Mystery of 60-Second Fluctuations in Power Grids Solved

It had both ended up in the second chance pool.

The paper has a little more details:

  "following our communication with the manufacturer, a software update was issued that removed the strict periodicity of the current peaks in one battery block of the investigated UPS system"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-026-02144-0

Given the issue is so widespread (international, affecting pretty much every grid), it's likely that multiple manufacturers use similar approaches.

The effect is apparently small enough that they had to use Fourier analysis over many minutes to see it in the noise.

There are many millions of devices connected that draw power, and increasingly so, supply power.

If it were not a substantial research effort spanning years, it would not get funded. This motivates academic researchers to ensure that every topic is explored thoroughly and at great length.

It can be that part of battery is disconnected, to estimate cells voltage. You can not measure voltage while another source is chsrging battery. Or capacitors are charging.

Not a scholar of languages, but maybe something like "mit unheimlicher Regelmäßigkeit" (with un-home-ly regular-like-ness, read "home" like in "family" -> "familiar").

I would go with “allzuregelmäßig”.

Similar to “allzuschön um wahr zu sein”, “allzugroß” etc.

Thinking about it tactically, I’ll go with taktisch. :) Takt-isch.

uhrwerksmäßig

Sounds like they've been set up as cron tasks. I've always been unhappy with the 1 minute granularity of cron tasks. Only thing I could come up with was putting a sleep(random()) type of line to avoid a thundering herd type of issue.

  * * * * * sleep 17 && …

It seems more like one or multiple suppliers of battery systems not taking into account that the decentralized deployments of their system could have that effect. If it's not regulated and an open market, this was bound to happen sooner or later.

In computer/systems/distributed engineering this is called request smoothing or traffic shaping, and it's implemented by adding jitter, which is a random time offset/pad added to the interval.

The funny thing is, modern electrical codes already account for this phenomenon. In order to implement Net Metering (selling your power to the grid), modern standards implement two kinds of jitter:

- Sandia Frequency Shift: a minute shift in the power frequency generated by inverters. If the grid is connected, this is effectively eliminated; if the inverter is disconnected from the grid, it detects the frequency has shifted and disconnects the inverter from the grid.

- Slip-Mode Frequency Shift: basically the same thing, but phase shift (which I don't understand).

Both of these are used for anti-islanding (don't create an island of power). When the inverter detects it's isolated and stops outputting current, it then has to check every 5 minutes, with jitter, for whether the grid is restored or not. It has to add random jitter, because otherwise all the mini battery/solar installs will come online at the same time and swamp the grid, causing another outage.

power guys got surprised as rest of the grid load is human randomised and even huge factories will come on one chonk at a time, vs miilisecond co ordinated load switching at scale, with batteries as the load of the initial surge into even fully charged batteries can be almost infinite, and the whole calculation around grid scale turbines is that they run at very precise rpm's for stability and longevity, but worse, and a big fail, as battery storage is supposed to help with that, not be the problem. bet it gets fixed realy fast as those grid guys definitly get listened to.

To anyone herding a herd this is obvious. To people crafting animals less so.

Apparently not everyone does ;)

Stuxnet damaged gas centrifuges by introducing a subtle change in rotational speed over time, eventually the motors failed mechanically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

Because a variation in force is a cycle of stress, which is more destructive than constant force. It's called hysteresis, leading to material fatigue.

When the battery storage systems all temporarily pause providing grid inertia due to the state of charge check they’re performing, grid synchronized spinning mass has to compensate, which slows it down (transferring the kinetic energy to electrical energy), and then is sped back up as battery storage resumes inertia support.

Broadly speaking, it’s a collective momentum problem. If part of the system inertia sags, another part needs to step in to compensate for the inertia loss, otherwise you have brownouts and eventually, a blackout.

https://neutrino-energy.com/technology/grid-inertia/