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BTW: I thought entire western Europe had +/-1% frequency tolerance?

Well, something I know is that we have a 500kV DC line from the czech republic, to avoid frequency hassles. Our PoCos seem to be afraid that the frequency of czech power is less exact than ours, and they don't want to think about synchronization.

Maybe the tolerances have been tightened up in recent years, but the most recent information I've seen for France specifies the frequency range as 49 - 51 Hz (i.e. 2%).

I'm not sure if there are any AC interconnectors into/out of France.

Paul: France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany and Benelux are connected and synchronized. Since France has excess capacity at night, power is exported to Switzerland (which has a lot of hydropower) during the night and imported back during the day. This way the Swiss hydropower dams act as "storages" for the power grid. (I think they even pump water back into the dams during the night.)

Update: Here is a map of the European synchronized grids:
http://www.centrel.org/europe.html

[This message has been edited by C-H (edited 01-12-2003).]

Sort of off topic, but some electric utilities/regions take frequency control very seriously. GPS satellite frequency/time references are commercially available with 1-ns accuracy.

http://www.arbiter.com/catalog/frames/specs/clock/power_mon/power_mon.php




[This message has been edited by Bjarney (edited 01-12-2003).]

And some take it less seriously. The Russians want to connect to the European grid and sell power, but the rest of Europe doesn't really want to be connected to the Russian grid. It seems Russian frequncy control is too lax. (And we don't want to buy power from leaking nuclear power plant and smoking coal fired power plants...)

A more complete report on: http://europa.eu.int/comm/energy/en/elec_single_market/florence9/presentations/u cte_russia.pdf


A map of the high voltage lines around the Mediterranean. Currently North Africa, Middle East and Turkey are "sort of" synchronized with Western Europe. Two 400 kV AC links exist: Turkey-Bulgaria and Morocco-Spain. Apparently these are small enough not to affect the stability of the European grid in case of disturbances. A Mediterranean Ring is to be built, with full sync. (Now we're talking serious Ring Mains!!!)



[This message has been edited by C-H (edited 01-13-2003).]