Back in 2015 Turkey has been synchronized to the European grid.
Now my question is, how do you synchronize a whole country to another country? Adjusting the voltage is pretty simple by using transformers, but what about the frequency and phase angle? While synchronizing a generator to the grid is just a matter of changing the rpm of the generator, but obviously you can’t do that, in order to change the frequency of the grid, because if your generator is to slow it will be powered by the grid. So how do you synchronize a whole country?
In: Engineering
You essentially do it the same way as if you connect a new set of generators to the grid: carefully adjust the frequency of most of them, very slowly, until it matches the target. The phase angle is particularly simple as it changes when the frequency is even the tiniest bit off.
To adjust the frequency one can add slightly to much or little power, generators then adjust by changing the frequency. We can even see that within a single grid when the burden gets too high, it causes the frequency to decline.
At the moment both frequency and angle match, you connect the two grids. The classical device for this are [Synchroscopes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchroscope), you can find a few nice videos of those on the web. [Here’s a modern variant](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI_07YVS3tY) and this can also be automated.
After connection each grid then drives the other(‘s generators), so their frequency stabilizes further and wipes out remaining discrepancies.
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