The water-hammer effect, or in this case electron-hammer effect, is why you don't reboot every Windows server in the data center at exactly 2am, to stagger the load shift over time. Surprised that the power guys didn't realize that switching a presumably multi-hundred-MW load in and out at the top of each minute would cause a problem.
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.
> as the load of the initial surge into even fully charged batteries can be almost infinite
There was an post a couple of days ago about a telco debrief of an interesting outage that happened. Several things went wrong like the audible bell was manually silence from being heard as a step in routine working but was forgotten to put back into normal mode once work was complete. The actual loss in power triggered the automatic switch to the batteries, but something else seemingly benign happened at the same time so that when power was restored, the batteries had been depleted to the point the charging process could not start because of something similar to this. I wish I could remember the write up, as it was really well written about the cascades of failures that occurred.
> grid scale turbines is that they run at very precise rpm's for stability and longevity
The turbines/generators set the grid frequency itself.
Having the batteries disconnect/connect would cause the generators to slow down and then speed up (or vice versa) which makes the rest of the grid frequency fluctuate as well.
It may also trigger the FCAS part of the grid that is paid to keep the frequency within the required range which is +/- 10mHz-200mHz.
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.
It's a human problem. Noone "expects" their own "minimal"
checks to compound. And everyone (re)implements periodic checks in ever-more-inventive ways.
BSD cron solves this ? Alright. Does prometheus use it to schedule its periodic polling ? Do OTel collectors use it to smear their backend metrics uploads ? Does your own code use cron jobs for its "periodic" heartbeating ?
If the answer to that is all-yes, then my compliments to you. Alas ... at least my experience says that's not how things are done.
Yes, using prime numbers are a good way to reduce the risk of multiple timers coinciding, for example a 10s, 30s, 60s period on a freshly restarted node / process.
The Google internal equivalent to cron has a ? placeholder in the scheduling spec syntax letting the scheduler deterministically pick an arbitrary valid value within the field range. So ? 2 ... will pick any minute between 02:00 and 02:59 (and I suspect any second within that minute). The value is derived from a hash of the job definition, so overall this spreads the cron load within the hour.
Obviously cron jobs are not all equal in terms of load and duration, and hours are not all equal in terms of usage, but that still helps prevent trivial spikes similar to the one mentioned in the article (disclaimer: I'm not aware of a recent counterfactual experiment proving this, but that seems a fair assumption).
I suppose one would end up with checks happening on a random second instead of a random minute - reducing the size of the spike by a factor of 60, but still spiky.
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.
Doesn't seem that complicated from the article though. They say that they immediately knew it was clock based due to the strict interval. With REA etc. it might become easier to proof, but I guess it's a measurement problem that only appears in large networks?
Can someone with more understanding explain why this was apparently so difficult to find out?
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.
That's not really telling us anything. The way you convert a time domain signal to a frequency domain signal, that is fourier analysis. There are other uses for it too, but that is the primary use.
>> explain why this was apparently so difficult to find out?
Likely because the source of the noise was a class of energy providers that themselves react to fluctuation in the grid. Electricity may travel at the speed of light but all the little switches and transistors that connect/disconnect suppliers do not. It would have been noise within noise.
Well ya, nothing on earth moves that fast, but the speed of power/signal in a grid references a fraction of c, as opposed to the frequency of the current which is measurable in frequencies we can actually appreciate with our own ears/eyes. They are in different leagues.
When you monitor a power line, you don't get a tcpdump showing who's producing and who's consuming the power. You can't just jump straight to the culprit.
It's just bulk flows, so when a weird flow shows up, you've got to move up or down the line, past a few producers or consumers, and see if the flow changes. For a subtle effect, that might not even be so clear.
Worse, for an effect that's most visible at the medium-voltage transmission level, simply placing a monitor might take weeks. These are planned installations with incredible safety considerations -- you don't just plug in.
Finally they found a research campus with a bunch of battery storage systems, AND the ability to install a bunch of monitors, and persuaded them to install dozens of monitoring points. Finally a high-resolution view of the effect allowed them to confirm the behavior.
> Can someone with more understanding explain why this was apparently so difficult to find out?
