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
I’m not sure but I think what you say “*if your generator is to slow it will be powered by the grid.*” is the answer. If your generator slows down the grid will pull on it and speed it up. If your generator speeds up and tries to push on the grid, the grid will resist and slow it down a little. And together all the generators keep each other in sync. You can see a lab bench example of syncing two generators here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGPCIypib5Q
The European grid is 50 Hz, you can see it flickering on lights or hear it and get close to it by manual faster/slower adjustments, I don’t know what equipment can speed or slow a generator but [Synchroscopes (Wikipedia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchroscope) can measure how in/out of sync two power feeds are, so there must be a way to feed that into the regulation of a generator. The Wikipedia page says they are used for syncrhonising power generators onto a grid and describes basically a human adjusting the settings until the Synchroscope says the new generator is in sync, before connecting them. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s automated nowadays.
One of the problems people consider in the event of a disaster which shuts down a national grid completely is how do you get it started again? Some power stations take power to start them up (e.g. water pumps, coal conveyor belts, control computers, water pumps, etc.) and they all need to come online in sync. In that situation it’s known as a [Black start](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start) and an example is given there – battery to start a diesel generator at a hydro plant, diesel generator runs the control systems and powers some of the valves to start water flowing, water generates power to bring the whole hydro plant online and energise the local grid, a bigger gas, coal or nuclear plant starts up from that and merges into the grid.
> if your generator is to slow it will be powered by the grid
Something like this was happening across Europe for a couple of months in 2018; the European grid is 50Hz between many countries, and industrial devices and microwaves and cookers use that for clock ticks. When Kosovo declared independence from Serbia and Serbia refused to recognise it, that left some problems over who was paying for what power and what infrastructure which ended up dragging the entire European grid down below 50Hz for a sustained time, and putting clocks up to 6 minutes out. – https://www.wired.com/story/clock-slow-europe-electricity-power-serbia-kosovo/
You can see a graph and details of the European power frequency tracked here: https://gridradar.net/en/mains-frequency and here: https://www.mainsfrequency.com/
And you can see really cool electricity maps here! https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
This doesn’t totally answer your question how they are sync’ed, but hopefully it’s relevant and interesting enought to be allowed.
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