Why do our grids show a brief spike in electricity demand every minute? A team led by Dirk Witthaut from Forschungszentrum Jülich has now demonstrated that this is due to regular power checks carried out by large-scale battery storage systems. These findings could help to make our electricity supply more robust, as the team reports in an article published in Nature Energy.
Like the Parkes observatory mystery signals
I don’t think we got one that tracked back to lunchtime specifically, and those tend to be slightly less well aligned or frequent anyway, but the one that was being caused by a freight elevator’s motor was a devil to track down before we knew what it was.
And we may not have found it if the engineer had used the stairs to come back from the basement where the router was. Lazy engineer plus angry motor = DSL died when engineer still present. “It died again! What did you do?” “What did I what now?”