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.
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.
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.
