Report says solar storms could mess us up.

[speaker-to-trolls]

Source

Major solar storm could cause lasting damage
17:48 12 January 2009 by David Shiga

Our technologically dependent society could be brought to its knees the next time Earth is walloped by an extreme solar outburst, according to a new report.

Intense outbursts of plasma from the Sun, called coronal mass ejections, can create electromagnetic interference that plays havoc with technology. One nasty blast in 1989 knocked out the power grid in Quebec for several hours.

The effects could get much worse, according to a report by a US National Research Council committee led by Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado in Boulder and based on workshops held in May 2008 in Washington, DC.

The most powerful solar outburst on record happened in 1859. At that time, it merely disrupted telegraph communication. But if it happened today, it could cause lasting damage to electric power grids, with cascading effects on the supply of water, perishable food, medicine and other necessities, the report says.

Damaged transformers, which change the electricity's voltage, could be a particularly big problem. "If a large number of those were taken out, it could take quite a while to replace them," says Baker. "There's not a lot of stock of them, and they have to be built to order."

One recent study suggested the Sun may be on the verge of a decades-long quiet period, during which big outbursts would be less likely (New Scientist, 10 January 2009, p 11). But such predictions are fraught with uncertainty.

Fortunately, there are ways to reduce the risk of such a catastrophe. Relatively cheap modifications to transformer circuits could make them 60 to 70% less vulnerable to solar storm damage, for example, the report says.

and the sources source
This is a problem I've thought about a few times and which it seems we'd do well to keep in mind for the future. Also, this makes me wonder about what problems solar weather would cause for any possible future space habitats. If this could mess with us this thoroughly now, with all our infrastructure safely under thousands of tons of gas and a planetary electromagnetic field, imagine what it'd do to people living in a place thousands of miles away from those defences unless they're buried into the heart of an asteroid.

[Broomstick]

Doooooom! Dooooooom! We're all dooooooomed!

You can actually get a space weather forecast, it's not like governments are unaware of this possibility. The 1989 event was a bit of wake-up call, too.

Would a coronal mass ejection screw some things up? Yep. Would it cause civilization to fall? No.

[Admiral Valdemar]

That depends. A sufficiently strong storm that takes out power grids in the developed world for months would cause anarchy at the very least. Witness the problems of the New York blackout, then multiply the scale in time and area a few hundred times.

[Chardok]

this is a DUH article - but it bears being said - This is why we need wireless/gridless power transmission. Decentralize the grid and bang-a-rang, solar storms = no problemo anymorez. Tell me I'm wrong, I dares ya.

[Broomstick]

That depends. A sufficiently strong storm that takes out power grids in the developed world for months would cause anarchy at the very least. Witness the problems of the New York blackout, then multiply the scale in time and area a few hundred times.

New York blackout? What about the Northeast Blackout of 2003? That affected states from New England to the Great Lakes, and also Ontario, Canada. Granted, that wasn't a solar event but a lightning strike in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it's not like widespread power failures in the industrialized world are unprecedented.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I think that was the same incident, wasn't it? In any case, taking huge swathes of people out of comfort for even a couple of days isn't without precedent. It's the possibility of this happening to whole nations and for potentially months which would seem far less likely to go without incident. After Katrina you can see some people thrive on that chance for social breakdown.

[Sky Captain]

I remember this was showed on Discovery channel perfect disaster series. As I understand solar storm causes large fluctuations in Earth magnetic field which in turn in power grids induces currents strong enough to burn out transformers. If so is`t it possible to solve this problem by adding circuit breakers between the grid and transformers which disconnects transformers from the grid if dangerous power surge is detected.

[Samuel]

I think that was the same incident, wasn't it? In any case, taking huge swathes of people out of comfort for even a couple of days isn't without precedent. It's the possibility of this happening to whole nations and for potentially months which would seem far less likely to go without incident. After Katrina you can see some people thrive on that chance for social breakdown.

Actually didn't New York has two blackouts in modern times? The second resulted in anarchy, but the first was peaceful. I've heard either the social climate or the weather was responsible.

[Sea Skimmer]

Actually didn't New York has two blackouts in modern times? The second resulted in anarchy, but the first was peaceful. I've heard either the social climate or the weather was responsible.

