AC frequency - does it matter?

[OBMG74]

From USA Today:
Electric clocks keep time based on the usually stable and precise pulses of the electric current that powers them. In the U.S., that's 60 hertz (cycles per second). In the past, regulators required power companies to immediately correct the rate if it slipped off the mark. But that precision is expensive to maintain, so last year, the correction part was quietly eliminated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Full article here:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/mone...change-power-grid-maintenance-rule/619864002/

This sort of thing along with the talk of cutting WWV funding late last year just drives me crazy.
Standards are put in place for good reason.

 

[AdamAnt316]

From USA Today:
Electric clocks keep time based on the usually stable and precise pulses of the electric current that powers them. In the U.S., that's 60 hertz (cycles per second). In the past, regulators required power companies to immediately correct the rate if it slipped off the mark. But that precision is expensive to maintain, so last year, the correction part was quietly eliminated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Full article here:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/mone...change-power-grid-maintenance-rule/619864002/

This sort of thing along with the talk of cutting WWV funding late last year just drives me crazy.
Standards are put in place for good reason.

I've heard that said standards relaxation was meant to benefit those who back-feed power into the grid from solar or wind-based power systems at their homes or whatnot. Of course, I'm fairly convinced that said relaxation started years before that article was written, at least in my part of the country. I first started noticing discrepancies between WWV and line-synchronous clocks in the early-mid 2000s. It was much the same as it is now. drifting ±10 seconds from 'atomic time' over a period of several days. At first it annoyed me greatly, and I planned to try and figure out a way to track the discrepancies on a daily basis, but eventually lost interest in doing so. To follow up my post from a few days ago, as of this writing, my line-synchronous clocks are one second behind WWV, as according to the time display on my Heathkit Most Accurate Clock. That's a downward swing of ~27 seconds in a bit over three days. Not sure what it means, but it strikes me as rather odd.
-Adam