“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.
Gunner Jensen says:
June 27, 2011 at 2:10 pm
“Watching TV with black bars crawling vertically through the picture; happens when frequency is the same but the phase is not, due to no synchronization of 60 hertz.”
I used to fix TVs for a living. The above is misleading. The NTSC video signal has a vertical sync pulse which is nominally 60hz but it’s completely unrelated to AC line frequency. If the entire frame is rolling vertically the black bar is the vertical sync interval which is normally hidden while the electron beam in the cathode ray tube that lights up phosphors on the screen moves from the bottom of the picture tube face back to the top. This condition indicates you have a problem in the vertical sync detection circuitry.
If the frame itself is not rolling but you have some kind of distortion rolling vertically through the picture that’s indicative of a bad power supply low frequency filter capacitor. That’s probably the most common problem in AC power supplies as those filter caps are typically large electrolytic capacitors operating in a hot environment. The liquid electrolytic either leaks out or dries out over time with characteristic result of a 60hz signal appearing on the power supply’s DC output. Since the NTSC sync pulse and AC line frequency are both very close to 60hz but otherwise unrelated the result is an interference pattern rolling vertically through the picture frame where the roll rate is determined by how much the NTSC vertical sync pulse and line frequency differ. In audio systems the same filter cap failure results in a notorious 60hz “hum”.
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Dave Springer says:
June 29, 2011 at 7:17 am
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For some reason WordPress lost my name/email and I had to type it in again. I made a typo in my name when I reentered it (see previous post). I corrected the typo but in order to make it stick I had to post another comment. At a loss for words (hard to believe, innit?) I just entered xyz and hit the post button. 🙂
Perdavid Nygren says:
June 28, 2011 at 2:00 pm
“We have 50Hz here in Europe (at least in Sweden), remember my time trying to play a 60Hz game on our 50Hz TV back in the 90´ies… didn´t work at all. Do NOT expect the massmedia to tell you about all the thing that went wrong after this experiment. Sure am glad to not live in the US of A!”
For short while in the very early 1980’s I was writing console video games for a living, primarily for the Atari 2600. On that platform the programmer was responsible for vertical sync timing. We had a hardware interrupt that occured at the end of every horizontal line. We had to count the number of lines in software and intiate vertical synchronization at the proper time.
The horizontal sync interrupt was generated by hardware counter counting out a number of ticks from a crystal oscillator. The oscillator was running at 14.318mhz which happens to be 4x the color burst frequency for NTSC (60hz vertical) and 3x the color burst frequency for PAL. The microprocessor was running at 1/3 the color burst frequency. PAL (50hz vertical) uses a different color burst frequency at 4.43mhz althought the horizontal sync rate is very nearly identical for both NTSC and PAL video at 15.7khz and 15.7khz respectively. So on the Atrari 2600 we could have generated the proper timing for horizontal and vertical synchronization but the color burst frequency would have been way off the mark unless the counter was reprogrammable from 4x for NTSC to 3x for PAL. The counter must have been reprogrammable as I know there were PAL-compatible cartridges for the 2600 VCS but as far as know the shop I worked for didn’t do any PAL versions of any of our games.
What’s with all the blaming the government? Its not being mandated, its being allowed (less regulation). What gets me is the same poster who blames Fed gov for this typically goes on to rant about the need for less governement or such. Really, get a story and stick with it.
I have an electrical engineering degree, and this changes involve LESS variance of the power frequency. Years ago, when one power plant supplied one town, and electric clocks had mechanical motors, it made sense to speed up the power grid frequency to make the clocks run fast for a day or two to catch up to the duration of the power outage. But even that caused problems — if you just reset the clock when the power came back on, the power company’s efforts made THOSE clocks wrong — they would be FAST by the amount of the correction. These periods of non-standard power frequency make it extremely difficult to merge into a regional power grid operating at normal frequency.
And anyway, today’s clocks with digital displays use quartz movments and most analog clocks use a battery movement – both unaffected by power grid frequency.
I was worried about frequency variation too, i thought they were going south america style and letting it run at some vague 48-60hz or whatever. But, if you RTFA (well, don’t, it’s uniformative. But read a *different* article) and they are said the variation would be about 20 minutes a year on the east coast (although they incorrectly said a clock would be fast rather than slow) and 8 minutes on the west. that would mean running at 59.9977hz. (Or, as a few commenters have said, not running at slightly *over* 60hz overnight to make up for times during the day when the cycles *already* are a little slow.)
THANKFULLY this phenomenon has at last been explained!
/mild sarc
The phenom continues to this day having raised it’s ugly head back in February of this year when we saw rolling blackouts throughout the state to forceably ‘shed load’ after significant amounts of generation were lost due to the effects of cold on systems:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/25/it-hertz-when-you-do-that-power-grid-to-stop-regulating-60-hz-frequency/#comment-689996
Clocks reset just after the rolling blackouts would show a gain of about 18 seconds in the above case …
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The thought of allowing the national power frequency to be free floating is ridiculous. Why do we have tthe national clock at the National Bureau of Standards if not to maintain a true standard? Even if we disreegard the (electric) clock problem there is the real problem of opening and closing grid interconnects. An off phase connect can default into a complete collapse of both grids; the nightmare of all power generators. Any phase shift by pushing the phase of a power generator causes that generator to pick up the load on the line and try to push all other on line generator to become unloaded. Obviously this is a hare-brained attempt to justify more political interference that MUST remain the domain of the consenting power producers, not the Bureacrats.The IEEE ans NEMA have many years in solution of the integration of interconnected power, let them alone! No Czar in Washington should have any interference in the national system!
Larryn11 is a real tool, blaming Obama’s “czars” for this change. He must have not even read the article, because the change is proposed by The North American Electric Reliability Corp, NERC is a non-government organization (as in free-market) that runs the nation’s interlocking web of transmission lines and power plants.