Power grid change may disrupt clocks

Doesn't sound like the wisest thing. To much phase mismatch on the grids increases line noise. Not just bad for clocks, but it can cause things like transformers and ballast circuits to have a decreased life span. (A CFL may no longer last those typical 5+yrs or so. Some cheaper PSUs used on some computers may also act up causing other problems like the dreaded BSOD.) And it can cause problems for things like radios and some types of amplifiers too. Having a good clean sine on the grid is something that you shouldn't mess up too much.

Who knows though? Maybe somebody invested in power conditioners and now they want to have a larger market than just audiophiles.

reply to post by this_is_who_we_are


Wow, thanks for the info, he was assigned this position in 2005 yet he has yet to contribute enough to find any articles except the ones I linked? Makes one wonder since we do know that anyone and anything attached the the "Al Gore's" of the world and their Global Warming Money Machine have lost credibility!

Why isn't this article in the AP website? Odd, I think it is a shirt-tail publication based on a survey done in 2008, well that is how it looks to me so far! I don't believe it. No one would mess with our Grid in such a fashion and not inform Municipalities or other Government Operations. Has anyone else found anything? I see this same article is being carried, but I am not finding any credibility to the source material! Cover-up?

OK, I will go back to sleep now, hopefully my alarm will ring true!

I do appreciate finding this info on Seth! Thanks again!

Makes sense now, thanks for clearing that up.

Originally posted by kwakakev
A change in AC frequency does not result in any changes for DC and digital time pieces. Sounds like another fog off as the MIC opps again.

That's right. A lot of these clocks convert AC to DC. It is not possible for "frequency" to affect them, as a DC current has no frequency.

Since 1930, electric clocks have kept time based on the rate of the electrical current that powers them. If the current slips off its usual rate, clocks run a little fast or slow.

Voltage regulators would come in handy. The only two things that can affect the current flow is a change in voltage, or a change in electrical resistance within the clock.

Is there a change happening on Earth at the moment causing materials in the clocks to become more conductive?

Ohm's law states that an electrical current (amps) = voltage divided by resistance.

It is not possible for the current to change unless the voltage or resistance also does.

More evidence this is nothing to do with AC frequency in this thread:

Translation: "Since more than a week ago, electric watches and clocks in the city of Catania, but in other Sicilian cities too, seem to have become crazy. The clocks are faster, up to 15/20 minutes/day.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

So these watches use AC power, hey?

Originally posted by NuclearPaul
That's right. A lot of these clocks convert AC to DC. It is not possible for "frequency" to affect them, as a DC current has no frequency.

Unless they're counting it as their time base, which many of them do. Sorry to pop your bubble.

I see it very irrational that the power companies would run all the generators at a higher speed. This is not just a change in some output setting but a large spinning mass creating the sine wave that has to be in sync with orher large spinning masses to create the three-phase standard all running at a higher speed. More power needed to drive it and severe disruption to three-phase systems synced to 3600 rpm / minute.

My thoughts (I think 1 is the best possibility)

1) Hoax, as already suggested,
2) Disinformation to hide some other anomaly (changes in the passing of time or effects on all electrical devices???) that could be some new wonderful conspiracy?
3) Sabotage from within or maybe some Stuxnet (is it possible, maybe but it definitely has not happened yet)

I haven't seen any failures in three-phase devices. And I would be one of the first people to know that three-phase devices were syncing incorrectly I assure you, from anywhere on this side of the world.

Originally posted by NuclearPaul
So these watches use AC power, hey?

Read on down to the post where you'll find out that "watch" and "clock" are pretty much the same word in Italian, and you have to get which from context.

Seriously, if you alter the AC line frequency, any synchronous motor clock and any digital clock that counts cycles will be off.

In the future, more use of renewable energy from the sun and wind will mean more variations in frequency on the grid, McClelland said.

Crap.

For these sytems to be connected to the grid, an inverter is required. Not a standard inverter which has its own frequency, but a grid tie inverter.

A grid tie inverter senses the frequency of the grid and matches it to be compatible. It cannot affect the frequency of the grid.

Originally posted by lakesidepark
I see it very irrational that the power companies would run all the generators at a higher speed. This is not just a change in some output setting but a large spinning mass creating the sine wave that has to be in sync with orher large spinning masses to create the three-phase standard all running at a higher speed.

