Worse, since plug-in alarm clocks don’t depend on proper toilet flushes to keep accurate time. Just because crystals “can” regulate to within a second a year doesn’t mean every clock design goes to the expense of using such a crystal. They didn’t have to, when it was a given that over time, cumulative cycle counts would always return to normal. Whoever came up with this asinine idea would be kicked out of even the most redneck electrical engineering department in the land (wherever that might be) with straight F’s. Is this intended to be able to accommodate dirt-cheap solar power stations, windmills, and other corner-cutting power generator designs that can’t bother to look to a super-accurate standard like the cesium clock at WWV to keep cumulative cycle counts “going down the middle”?
Umm, no.
First of all there is not, nor will there ever be, any such thing as a "dirt-cheap solar power station," windmill, etc.
Second, no such power station needs to create its own time base, because when there's power on the grid, it already has one: the power on the grid. The phase of the power on the grid is determined by a super-stable time base, but there needs to be (and in fact must be) only one somewhere.
For various physical reasons, phase deviations on the grid from this master must be tolerated, but are not ignored. A grid power dispatch center tries to make up the lost phase, slowly, so that no net phase is lost over a period of a day or so. It does this by commanding key alternators to speed up slightly until the phase is made up. Of course, speeding up an alternator, although very slightly, tends to increase its voltage output, so the alternator controller correspondingly decreases its stator field so as to regulate its power contribution to the grid.
Other 'slave' alternators feed the grid under control of circuits that monitor the grid itself, in order to stay in phase and put the desired amount of power into it.
The new 'green' power sources of solar cells and windmills all generate DC, which is turned into AC by an 'inverter.' Inherent in this inverter design is control circuitry that regulates both the output voltage and phase so as to be appropriate to the grid during all times it is connected; essentially like the 'slave' alternators described above.
The inverter is essentially like the one you buy at the auto store, but scaled up a few orders of magnitude, and with much more sophisticated control circuits. There cannot be an inverter meant to feed the grid that does not have the ability to synchronize with it. The only solar or wind generator that might need a stable time base would be one that was the 'master' of a grid. If we're talking about power grids now in existence, this is not probable.
I grant some provisional plausibility to the idea that the grid may benefit from larger deviations from ideal phase; but I agree that it would be a poor idea to let this go uncorrected, contrary to present practice.
Some people on here are predicting doom, and inventing conspiracies, purely from the prospect of further deviations from ideal line frequency.
Bosch, I say ≤}B^)