Continuing frequency deviation in the Continental European Power System
The short version of the story is that grid electricity in Europe is produced by rotating the turbines 50 times a second and that&#x27;s where the 50Hz AC electricity comes from.<p>Apparently to match the demand at given instance electricity plants rotate their turbines a bit faster or a bit slower instead of switching a complete plant on and off[edit: this is not exactly right, see the reply below], which results in slight deviations from the 50Hz standard but it is fine as long as it stays between the limits.<p>At the end of the day, as the demand increases and decreases, the average frequency would be 50Hz and engineers took advantage of that fact to create clocks that may not be accurate to the second but accurate on average. How do they do that? They count the change in the electricity and assume that 50 changes are exactly 1 second.<p>Unfortunately, due to political issues in the Balkans, the grid was undersupplied or oversupplied for a prolonged period and this created a deviation from the average of 50Hz and the clocks that depend on this average to be 50Hz also lost accuracy that currently amounts to 6 minutes.