Yup. You have to wonder what the system dynamics are of, say, half the Eastern seaboard.

They're talking about long term drift between systems that are coupled through DC long lines. They don't want to take the time/effort/expense of keeping it all in sync anymore, nor of keeping exact count on daily cycles to keep older AC clocks accurate as they do now.

Originally posted by NuclearPaul
Crap.

For these sytems to be connected to the grid, an inverter is required. Not a standard inverter which has its own frequency, but a grid tie inverter.

A grid tie inverter senses the frequency of the grid and matches it to be compatible. It cannot affect the frequency of the grid.

I think they might be talking about solar cell installations at the utility company level rather than at the home level, but yeah, that didn't make much sense to me, either. If anything, a modern power utility grade inverter should be more accurate than a rotating machine, not less.

Originally posted by Bedlam

Originally posted by NuclearPaul
That's right. A lot of these clocks convert AC to DC. It is not possible for "frequency" to affect them, as a DC current has no frequency.

Unless they're counting it as their time base, which many of them do. Sorry to pop your bubble.

Well, the excuse they are giving us is this:

Since 1930, electric clocks have kept time based on the rate of the electrical current that powers them. If the current slips off its usual rate, clocks run a little fast or slow.

Only the voltage or resistance can affect the current. Frequency has nothing to do with it.

Any electrician that argues with this is arguing against Ohm's law.

Originally posted by NuclearPaul

Since 1930, electric clocks have kept time based on the rate of the electrical current that powers them. If the current slips off its usual rate, clocks run a little fast or slow.

Only the voltage or resistance can affect the current. Frequency has nothing to do with it

I think what you're seeing here is non-technical journalist slop. You'll note that they use "rate" not "quantity" or flow, which probably means someone told them the right thing but they reworded it into inaccuracy.

The article's context is frequency, which makes sense for the types of clocks they're talking about - the next sentence in the article after the one you quoted reads "Power companies now take steps to correct it and keep the frequency of the current — and the time — as precise as possible"

eta: If I got suspicious every time I heard some non-tech publication get current, voltage or frequency wrong, I'd be wearing a tin-foil hat. Most of these guys are pretty much knowledge-free.

Sounds like it's simply a test run with relaxed frequency and time error correction standards. All the large generators on the grid have governors which are optimised for the system frequency (60Hz in USA) and when load increases the system slows a little causing the governors to increase output, vice versa for load reductions. If left alone the system will lose a little time as load increases in the morning and correct the error in the evening as load drops off to minimum in the early hours of the morning but the system isn't perfect and errors will accrue depending on overall governor 'speed droop' settings.

The overall SCADA central control of the whole system monitors and nudges the machine outputs to get better management of the time errors than the governors are capable of achieving by themselves. Relaxation of that central control's response to frequency deviations means that frequency swings will be larger and longer in duration. 'Swings' are the result of either loss of load/increased generation (frequency rises) or loss of generators /increased load (frequency falls). SCADA systems monitor 2 clock sources, one is synchronous driven by the mains frequency and the other driven by a more stable source like a satellite, atomic clock or simply a well calibrated crystal oscillator. If the synchronous time lags the standard it pulses the generators up a little above normal frequency until the 2 clocks are within a defined 'deadband' difference, or pulses them down if the system is too 'fast'. Typical 'deadband' settings might be +/- 5-10 seconds which means that within that band it leaves the generators alone but outside the band it reacts with progressively greater urgency in order to make the necessary time error corrections.

There are not many synchronous clocks out there these days compared to 30 years ago so consumer clocks won't really be much of an issue but industrial processes using large synchronous motors will definitely 'feel' the difference. Older paper manufacturing facilities could be particularly affected because the thickness and quality of their product will be very sensitive to the system frequency and they'd desire the frequency to be as constant as possible with big swings (caused by unavoidable system faults) corrected very quickly. This 'test' is proposing a slightly less urgent response to such events because it means significantly less wear and tear on the system's generators (governors and actuators particularly). Increasing the time error 'deadband' I mentioned would achieve this very neatly and easily with 99% of consumers none the wiser.

