CAST Updates its Best Practices White Paper on Implementing a Terrestrial Timing Solution
ORNL’s CAST team has released their Updated Best Practices document on Implementing a Terrestrial Timing Solution. It provides an overview and guide on the concept of precision time and how an alternative terrestrial timing solution to the Global Positioning System (GPS) can be implemented. A set of recommendations and best practices, derived from research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, across industry, and within the US government are provided to enable implementation of a system of precision timing and synchronization to support resilient operations for the US grid. Precision time is a fundamental necessity for operating the grid today, and it becomes even more important as the grid modernizes with distributed energy resources, microgrids, and precision sensors placed throughout the grid system to ensure failure-resistant operations. The Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), which includes GPS, is currently the primary provider of precision timing. A terrestrial-based system for time delivery and synchronization to augment GPS is outlined in this document. It provides secure time, synchronized with Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), in the event of outages or other interruptions associated with time delivery. Download the Best Practices document here.