Three I do believe, 1965, 1977 and 2003. The first was caused by bad relays, 1977 was a lighting strike combined with a bad breaker, and 2003 was high tension lines hitting trees. In each case major power lines were lost and caused a cascade of failures as load was shunted onto other lines which could not handle it. This was aggravated by other technical problems, but fundamentally, it’s just what’s supposed to happen. The danger of major damage to power lines and transformers cannot be risked, so they just have to shutdown if bad shit happens. If we lost a couple hundred transformers it could take a year to replace them all, if we lost thousands we’d just be fucked for a good long time. A US government panel recommended establishing a national transformer stockpile a while ago, but the plan has not been funded.

The cascading failures are halted by power companies physically isolating the affected portion of the grid so it is no longer a burden. This has to be done in a matter of seconds, minutes at best. During the 2003 blackout my area, Philadelphia was completely unaffected because our power company acted quickly to isolate itself for example, while almost everyone around us was out of luck.

Everything is made worse by the fact that while the US has a somewhat interconnected power grid, there is no coast to coast national grid (we have three main grids, east coast, west coast and for some bizarre reason, Texas has its own). These grids are linked at a few points, but not with any meaningful capacity, and even within each grid options for shunting loads are limited since the grid already operates as close to its max capacity.

One of the projects Obama may be funding in his infrastructure stimulus plan is the start of a true national grid, which will alleviate this problem with a bunch of new very high voltage power lines. It will theoretically then allow us to have even bigger cascading blackouts then ever before… but also theoretically it should make it much harder for one to occur in the first place. Like the transformer stockpile this is one of those ideas we've known we've needed for a long time, but its damn expensive and rather lacking in obvious results politicians can use to win more votes.

Edit: here we go, the US goverment is so very nice to have a page on the nature of the grid’s divisions. I also checked and apparently right now no lines in the US are higher then about 500kv, the ‘national grid’ plan would use 1mv lines
http://www.eere.energy.gov/de/us_power_grids.html

[Broomstick]

I think that was the same incident, wasn't it?

Not exactly. There have been two blackouts that affected mostly just New York City. The one in 2003 affected MANY more people and cities, something like 30 million people.

Observe:

This is a satellite photo from the night of the blackout. As you can see, quite a bit of real estate is dark.

In any case, taking huge swathes of people out of comfort for even a couple of days isn't without precedent. It's the possibility of this happening to whole nations and for potentially months which would seem far less likely to go without incident. After Katrina you can see some people thrive on that chance for social breakdown.

And yet, during the second New York City blackout, and during the 2003 Blackout, people remained relatively calm, there were no riots, no outbreaks of violence, etc. Neighbors came over to check on my parents, and to offer assistance to my ill, elderly mother (dad later in the afternoon got in the car and drove west until he saw a hotel with the light on - mom can't tolerate heat very long and it was the height of summer).

So, yes, there could be massive civil unrest. There might also be massive civil cooperation. A lot depends on what else is going on. A blackout in summer is largely an inconvenience. If it hit where I live now - well, it would be life-threatening even to the healthy because our winters are no joke.

[ArmorPierce]

I think that was the same incident, wasn't it? In any case, taking huge swathes of people out of comfort for even a couple of days isn't without precedent. It's the possibility of this happening to whole nations and for potentially months which would seem far less likely to go without incident. After Katrina you can see some people thrive on that chance for social breakdown.

It was not. New york black out was in 1977. The northeast blackout of 2003 ran longer than the new york black out by 1 or 2 days. The overall looting and vandalism was a fraction of the prior blackout as well. From my personal account, people were actually acting really civilized. Everyone was outside, making barbecues and such. It was excruciatingly hot.

[Admiral Valdemar]

There's some confusion. I was referring to the 2k3 event originally. The previous events slipped my mind entirely, but they bear thinking about given the US sorely needs to upgrade the ageing parts of the grid. More modern systems would be better for efficiency and general robustness, as well as avoiding the biggest problems during a solar storm.

[Broomstick]

Ya, there's only the hitch that for the US to upgrade the grid it would be the equivalent of Europe updating its grid - you're looking at a LOT of territory. Keep in mind, too, that it's spotty - utilities are typically locally owned and maintained so one community will have good, modern equipment and the community next to it will have aging crap. There is not and never has been a consistent policy or equipment list across the entire grid.

[General Zod]

This is a satellite photo from the night of the blackout. As you can see, quite a bit of real estate is dark.

Uh, actually it's not. I just did a google search on the satellite name out of curiosity and I found this interesting little tidbit.

