Hacker News Reader

They still do. See below how the European grid ran a little slow, causing all the oven clocks to fall behind. This was corrected by running the grid slightly faster, to move all the oven clocks forwards again.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/european-grid-di...

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/360328/serbi...

View on HN

Interesting. Completely clueless in this domain.. is the wording of "returning energy back to the system" reflect reality? Is that because I was out of sync or because of the previous unmet demand? Or is this just fundamentally how it all works?

That's exactly how it works! Grid frequency is determined by the speed of all turbines connected to it. They lost a bit of inertia due to energy being taken out of the system (higher demand than supply of power), so they slowed down, the grid frequency lowered and clocks started running behind. To get the frequency back, gotta generate a bit more energy to speed all the turbines back up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com