Never happen? Hubris. A powerful enough solar storm could wipe out transformers all over the place simultaneously. So even the factory that makes transformers has been crippled. The companies that supply the raw materials to the transformer manufacturers have been crippled.
Communications are down.
Food distribution systems are crippled.
People are panicking.
I don’t see how a carrington level event would be anything other than a threat to civilization as we know it.
Absolute worst case, if every petrol pump was destroyed, every hardware store sellshand pumps for about %50. Each gas station would need half a dozen. Why would that fuck anybody?
From Wikipedia:
I have some experience with electronics, having worked as a EE for 30 years, and I’m inclined to agree with the NERC point of view.
Yes, you could get the gas from the storage tank underground. Of course, financial transactions are going to be difficult. How do you pay for the gas? Is anybody going to accept cash dollars? Who’s even in control to make these decisions? Even if that gets sorted out are refineries going to be able to make more gasoline? What happens when your local gas stations are all out of fuel?
Yeah, you might be able to tool around in your Buick for a while, but that’d be it.
Well, either NERC or Metatech is wrong.
What we know is that the Carrington event wiped out telegraph communications worldwide.
From National Geographic.
“Imagine large cities without power for a week, a month, or a year,” Baker said. “The losses could be $1 to $2 trillion, and the effects could be felt for years.”
Cities would be the first to get back up and running. I would imagine rural re-electrification would come more slowly.
On the positive side, it’s not going to magically kill all of the power generating and distribution equipment. The actual power lines aren’t going to vaporize to plasma, the poles aren’t going to fall down, the actual engines driving the generators will be fine, most of the generator themselves will be undamaged, and so on. Fried transformers and blown fuses are a major economic loss because of the time it would take to replace them, but it’s miles from mad max. Especially since it probably wouldn’t kill every transformer, so you could probably cannibalize parts from some grids to get others running, and rush manufacture replacements, or hopefully find enough replacements in a warehouse somewhere.
Compared to the deprivations faced during, say, ww2, this is minor.
Ironically, since people would come together and work a lot harder in the face of this disaster, it could end up being a net economic positive.
Ugh. The only power distribution systems that would possibly be damaged are those that are powered up at the time the storm hits. That is the point of having warning systems. If you know a major event is on its way, you carefully and in a controlled manner turn the grid off. Once the storm is past you bring it back up. Not trivial, and you may get into trouble blackstarting some areas but no worse than many other major power outages. Being able to control the sequence, and giving everyone good warning, one would hope that there would be no major (life threatening) issues. People might have to find some other ways of entertain themselves, one that don’t involve power, for a day. Curiously, it is amazing what people can find to do in the dark.
You don’t even need to turn the grid off. Just fragmenting it is good enough. As it is now, every power plant contributes to the power supply for a large chunk of the continent, which is good for economies of scale. But if you switch off all of the interconnections (which they can do), you could have each power plant just powering its own neighborhood. It’s less cost-effective, but it would protect all of them from the effects of a storm, and would probably go entirely unnoticed by the consumers. A solar storm can only be catastrophic if it’s unanticipated, which is one of the big reasons we have solar monitoring satellites now.
So is my computer any better off in the basement than on the first or second floor?
If your computer is still hooked up to the grid (and the grid is still hooked up to the grid), then it’s at risk no matter where it is, since the danger to your computer is power surges coming through the wires. If your computer is not hooked up to the grid, it is safe no matter where it is. In either case, basement or attic makes no difference at all.
And, even if the entire grid goes down, every police/fire headquarters, electric company communications center, drinking water and sewage treatment plant, Amazon data warehouse, and probably even most Target Stores, have backup generators sitting around just waiting to be turned on.
Sure, it would be a Big Deal, and huge expensive disruption, with lots of people without residential power for months or even years, but it wouldn’t be complete instant anarchy with nothing above stone age technology.
If we assume suburbia is unpowered for “months or years”, then we have to assume all those emergency generators have “months or years” of fuel already stored on-site.
