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Researchers tie 60-second grid frequency dips to synchronized battery checks
TechCrunch reports that a Forschungszentrum Jülich team linked worldwide once-a-minute grid frequency sags to internet-synced UPS and battery state-of-charge checks.
A Forschungszentrum Jülich team has linked tiny, once-a-minute drops in electrical grid frequency that appear at the same time on power systems across countries to synchronized battery and uninterruptible power supply (UPS) checks, TechCrunch reported Sunday1.
TechCrunch said the sags have puzzled operators for years: every 60 seconds, frequency dips slightly, and the pattern shows up in data from Europe, Australia, the United States and Malaysia1. Germany's largest transmission system operator, Tennet Germany, brought the puzzle to physicist Dirk Witthaut, who spent years on investigation and modeling, according to the report1. TechCrunch cited a Nature Energy paper (doi:10.1038/s41560-026-02144-0) as the research1.
Frequency must stay in a narrow band; large oscillations or a wrong operator response can contribute to blackouts, and even smaller sags can stress plant equipment, especially hydropower turbines, TechCrunch said1. Hydropower has historically driven ultra-low frequency oscillations because turbines can resonate, the outlet reported1.
A computer model of hydropower controls on the Scandinavian grid could produce a once-per-minute resonance but not the minute-after-minute persistence of the real signal, TechCrunch said1. The team then looked for a clock-driven load1.
More than 80 power-quality meters on the Jülich campus, sampling every three seconds, recorded a once-a-minute peak on the transformer serving a battery energy storage system used as UPS, according to TechCrunch1. The report said many stationary batteries, from data-center UPS units to grid-scale storage, check state of charge every minute, and internet-connected clocks keep those checks nearly simultaneous, so individually tiny disturbances add up on the wider grid1.
To test UPS as a grid-scale driver, the researchers used operator data from Ireland, TechCrunch said1. Data centers were 18% of Irish electricity load by 2022, each with fleets of UPS devices, and the minute-by-minute frequency drop on that grid rose from 3 millihertz in 2016 to 12 millihertz in 2021, with some later drops above 20 millihertz, the outlet reported1. Ireland's 50 hertz system is built to withstand swings of plus or minus 200 millihertz, though the operator would rather keep them within 100 millihertz, TechCrunch said1.
The team recommends that UPS and grid-battery makers add randomization so devices do not all check charge on the minute, according to TechCrunch1. The researchers also detected periodic power fluctuations in IoT devices such as a smart oven and Raspberry Pi clusters, the report said, and cited a separate study finding that less than 3% of IoT devices run the latest firmware1. TechCrunch said regulators may be asked to act locally while the pattern is global, and that the phenomenon could persist even if the cause is identified1.
