In article ,
The Other Mike writes:

There was someone on another group in the past few months, maybe uk.railway? I
think the poster was possibly German, and they were claiming that on the German
grid, the system frequency during the loss of 1.5 - 2GW of generation (this
was a one trip, one site event) with a system loading of 50GW was about 0.05Hz.

Yes you read that right zero point zero five hertz. So that's a larger loss than
the Sizewell B Longannet incident of 2008 that resulted in a frequency of around
48.8Hz. No, I didn't believe it either!

Not got any measurements in Germany but the frequency moves about in Italy about
the same as the UK.

Germany doesn't have a grid - it's part of a much larger sychronisation
zone which covers all EU countries between Portugal and Romainia, and
is controlled from Switzerland. (Also includes some north african
countries via a Gibraltar link, but I doubt that passes a large amount
of energy in relative terms.)

Originally all the eastern (political) european countries were part of
the USSR synchronisation zone, but they've been gradually moving across.
It was an interesting issue when the Berlin Wall came down - the West
was 50Hz +/-0.1Hz, and very short of power, and the East was 50Hz +/-1Hz
(but often a larger drift), and with a surpless of power, but very poluting
power generation.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]