China’s power grid now wields a futuristic safeguard against catastrophic collapses – a quantum-powered, all-seeing “diamond ring” capable of detecting grid instability in real time with unprecedented precision.
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The urgency was underscored in April, when sweeping outages paralysed Spain, Portugal and France after grid oscillations severed Spain from Europe’s interconnected network.
Such incidents highlight a critical challenge – as renewables dominate energy transitions, their weather-dependent unpredictability strains traditional monitoring systems.
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Designed by a team from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in collaboration with the State Grid Corporation, China’s “diamond ring” – a toroidal or ring-shaped device embedding nitrogen-vacancy quantum sensors – acts as a high-precision sentinel for power lines.
