Gotta get some answers from my relative in a PA gas fired plant. A year ago he told me that the plan to deregulate the number of cycles in a day had been abandoned. The referenced documents are older than that.
OTOH, there's no other explanation for Hal Murray's observation of the West Coast grid variation. Seems to me that all of the rotating synchronous machinery connected to a grid is constrained by all of that heavy rotating machinery to change speed quite slowly, like starting to change the direction of a ship heading to a port about 5 miles out. There are at least three grids in the US that are independent of each other in frequency. That reduces the strains on a grid from distant changes. Power is transferred using high voltage DC transmission lines. Really large solid state inverters convert between AC and DC. Each inverter can make any frequency it wants to, subject to the constraints of all that synchronous machinery. Frankly, I'm puzzled by the graphs that relate to the time offset. All that's available to the observer is the line frequency. Relative time may be inferred with a cycle counter. How is that counter set to UTC? How can you tell the difference between time error from some reference point, and cycles gained or lost in the counting equipment - due to noise and/or computer interrupt servicing routines? When I asked for data from parts of the country east of the Rockies (on 7/10), I got one reply from a person who is not a member of the list but reads archive sites. He sent his long term graph for Texas and the link to a real-time statistics page that gave him the data for the graph. The statistics are at (strip the stuff after com/ to get the home page and further details): http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_conditions.html His chart (with permission) is at: http://home.earthlink.net/~schultdw/power/all.png In this case, the time reference was given by the power company. No cycles were counted. Regards, Bill Hawkins _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.