Because the grid as a whole is dumb as fuck. Sure, you got measurement stations doing very fine frequency analysis, to the point you can use grid hum to timestamp audio recordings [1].
But you rarely have realtime insight at individual busbar level for each substation or heaven forbid consumers. Best chance you get is 15-minute consumption pings and voltage/frequency metering at large plants.
That means if you want to track down bad actors like the batteries here or the Kosovo/Serbia bullshit [2] that dragged down the frequency on the entire ENTSO-E grid (which is quite the challenge!), it takes months if not years.
Oh interesting that got reformed, too! Strange choice to split it in two instead of three words (the latter which would have mimicked English: “all too”).
Well, then it seems we don’t have any single German word for all too regular anymore :(
Until the reforms in 1996, allzu… was one word: allzuoft, allzuschön, allzugroß, allzuviel, etc. But yeah, probably would have written such a long word in two words even then.
My new proposal would be überregelmäßig. Über+adjective is still one word only, post-reform. Sounds strange, but grammatically correct, and still conveys the “unusual” part.
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").
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.
The grid frequency is set directly by 3 phase generators. So if the grid frequency drops, there is indeed a very strong torque trying to decelerate the turbines.
To some extent, this is a good thing. Because it means the spinning mass of all turbines in the grid actually provide a buffer for sub-second mismatches in demand and supply. But it does mean that big demand spikes (or drops) put some wear on the systems. They are made for this, but if it gets very periodic it might be more than designed for.
Note that this means that all turbines in a power network are perfectly synchronized. And if they are not, they are subject to massive torques. This is why a cold start is so hard. You need to bring on generators from one central point to keep everything in sync. And as you bring on new generation capacity you also need to bring on new consumption, that electricity has to go somewhere.
The reason for this synchronization is because the generators are spinning a magnet past 3 coils, and those coils are directly wired into the power network. If your magnets are out of phase then effectively the entire power network will use those coils to generate a field to get that magnet back in sync. All of those coils on all those generators really are all hard-wired together, it still kind of blows my mind.
i'm confused, why would a system simply checking its own power state be taking so much electricity as to show up on grid measurements? unless they mean that the systems are choosing to start charging the batteries, but then it's a continuous load and not a spike at the start of the minute, right?
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.
I think you can. RC toys do that all the time. Maybe the measurement is less precise, but you usually don't need super precise voltage, especially if you know your capacitance and measure current.
Current doesn't tell you if the battery is leaking charge, or otherwise failing to store it though. Vastly increased losses could be a sign of failure, for example. In any case it's important to be sure.
The Frequency is actually increasing at every event which means grid load is reduced for a short while every minute. Those UPS installations basically briefly switch to Battery every Minute to test Capacity/internal resistance and so on. This so called "load dump" is visible in grid frequency since a lot of these systems work synchronous thanks to NTP
The press release is rather light on details. They found that it is every 60seconds (duh!) and generators (or such). So what exactly is it? (Make and model?)
Seems like they did not find the exact manufacturer or the exact devices and were not able to change firmware then?
"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"
You see the same thing with e.g. cron jobs, where everyone schedules on xx:00 or xx:30. No communication needed, it's just natural. More senior people recognize this and add randomness to their start times or skew a bit.
I always recommend to use weird numbers for different tasks. That way, you can see "oh my system is under severe load at *:13 (or 17, 23, 42, ...). That must be this cron job"
Funny, similar patterns are super common in API traffic. A large spike at midnight UTC, a smaller one every hour, even smaller ones every 15 minutes, and a little bump every minute if your metrics have enough resolution.
Of course, if someone calls your API every minute you should probably consider some kind of streaming, or at least include make the request cheap by requiring a cursor of some kind.
74 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 12.5 ms ] threadThere was an post a couple of days ago about a telco debrief of an interesting outage that happened. Several things went wrong like the audible bell was manually silence from being heard as a step in routine working but was forgotten to put back into normal mode once work was complete. The actual loss in power triggered the automatic switch to the batteries, but something else seemingly benign happened at the same time so that when power was restored, the batteries had been depleted to the point the charging process could not start because of something similar to this. I wish I could remember the write up, as it was really well written about the cascades of failures that occurred.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50153229&hl=en-US
The turbines/generators set the grid frequency itself.
