do not want an unelected bureaucrat relaxing such standards, contact your senators and representatives with your concerns. Even if timekeeping were the only problem, it can still be a nontrivial side effect.
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Frederick Michael says:
June 25, 2011 at 7:55 pm
There was an episode of the old Superman TV series where they did this to speed up the clocks in this guy’s impenetrable chamber. His plan was to stay in the chamber until the statute of limitations ran out on his crime. The fast clocks tricked him into emerging early and he was busted.
Classic TV!
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My favorite line from that ancient episode was when the criminal was goading Superman on the telephone from his lead-lined chamber. Superman responded: “No comment until the time-limit is up”.
Considering that this is a scienitific website it’s amazing how many commentators are showing their lack of scientific knowledge.
Oh noes the world is going to end! The gov’ment are going to tax us even more. I’m going to go off grid till it’s all sorted out. What clutz.
As some of the more knowledgeble people have said, it won’t stop the world. Power companies have vested interests to keep the 60Hz (or 50Hz in th EU) but a minor variation here and there (not .001% on every single cycle, more like .01% for a few minutes at a time) will now not be maintained. So a few antique clocks and devices running on synchornous motors (not VCRs) might loose half second a week or they might gain a half second a week. If anyone is using a synchronous motor for such accurate timing more fool them for not upgrading to some crytsal derived clock. And you probably loose more time from power cuts and brown outs than any change in frequency could every produce.
As for frying electronics, anything that sensitive to such a small variation in frequency over a short period of time is asking to be replaced as it’s probably on it’s way out already. Switch mode power supplies (in the majority of electronic devices) ignore such issues.
Jeez, some people.
@Dennis L:
Just because something is “Old” does not mean it is accurate, efficient or the best way to do something.
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I take offense to that remark 😉
Has any of these idiots heard of impedence? Do they not know that reactance is dependent upon frequency?
OK so most things will not be affected, but a few will. I know that on an aircraft the AC system shuts down if frequency drops by more than 5%, to avoid fire risk of impedence drop in motors and heating elements. What is going to be the allowable variation? OK most modern transformers can take 50 – 60 Hz, but what about older kit, what about motors?
Wreck of a Marvel,
The Wichita Lineman mourns.
Carrington Event.
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Not so fast there Dennis L, P code and C/A code are derived from the same 10.23 MHz time base references in the birds, making them ‘equally accurate’ … resolution (not to be confused with accuracy) temporally (time) and spatially (position) is enhanced using P-code in conjunction with L2 frequency (1227.6 MHz, which is 120 times the time base reference frequency of 10.23 MHz) in conjunction with L1 (1575.42 MHz, which is 154 times 10.23 MHz) by taking into account ionospheric anomalies …
Full disclosure: I was with TI doing ‘factory support’ of HDUE (High Dynamic User Equipment) in the 1978 time frame when there were only a few ‘birds’ in orbit and the majority of testing was at the Yuma Proving Grounds using terrestrially-based ‘GPS’ transmitters …
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There is; they are called
Power Quality Meters (or monitors).
Something looks to have been thrown together using LabVIEW in this post, which was likely overlooked while reading other, shall I say, slightly over-the-top posts in this thread …
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Hmmm … ‘energy saving ideas’ …
What about all those programmable thermostats installed in the last few decades?
Sure, they have battery-backup (or ‘supercaps’ nowadays) for time keeping during mains power outages (they rely on a ‘crystal’, either an actual quartz crystal or more likely a ceramic resonator today) … but the long-term time keeping accuracy has been assured by continued ‘counting’ of AC mains line frequency – which system operators strive to maintain long-term ‘accuracy’.
For example, the ERCOT system in Texas (in the recent past, like back in February of this year) worked to ‘make up for’ cycles that had been ‘lost’ due to excessive system loading (REAL rotary, spinning equipment in the system powered by steam or gas turbines) WILL slow down if the load on the system is heavy and the resources to cope with the load are not available as noted here:
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I could not find anything in the ‘press’ on this story save a mention in the Seattle Times … nor anything in the trade press or any white papers or references on the FERC website two days ago while doing searches for over an hour of web and news sites …
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At some point the aqueducts started to break down. Later the water stopped flowing outright. People throughout Western Europe reverted to wells, surface streams or whatever. Yeahhhhhh … the 5th Century, that’s the ticket!
I don’t have time to go back and look right now, but isn’t there a plan to move from true alternating current to pulsating current. Instead of AC switching poles 60x per second, the electricity will be sent out in 60 pulses per second. Read an article on that a couple of years ago. Sound familiar to anyone? Could this be tied to that?
Based on the comments above this has zero impact on anything and is not some green environmentalist scheme to fry electronics device to stimulate the economy. Let’s move on.
http://truthsurvival.com/2011/06/27/the-schumann-reson-the-heart-beat-of-earth-and-how-it-effects-us/#comment-851