Origins: Although the great blackout which struck the northeastern United States and Canada on the afternoon of 14 August 2003 and lasted well into the next day darkened many large North American cities (Cleveland, Detroit, Toronto, Ottawa, New York), it didn't produce nearly as total a zone of blackness as depicted in the image shown above. Artificial light was still quite visible throughout many parts of the northeastern region, as shown in the photograph below:

Blackout

Genuine satellite images processed by the Air Force Weather Agency and available on the web site the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) show the extent of the blacked-out area at 7 hours after the start of the blackout and a comparative shot 20 hours before the initial power failure.

The original picture is a composite image of nighttime North America which someone has manipulated with an editing program to darken the northeastern area. Reasons why this is obviously so include the following:

* Pictures such as the one displayed above are not simple snapshots; they are composite images formed from multiple pictures taken by a variety of satellites at different times. If the image above were actually a photograph (rather than a composite image) taken at 11:15 Eastern Time, then much of North American would be obscured by clouds, the western portion of the continent would still be bathed by at least partial sunlight at the time of the photo, and the Earth's curvature would be noticeable in the picture.

* There is no such satellite as the "ISAT GeoStar 45."

* Satellite images are usually date-stamped with times corresponding to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) rather than a particular local time zone. Even if Eastern Time were being used for date-stamping purposes by whatever agency processed this image, in August nearly all of the eastern U.S. and Canada is on Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) rather than Eastern Standard Time (EST).

[Broomstick]

This is a satellite photo from the night of the blackout. As you can see, quite a bit of real estate is dark.

Uh, actually it's not. I just did a google search on the satellite name out of curiosity and I found this interesting little tidbit.

Dammit! And most of the images I found on line look just like that one!

I actually have two much better images on my hard drive I got in 2003, but no way to get them up on the web to link to them. Well, I tried. Can someone get a real picture of the blacked out area?

[Adrian Laguna]

There is one thing the Snopes article failed to mention that I noticed immediately. The supposed black-out area is the single darkest land area in the whole map. It is considerably darker than sparsely populated areas such as the Northwest Territories. When compared with places that are known have very few light sources, it actually looks like a black splotch painted unto the picture, rather than the actual results of a black-out.

[General Zod]

This is a satellite photo from the night of the blackout. As you can see, quite a bit of real estate is dark.

Uh, actually it's not. I just did a google search on the satellite name out of curiosity and I found this interesting little tidbit.

Dammit! And most of the images I found on line look just like that one!

I actually have two much better images on my hard drive I got in 2003, but no way to get them up on the web to link to them. Well, I tried. Can someone get a real picture of the blacked out area?

There's links to real pictures of satellite footage on the Snopes page. But you can always use Tinypic or Imageshack if you need an uploader service.

[Broomstick]

No need to upload this time - the Snopes images are the ones I downloaded in 2003

Before and After:

[Enigma]

No need to upload this time - the Snopes images are the ones I downloaded in 2003

Before and After:

A big green smilie sticking out it's tongue is the result of the blackout?

[Broomstick]

I don't get it - what are you saying?

[Sarevok]

I don't get it - what are you saying?

Apparently the site you linked to does not allow direct linking. The images show up as a funny green face.

[Broomstick]

Funny - I can see them just fine on my machine. Anyone else getting the "funny green face"?

I did not anticipate this becoming such a trainwreck...

[General Zod]

Funny - I can see them just fine on my machine. Anyone else getting the "funny green face"?

I did not anticipate this becoming such a trainwreck...

They're showing up now. I suspect it's due to Snopes not liking people hotlinking their images. (They were showing up as green faces on my home pc).

[Simplicius]

I'm still getting the face, so for anyone else who isn't seeing whatever Broomstick posted:





I distinctly remembered being cheered by the news reports of just how civil everyone in NYC remained while the power was out. Shows that power outages alone aren't enough to provoke large-scale unrest or panic even in a city of millions.

Edit: used better images.

[Sky Captain]

Ya, there's only the hitch that for the US to upgrade the grid it would be the equivalent of Europe updating its grid - you're looking at a LOT of territory. Keep in mind, too, that it's spotty - utilities are typically locally owned and maintained so one community will have good, modern equipment and the community next to it will have aging crap. There is not and never has been a consistent policy or equipment list across the entire grid.

That`s completely new to me. Never thought one of the wealthiest countries in the world has so crappy power grid.