Having the batteries disconnect/connect would cause the generators to slow down and then speed up (or vice versa) which makes the rest of the grid frequency fluctuate as well.
It may also trigger the FCAS part of the grid that is paid to keep the frequency within the required range which is +/- 10mHz-200mHz.
https://mainsfrequency.com/frequ_info_en.php
That way I still maintain a per-job 60-second cadence consistently (which random would not), but don’t do it right on the top of the minute.
If the answer to that is all-yes, then my compliments to you. Alas ... at least my experience says that's not how things are done.
https://shoppress.dormanproducts.com/hunting-tooth-gearsets/
Obviously cron jobs are not all equal in terms of load and duration, and hours are not all equal in terms of usage, but that still helps prevent trivial spikes similar to the one mentioned in the article (disclaimer: I'm not aware of a recent counterfactual experiment proving this, but that seems a fair assumption).
Analog systems naturally have a dispersion to them, digital ones, especially with everybody on NTP, much less so
Doesn't seem that complicated from the article though. They say that they immediately knew it was clock based due to the strict interval. With REA etc. it might become easier to proof, but I guess it's a measurement problem that only appears in large networks?
Can someone with more understanding explain why this was apparently so difficult to find out?
Likely because the source of the noise was a class of energy providers that themselves react to fluctuation in the grid. Electricity may travel at the speed of light but all the little switches and transistors that connect/disconnect suppliers do not. It would have been noise within noise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_factor#Typical_veloci...
It's just bulk flows, so when a weird flow shows up, you've got to move up or down the line, past a few producers or consumers, and see if the flow changes. For a subtle effect, that might not even be so clear.
Worse, for an effect that's most visible at the medium-voltage transmission level, simply placing a monitor might take weeks. These are planned installations with incredible safety considerations -- you don't just plug in.
Finally they found a research campus with a bunch of battery storage systems, AND the ability to install a bunch of monitors, and persuaded them to install dozens of monitoring points. Finally a high-resolution view of the effect allowed them to confirm the behavior.
Because the grid as a whole is dumb as fuck. Sure, you got measurement stations doing very fine frequency analysis, to the point you can use grid hum to timestamp audio recordings [1].
But you rarely have realtime insight at individual busbar level for each substation or heaven forbid consumers. Best chance you get is 15-minute consumption pings and voltage/frequency metering at large plants.
That means if you want to track down bad actors like the batteries here or the Kosovo/Serbia bullshit [2] that dragged down the frequency on the entire ENTSO-E grid (which is quite the challenge!), it takes months if not years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_network_frequency_a...
[2] https://www.entsoe.eu/news/2018/04/03/frequency-deviations-c...
Oh I’m sure there is a German phrase for this.
Similar to “allzuschön um wahr zu sein”, “allzugroß” etc.
Well, then it seems we don’t have any single German word for all too regular anymore :(
My new proposal would be überregelmäßig. Über+adjective is still one word only, post-reform. Sounds strange, but grammatically correct, and still conveys the “unusual” part.
Why though? Due to increased torque?
To some extent, this is a good thing. Because it means the spinning mass of all turbines in the grid actually provide a buffer for sub-second mismatches in demand and supply. But it does mean that big demand spikes (or drops) put some wear on the systems. They are made for this, but if it gets very periodic it might be more than designed for.
Note that this means that all turbines in a power network are perfectly synchronized. And if they are not, they are subject to massive torques. This is why a cold start is so hard. You need to bring on generators from one central point to keep everything in sync. And as you bring on new generation capacity you also need to bring on new consumption, that electricity has to go somewhere.
The reason for this synchronization is because the generators are spinning a magnet past 3 coils, and those coils are directly wired into the power network. If your magnets are out of phase then effectively the entire power network will use those coils to generate a field to get that magnet back in sync. All of those coils on all those generators really are all hard-wired together, it still kind of blows my mind.
Seems like they did not find the exact manufacturer or the exact devices and were not able to change firmware then?
Given the issue is so widespread (international, affecting pretty much every grid), it's likely that multiple manufacturers use similar approaches.