--- title: Mystery of 60-Second Fluctuations in Power Grids Solved description: Researchers solved a years-long mystery behind a recurring 60-second dip in power grid frequency. A team led by Dirk Witthaut at Forschungszentrum Jülich... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/mystery-of-60-second-fluctuations-in-power-grids-solved-v9lovnb8d twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Mystery of 60-Second Fluctuations in Power Grids Solved | daily.dev og:description: Researchers solved a years-long mystery behind a recurring 60-second dip in power grid frequency. A team led by Dirk Witthaut at Forschungszentrum Jülich... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/mystery-of-60-second-fluctuations-in-power-grids-solved-v9lovnb8d og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/v9lovnB8d.png og:image:alt: Mystery of 60-Second Fluctuations in Power Grids Solved og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Mystery of 60-Second Fluctuations in Power Grids Solved **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 4 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Researchers solved a years-long mystery behind a recurring 60-second dip in power grid frequency. A team led by Dirk Witthaut at Forschungszentrum Jülich traced the cause to large-scale battery storage systems that check their state of charge every minute. The researchers found the effect is not just European but global. In Ireland the amplitude of this 1-minute signal quadrupled between 2016 and 2021. The synchronized spikes make hydroelectric turbines slow down momentarily, which increases wear. Witthaut says that randomizing the timing of battery checks instead of starting them simultaneously would be a simple solution. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### why does grid frequency dip every 60 seconds The dip is caused by large-scale battery storage systems that check their state of charge once per minute, almost all starting at the top of the minute. Because many devices do this simultaneously, it creates a measurable, synchronized spike in electricity consumption. Researchers led by Dirk Witthaut at Forschungszentrum Jülich confirmed this using 80 measurement points at the Living Lab Energy Campus and found the pattern is global, not just European. _Engineers chasing grid stability issues can follow research like this through daily.dev._ ### how much has the 1-minute grid frequency signal grown in Ireland The amplitude of the 1-minute frequency signal in Ireland quadrupled between 2016 and 2021. This growth coincides with data centers using large-scale battery storage, which now account for around a fifth of the country's electricity demand. The synchronized battery state-of-charge checks are believed to drive this periodic disturbance. _Those tracking grid reliability trends can keep up with findings like this on daily.dev._ ### how can the synchronized battery check problem on power grids be fixed Distributing the battery state-of-charge checks randomly instead of having them all start at the same second would solve the problem, according to Dirk Witthaut. Since there are no binding standards for the timing of these checks, most manufacturers apparently defaulted to running them at the start of every minute, creating the synchronized spikes that cause measurable grid frequency dips and turbine wear. _Infrastructure engineers weighing fixes like this can track the research on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 3 discussions and 108 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-11-02). **TL;DR:** Commenters largely treat this as a satisfying, relatable engineering detective story, quickly recognizing the root cause as a classic 'thundering herd' / unsynchronized cron-job problem applied to power grids, with lots of discussion on how software systems already solve this with jitter. **Sentiment:** 20% positive · 65% mixed · 15% skeptical **The case for** - The investigative work to isolate a subtle, global, synchronized signal buried in grid noise over years was seen as impressive detective work. - Many found the parallel to well-known distributed-systems problems (cron thundering herds, request smoothing, systemd timer jitter) satisfying and instructive. - The proposed fix (randomizing check timing) was widely seen as simple, cheap, and already proven in other software domains. **The pushback** - Several questioned why grid engineers/battery manufacturers hadn't anticipated or caught such an obvious synchronized-load pattern sooner, given it's a well-known issue in computing. - Some felt the press release/article was light on technical specifics, such as exact manufacturer or device models responsible. - A few noted frustration that not all systems (e.g. certain cron implementations, vendor firmware) have jitter or randomization built in by default. