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▲ kazinator a day ago

I'm skeptical that this one minute jitter period is solely attributable to one minute timers in power inverter equipment. It's likely the net scale effect of all cron-like scheduling of actions in everything with a microprocessor. All the long-term scheduling that is done with minute precision (i.e. seconds field is implicitly :00) regardless of its individual period. Like if one device is scheduling at x:17 and x:47 every hour, another one is doing x:06, x:09, x:12, x:15, ... and numerous other combinations, at scale, the common divisor will be one minute. If wall clock time is used, all the devices that are synchronized to a network time will have cron-like scheduling events firing at xx:xx:00 for all values of x.

This type of scheduling should be randomized at the seconds level, perhaps. Unfortunately, it would require a massively coordinated effort across numerous operating system and application stacks.

▲rustyhancock a day ago | parent | next [-]

Perhaps easier, now it's identified it can be anticipated.

Like TV pickup, where advert breaks in television cause surges in power demand.

The classic example is everyone making a cup of tea at the same time during the World Cup half time break.

Something as common as predictable as every minute should be simple to model in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup

▲DerDerDaIst 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The classic example is everyone making a cup of tea at the same time during the World Cup half time break.

Are we talking soccer? I can't even imagine the british drinking tea while watching :)

▲squidmaster 8 hours ago | parent [-]

[dead]

▲podocarp 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What's most fascinating about that wiki page is that claim that mass coordinated shut offs of lights etc can cause more co2 to be released.

▲zokier a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I'm skeptical that this one minute jitter period is solely attributable to one minute timers in power inverter equipment. It's likely the net scale effect of all cron-like scheduling of actions in everything with a microprocessor

The article says as much:

> The identified synchronization mechanism is not specific to UPSs or battery systems, but reflects a general property of digitally controlled devices operating with external timing signals or periodic software routines

▲veunes 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The common divisor argument makes sense, although I'd expect the actual power impact to depend heavily on what those scheduled tasks are doing