DOES ANYBODY REALLY KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS?

Until I read an Associated Press story about the nation’s electric grid, I never knew that, “Since 1930, electric clocks have kept time based on the rate of the electrical current that powers them. If the current slips off its usual rate, clocks run a little fast or slow. Power companies now take steps to correct it and keep the frequency of the current — and the time — as precise as possible.”  So what if that changes?  What time will it really be?

 

AP  obtained a document of a presentation by The North American Electric Reliability Corp, the group that oversees the U.S. power grid, which said they are proposing an experiment that “… would allow more frequency variation than it does now without corrections.” What a minute or do I mean wait a second? If there are not corrections in the rate of the power current, electric clocks won’t be able to keep time accurately.

 

Cell phones, computers, GPS, atomic clocks, U.S. time or Internet time won’t be affected because their information comes from Coordinated Universal Time, the time standard by which the world regulates clocks, a time standard based on International Atomic Time. Basically, atoms not electricity.

 

But clocks that we have in our bedrooms to wake us up or clocks on the oven or coffeemaker could start flashing 12:00, 12:00, 12:00 if the power grid rate of delivery of electricity changes.

 

According to AP, the June 14^th NAERC report said, “East Coast clocks may run as much as 20 minutes fast over a year, but West Coast clocks are only likely to be off by 8 minutes. In Texas, it’s only an expected speedup of 2 minutes.”

Do any of us non-scientists understand this?  No, but sometimes it is just fun to learn something. You never know when you will be at a dinner party and the President of ComEd is sitting next to you. A good ice breaker would be to lean over and ask him if he knows what time it is.