Originally posted by NuclearPaul

Voltage regulators would come in handy. The only two things that can affect the current flow is a change in voltage, or a change in electrical resistance within the clock.

Is there a change happening on Earth at the moment causing materials in the clocks to become more conductive?

Ok, I am prepared to get totally blasted for this, but here goes...

Apparently the Earth is slowing down and has been and we've been adding leap seconds from time to time. No big conspiracy there... just, it is what it is. Here's an interesting link related to it, and a couple of snippets from that site...

US Naval Observatory Document - Leap Seconds

As of 1 January 2006, TAI is ahead of UTC by 33 seconds.
TAI is ahead of GPS by 19 seconds.
GPS is ahead of UTC by 14 seconds.

...and...

"...we can change the time on an atomic clock, while it is not possible to alter the Earth's rotational speed to match the atomic clocks! Currently the Earth runs slow at roughly 2 milliseconds per day. After 500 days, the difference between the Earth rotation time and the atomic time would be 1 second. Instead of allowing this to happen, a leap second is inserted to bring the two times closer together."

I guess my question is, could they possibly be changing time-keeping to avoid the whole 'leap-second' scenario? (That's the non-conspiratorial question, unless you follow it up with "Why wouldn't they just say so?")
Which brings me to the go-ahead-and-blast-me-outa-the-water Conspiracy Question:

Could it be that various factors are leading to Earth slowing down a lot more than usual (dense clouds of space dust that I've read our Solar System is traveling thru, for example.)

Here's another interesting link about Earth's rotation and time:

International Earth Rotation and Reference Guide

Or, to go at it from the opposite direction, they've added all of these leap seconds thru the years to account for the slow-down of rotation (24 seconds since 1972 -- Wiki Article ) and then we've had these natural disasters that have have sped up rotation, which would make our clocks run slow over time... oh now I'm confused. Maybe they just have to implement a new system to somehow keep up with what the rotation is doing on any given day, since it seems so subject to change and the Atomic clocks don't adjust to rotation speed.

Anyhow, here are links to articles about rotation speed-up...

Chilian Earthquake - National Geographic
Japan Earthquake

Oh and one about China's Three Gorges Dam water shift slowing down the rotation...
www.theenergywatch.com... the-earths-rotation/

Mercy! Sorry so long-winded...
In summation, I'll just say I wonder if there is more to this than meets the eye, and maybe TPTB are trying to 'keep pace' (corny pun) without freaking out the masses. (Cuz they luv us so much, riiiiight?)

Heck it won't bother me at all.

I prepared for the power grid going down along time ago.

What we know of time is all manipulated even how.

That daylight savings time and time zones are all mans manipulation of a natural function.

I personally believe that all the time disruptions going on in Sicily is caused by Etna and the magma accumulating in the area and being released through the vents.

It is causing this which will effect the power grid and the distribution of man made electrical power.

It was mentioned in this thread and got me to thinking.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

I lived on a volcanic island in the Aleutian Islands and we always had earthquakes and minor eruptions and anything electric clock would never be accurate.

We always used government issued battery operated clocks and called a autovon number back to the Naval Observatory in D.C.to get a accurate time to ensure the clocks were correct.

TPTB do no not want us to know that time is SPEEDING UP - hence the lame explanation. MORE excuses as TIME progresses.

Is it just me or does this just simply not ring true to anyone else? Explain it all, time and again but it all comes down to a basic issue. Why are they really doing this? I feel like someone else is already controlling our concept of time through our cell phones, computers, etc... How many people actually wear a watch anymore?

I feel like they are just slowly hand feeding us a little BS at a time until they finally have us completely blind to any real truth. I would venture to guess that greater than 3/4 of Americans will read the official story about this and think "Ok. I better double check my cell phone or computer when i set my alarm tonight."

Without question.

That is the true problem...Without Question...

Meanwhile, my gut is screaming that something doesn't sound right with this.

I did notice today that my plug-in clock and my phone in my office were two minutes slower than my computer's time and I always set them to be at the same time. I could understand my electric clock being a little off but not two minutes. The clock on my office phone, I can set to the exact second as my computer, so it should have been "correct". (The office phone does plug in to the wall and has a back up battery.)