Or we have to assume that suddenly a new distribution system springs up to ferry diesel fuel from filling stations (which might be central depots, not corner gas stations) in a volume vastly larger than is done today.
Yes, there are certainly fueling services now that top up those tanks. But there’s a huge difference in the quantity needed by say, a Target store, which tests their generator for 10 minutes per month versus them running it 24/7 which is 43,000 minutes per month. IOW, it’s a 4300-fold increment in fuel required.
Nothing scales up 4300x quickly and smoothly. Especially not under disrupted emergency conditions.
My bottom line: An solar flare (or nuclear EMP) may or may not be hugely destructive. There doesn’t seem to be a real scientific consensus. But if it does happen and turns out to be highly destructive, reconstituting normalcy will not be quick or easy. A backup generator is a tiny fig leaf, not an end-to-end solution.
An antenna still resonates when the radio is turned off. Every wire in your home, every trace on a circuit board, every line on a power pole is an antenna and that energy will have to go somewhere.
In Agent Smith’s voice (from the Matrix): What good is a computer when you have no power?
To protect from an EMP type event, it needs to be ideally in a metal box, with no holes and that box must be grounded. Fine copper or stainless mesh may work, copper is a much better conductor than stainless but it would have to be grounded as well.
Yeah, but they are tiny antennas…
The energy that they will pick up from CME, will be negligible.
Right, we’re not talking about nuke-caused EMPs, here. Those are a lot harder to protect against.
A solar storm doesn’t generate AC. At least not in the sense we normally use the term. There is nothing big enough on the planet to resonate with the fields they generate.
The nearest thing we normally see to the effect of a storm is a thunderstorm - lighting strikes cause the same problems as a solar storm, but on a local scale. Big DC pulses along transmission lines cause transformer cores to saturate. Sometimes leading to systems tripping out, and very occasionally damage. A solar storm is like a set of very large very long lasting lightning strikes. It is the physical length of the storm that matters - as it means it can induce massive currents in very long conductors. On a local scale it is much much weaker than a lightning strike. If your equipment survives the average passing thunderstorm it will survive a solar storm.
The storms only last a day odd, so any need to shut down parts of the grid only last a a day or so. So long as you have warning it is coming most people will encounter little more than minor inconvenience.
EMP’s don’t generate AC either… That’s why it’s called a pulse, not a wave.
Not really. This is why I used the phrase “not in the sense we normally use the term”. The problem is that for both long period things like a solar storm, and ultra short events like an EMP, the conventional uses of AC and DC don’t work.
What matters is the rise time of the event. A solar storm may take hours to build in intensity. An EMP pulse’s rise time may be measured in microseconds or even nanoseconds.
So, a little bit of Fourier theory. A pure spike pulse contains energy of every frequency. A theoretically perfect spike isn’t possible in reality, and the slower the edge rises the less high frequency energy it contains. If your pulse rises in one nano-second it contains energy out to giga-Hertz. If it rises in a millisecond it contains energy out to kilo-Hertz.
It isn’t the steady state of an EMP that does the damage to electronic circuits - it is the very fast rise time - that creates energy across a wide band of frequencies - energy that couples with small scale systems. A solar storm does not have such a fast rise time, and it does not produce such energy.
Talking to someone who works at Diablo Canyon Power Plant near Avila Beach was interesting; in the worst case they’ll trip the generators and disconnect the transformers from the grid. Since there are outages about every 18 months for each of the two units (and rarely, the plant tripping off of the grid for all sorts of reasons) taking the units offline for a day or so to avoid damage from a Geo-storm is a no-brainer for them. As opposed to pissing the shareholders and the NRC off by allowing the transformers to burn up and spend 18 months waiting for new ones (spending zillions of dollars for new capital equipment and loosing a gazillion dollars of revenue).
Given now we can get a heads up about solar flares many hours in advanced from satellites designed to do this very thing, this does give utilities some leeway with respect to how one can minimize the damage while ensuring some reliability of power on the national grid.
I’d be a lot more worried about earthquake faults near the plant; but then again, I’m far more worried about my cholesterol levels…