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Discussion mixes genuine technical appreciation for the root-cause analysis with long tangential threads about cron jitter, grid physics, and even a German-language wordplay detour. **Hottest debate:** Whether this was genuinely difficult to diagnose given the scale and noise of grid-level monitoring, or whether it should have been an obvious thundering-herd problem to catch sooner. **Open questions** - Which specific battery/UPS manufacturers and models are responsible for the synchronized checks, since the press release didn't specify. - Why exactly a brief disconnect/reconnect for a state-of-charge check draws enough power to show up in grid-wide frequency measurements. - Whether regulatory or industry-wide standards will be introduced to mandate jitter in grid-connected battery/storage systems. **Highlights** > The paper has a little more details: "following our communication with the manufacturer, a software update was issued that removed the strict periodicity of the current peaks in one battery block of the investigated UPS system" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-026-02144-0 Given the issue is so widespread (international, affecting pretty much every grid), it's likely that multiple manufacturers use similar approaches. > — [manarth on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50333997) > When you monitor a power line, you don't get a tcpdump showing who's producing and who's consuming the power. You can't just jump straight to the culprit. It's just bulk flows, so when a weird flow shows up, you've got to move up or down the line, past a few producers or consumers, and see if the flow changes. For a subtle effect, that might not even be so clear. Worse, for an effect that's most visible at the medium-voltage transmission level, simply placing a monitor might take weeks. These are planned installations with incredible safety considerations -- you don't just plug in. Finally they found a research campus with a bunch of battery storage systems, AND the ability to install a bunch of monitors, and persuaded them to install dozens of monitoring points. Finally a high-resolution view of the effect allowed them to confirm the behavior. > — [myself248 on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50335979) > When the battery storage systems all temporarily pause providing grid inertia due to the state of charge check they’re performing, grid synchronized spinning mass has to compensate, which slows it down (transferring the kinetic energy to electrical energy), and then is sped back up as battery storage resumes inertia support. Broadly speaking, it’s a collective momentum problem. If part of the system inertia sags, another part needs to step in to compensate for the inertia loss, otherwise you have brownouts and eventually, a blackout. https://neutrino-energy.com/technology/grid-inertia/ > — [toomuchtodo on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50333835) > The effect is apparently small enough that they had to use Fourier analysis over many minutes to see it in the noise. > — [Animats on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50334087) > The Google internal equivalent to cron has a ? placeholder in the scheduling spec syntax letting the scheduler deterministically pick an arbitrary valid value within the field range. So ? 2 ... will pick any minute between 02:00 and 02:59 (and I suspect any second within that minute). The value is derived from a hash of the job definition, so overall this spreads the cron load within the hour. Obviously cron jobs are not all equal in terms of load and duration, and hours are not all equal in terms of usage, but that still helps prevent trivial spikes similar to the one mentioned in the article (disclaimer: I'm not aware of a recent counterfactual experiment proving this, but that seems a fair assumption). > — [nlehuen on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50333458) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50315217) · 220 points · 98 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50323992) · 12 points · 4 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320526) · 9 points · 6 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [One-minute frequency disturbances from synchronization in power systems](https://daily.dev/posts/one-minute-frequency-disturbances-from-synchronization-in-power-systems-gsumb7wft) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [3 Questions: Shedding light on why power grids go dark](https://daily.dev/posts/3-questions-shedding-light-on-why-power-grids-go-dark-bzujwvddn) · MIT News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [How Britain Narrowly Escaped A Grid Blackout In June 2026](https://daily.dev/posts/how-britain-narrowly-escaped-a-grid-blackout-in-june-2026-bfzmt2gza) · Hackaday · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [One fallen power line exposed a growing AI data center problem. Here’s how to fix it.](https://daily.dev/posts/one-fallen-power-line-exposed-a-growing-ai-data-center-problem-here-s-how-to-fix-it--f8fvg87zu) · TechCrunch · 0 upvotes · 1 comments - [Powering AI is an architecture problem](https://daily.dev/posts/powering-ai-is-an-architecture-problem-9spk2bfce) · MIT Technology Review · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/mystery-of-60-second-fluctuations-in-power-grids-solved-v9lovnb8d) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Mystery of 60-Second Fluctuations in Power Grids Solved","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/mystery-of-60-second-fluctuations-in-power-grids-solved-v9lovnb8d","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/mystery-of-60-second-fluctuations-in-power-grids-solved-v9lovnb8d"},"datePublished":"2026-11-02T07:20:17.374Z","dateModified":"2026-11-02T16:21:43.405Z","description":"Researchers solved a years-long mystery behind a recurring 60-second dip in power grid frequency. 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