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Grid problem ?

At about 03-00 today I had another power cut, this happens fairly regularly and is not normally worthy of much comment.

However I noted that after the supply was restored, that the UPS was still making unhappy sounds due to "mains out of tolerance"

I then observed the "dynamic demand" website, upon which there is a real time display of UK grid frequency. This looked very unstable with the frequency "bouncing around" a great deal.

There was nothing remarkable about the actual frequency attained, it remained generally within the usual operating limits of 49.8 cycles to 50.2 cycles.

What was however most exceptional was the speed of the frequency variations, less than a second for a 0.3 cycle change, and the number of these sudden frequency changes, at least a dozen such rapid changes in a minute.


I then observed the national grid website "frequency for the last 30 minutes" chart. This showed nothing unusual, but I suspect that the chart has insufficient resolution to display frequent and very brief events.
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  • If this fluctuation is due to poor measurement technique, it is pretty bad. The method suggested by Mike is only workable if there is an average of a number of readings. Traditionally really accurate measurements of low frequencies have been by phase locked frequency multiplication, the loop filter providing a suitable level of averaging. I designed such a device many years ago, and it was fairly widely used  for film and television discharge lighting where exact frequency control is required to prevent flickering. Multiplying to 500 kHz allowed readings to 0.001 Hz at 10 readings a second. Of course the input waveform needed to be filtered to reduce the noise bandwidth somewhere near the expected frequency range, but that is fairly obvious. Loop bandwidth was about 1Hz, so it followed "wobbles" quite well. I expect that this reading is not instrumented well, probably the period is just measured with a processor timer with little filtering etc. A similar technique to that above must be used by the synchronous wind generators to control the blade pitch, perhaps assisted by the reactive power phase from the alternator. I bet that gave someone a serious headache to design, as the error is probably chaotic with wind speed! I would doubt that 25% wind is properly stable, there are just so many time delays and the whole system would have far too many similar but not identical responses that normal control analysis would be impossible.
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  • If this fluctuation is due to poor measurement technique, it is pretty bad. The method suggested by Mike is only workable if there is an average of a number of readings. Traditionally really accurate measurements of low frequencies have been by phase locked frequency multiplication, the loop filter providing a suitable level of averaging. I designed such a device many years ago, and it was fairly widely used  for film and television discharge lighting where exact frequency control is required to prevent flickering. Multiplying to 500 kHz allowed readings to 0.001 Hz at 10 readings a second. Of course the input waveform needed to be filtered to reduce the noise bandwidth somewhere near the expected frequency range, but that is fairly obvious. Loop bandwidth was about 1Hz, so it followed "wobbles" quite well. I expect that this reading is not instrumented well, probably the period is just measured with a processor timer with little filtering etc. A similar technique to that above must be used by the synchronous wind generators to control the blade pitch, perhaps assisted by the reactive power phase from the alternator. I bet that gave someone a serious headache to design, as the error is probably chaotic with wind speed! I would doubt that 25% wind is properly stable, there are just so many time delays and the whole system would have far too many similar but not identical responses that normal control analysis would be impossible.
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