Time warp in Bethel? It's improving thanks to changes in the electrical system

"How did it get late so soon?"

— Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss)

BETHEL — There's this weird thing about time in Bethel. Way out here, 400 miles west of Anchorage and 40 miles from the Bering Sea, in this place of slow-moving seasons where the phrase "time immemorial" pops up in public meetings on fish and wildlife, clock time moves fast.

Or at least it did. Maybe it still will.

All that depends on the mechanisms of the particular clock.

Lenny Welch, Bethel operations manager for the Alaska Village Electric Cooperative (AVEC), said recent improvements to the Bethel electrical system here smooth out the cycling of the electrical current. The change comes as national energy regulators consider abandoning a requirement intended to keep good time as a way to save energy.

New automation here addresses the problem of clocks with electric motors running fast and sometimes slow, Welch said.

But another issue, rooted in elevated voltage levels, will continue to affect the time-keeping ability of some clocks, he said.

None of the quirks matters that much anymore. Most people now keep time with smartphones and computers, unaffected by imbalances in the electricity. But just a few years back, Bethel's time warp was wrapped into life.

"People would start showing up earlier and earlier at places," said Shane Iverson, general manager for public radio station KYUK. "That's how you would notice it yourself. It's time to adjust your clock."

People say all kinds of things about time. It heals, it flies, it stands still. There is never enough of it or maybe it drags.

"There is more to life than simply increasing its speed," Mahatma Gandhi said.

In slow-moving Bethel, time speeds up whether you want it to or not.

Not even Harvey, the invisible rabbit in the old Jimmy Stewart movie by that name, a character who had "overcome not only time and space — but any objections," could stop time here.

The continuing problem seems to affect inexpensive clocks found in many microwaves and stoves, Welch said. In Bethel, voltage is slightly elevated above the standard 120 volts, he said, so that lights don't dim when energy-drawing water pumps kick in. Much of Bethel relies on water delivered by truck, stored in tanks and pumped as needed to sinks, showers and toilets. Clocks timed to run on 120 volts may run fast if plugged into a 125-volt outlet, or run slow if the outlet is just 119 volts, he said.

"A $99 microwave will never keep good time even though the cycles are better," he said.

He has three clocks on his wall at work — two that run off batteries and one that plugs in — to check the timekeeping. On Thursday afternoon, they were close. His microwave oven clock at home, though, was off.

"The electric ones are the ones that start jumping time. Or used to," said Joy Shantz, who works as administrative assistant for the Lower Kuskokwim School District.

Classrooms usually have battery clocks. Class times are "ruled by the bell" anyway, so weren't affected by the Bethel time quirk, she said. "Everybody is synchronized when the bell rings."

AVEC, a nonprofit cooperative, acquired Bethel's electrical utility more than two years ago. Since then, fuel costs have gone down. AVEC doesn't have to pay city sales taxes or federal income taxes. Work is being done to expand the use of recovered heat — what some might call waste heat, AVEC chief executive officer Meera Kohler said at Thursday's Bethel Chamber of Commerce meeting. AVEC is studying where it could build a wind turbine.

And new governors — or regulators — now automate the engine speed of the power plant generators, with the effect of improving the time-keeping of motorized clocks, Welch said. Before technicians began installing the regulators in June, power plant workers in Bethel manually turned the knob to adjust engine speed, a souped-up version of adjusting the throttle on a lawn mower. Workers tried to keep the frequency of the alternating current at the standard of 60 cycles per second. With demand going up and down over the course of a day, manual tweaks couldn't be done quickly enough, Welch said. Even the newly automated system doesn't stay at an even 60Hz, but it's closer.

One outfit that appreciates the recent improvements is Christian radio station KYKD.

Without adjustments, "we were gaining about two seconds per hour, which came out to be almost a minute a day, or five minutes per week," station manager Palmer Bailey said this week at the chamber meeting.

Welch thought the time error was smaller, maybe 1 ½ minutes a week.

To compensate, the station's clocks for years have been corrected every hour automatically through what Bailey described as a time pulse sent from Nenana by satellite.

The station must sync with Salem Radio Network, its Christian news source.

"When we switch after station identification at the top of the hour, boom — we should be hearing the theme music for SRN news, not five seconds into the news, or five seconds before the news starts."

Bailey thanked AVEC for a dramatically lower electricity bill as well as more precise clocks.

The cycling issue became apparent about 12 years ago when Welch was out of work for several months due to complications from back surgery. Other workers took charge of the manual adjustments to the current frequency. But residents reported their clocks were way, way off while Welch was away.

Around the country, a debate is underway over whether power companies need to keep adjusting their 60-cycle alternating current frequency for "time error correction," said Jerry FitzPatrick, leader of the applied electrical metrology group in the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. His group calibrates electric meters for manufacturers and utilities.

As it is, big utilities on the power grid must follow rules to balance power demand and generation and keep the frequency at 60 cycles a second, on average.

"Just so that clocks keep accurate time," FitzPatrick said.

Yet, these days, many clocks are synced to GPS signals or the atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado, famed for its ultra-precision.

Is energy being wasted? It's costly for utilities to crank up generators to balance out the power just for electro-mechanical clocks, FitzPatrick said.

The North American Electric Reliability Corp. has been studying a proposal to drop the requirement, he said. The decision would be up to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is advising regulators to take a close look at how many clocks rely on precise cycling from the power system before giving up on the 60-cyle standard. Are some of those clocks hidden within machinery?

When told about Bethel's experience, FitzPatrick said it might be instructive.

"The fear is that the clocks out there will experience the same thing you used to have. Within a month they could be running 20 minutes fast," FitzPatrick said. "No one really wants to do that experiment because they fear the worst."