On 06/03/2018 16:05, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 06/03/18 14:57, Chris Green wrote:
Andy Bennet wrote:
On 06/03/2018 13:52, newshound wrote:
On 06/03/2018 13:46, Andy Burns wrote:
They've lost 5 minutes worth of cycles since mid-January

https://www.entsoe.eu/news-events/announcements/announcements-archive/Pages/News/Frequency-deviations-in-Continental-Europe-including-impact-on-electric-clocks-steered-by-frequency.aspx



Seems surprising.

I'm not sure if the continental grid is kept synchronised across all
countries. In the UK, any daily lag is usually fixed overnight.

Good job the interconnctors are DC!

It's exactly *why* they're DC as I understand it, the difficulty of
synchronising our grid with the French grid.

For longer cables DC makes sense for other reasons but for the 25 odd
miles across the channel I'm pretty sure it was the synchronisation
issue that was the reason for using DC.

No, it is losses.


Weren't they originally huge mercury arc rectifiers or is that just my
wierd imagination? :-)

Yes.


Indeed. According to Wikipedia, the largest were rated at 270 MW (the
main French interconnector is 2000 MW

"However, starting about 1975, silicon devices have made mercury-arc
rectifiers largely obsolete, even in HVDC applications. The largest ever
mercury-arc rectifiers, built by English Electric, were rated at 150-kV,
1800 A and were used until 2004 at the Nelson River DC Transmission
System high-voltage DC-power-transmission project."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercur..._Gillam_MB.jpg