Every Minute, the Power Grid Twitches — and Battery Storage Is to Blame
Mystery of 60-Second Fluctuations in Power Grids Solved
For years, TenneT noticed the European grid frequency dipping briefly every 60 seconds. A team led by Dirk Witthaut at Forschungszentrum Jülich traced the regular spikes to large-scale battery storage systems that check their state of charge at the start of every minute. With no binding standard for these checks, many manufacturers apparently settled on the same 60-second interval, synchronizing consumption worldwide. The fix is simple: randomize the timing. The findings appear in Nature Energy.
It quickly became clear to us that the cause must be something controlled by the clock.