Discussion
Europe's power grid hiccups every 60 seconds, and batteries checking their charge on the minute are the main suspect...
The frequency of Europe's power grid dips every 60 seconds, and researchers at Forschungszentrum Jülich think they know why. Their paper in Nature Energy traces the dip to devices that all check in at the top of the minute, battery storage systems among them. Dirk Witthaut, who led the Jülich team, called it "years of detective work."
It isn't only Europe's problem.
The likely cause is timing: the researchers took a closer look at one battery system and found "a spike in electricity consumption at the start of every minute due to the power check." Jülich says the cause "appears to be the many large-scale battery storage systems that check their state of charge every minute."
TechXplore quotes the team that batteries may be "only part of the problem here," and Jülich names air conditioners, heat pumps, washing machines and dishwashers as possible suspects too.
Nobody's lights are about to go out. TechXplore reports the deviations were "not critical to grid security," though turbines "slow down momentarily" and the wobble adds wear and tear. The fix is almost funny: "distribute the checks randomly, rather than always starting them at the same time."
Programmers on Hacker News knew it instantly. One described a setup where every scheduled job runs "with a delay of between 0 and 59 seconds, based on a hash of the server name," which is the same cure. If you build anything that phones home on a timer, I'd give it a little random wait before it does.
The grid has been flinching on the minute for years, and now there's a prime suspect for whose clock it is.
Jülich's release says the team found it "was not a European phenomenon, but a global one." It also grows where the batteries go. In Ireland, data centres with large-scale battery storage systems "currently account for around a fifth of the country's electricity demand," TechXplore reports, and "the amplitude of the one-minute signal quadrupled between 2016 and 2021."