Like how you can fry your electronics if they’re plugged in when the power comes back on from an outage, why can’t we “unplug” everything so to speak?
In: Planetary Science
You can. Turning off the power grid will protect it completely.
Solar flares are not EMP. When a solar flare hits, it generates tiny amounts of DC current in very long power lines. The problem is that the power grid only works on AC current. If any DC at all gets into it, equipment starts malfunctioning and losing efficiency. The malfunctioning equipment then starts heating up because it can’t handle the strain of the AC.
In other words, the energy in the power grid is what causes the damage, not the energy in the solar flare. It is just that the solar flare energy allows the normal power flow to cause the damage. If there is no normal power flowing, there is no damage.
The problem is that shutting down a whole power grid is extremely inconvenient, especially if you have to do it for days. Forecasting of solar flare impact is not very precise and it is not really possible to predict what effect one would have on a power grid in order to shut down selected parts.
Many power companies have installed real time DC monitoring equipment in their power lines. This allows them to monitor early impacts of the solar flare before damage occurs and then shut down selected parts as soon as they start to malfunction but before damage starts.
Even this can be inconvenient. For example, Canada has real time monitoring. The problem is that they get hit so hard by solar flares so often, that repeated automatic shutdowns of parts of the grid became a problem. They ended up installing DC blocker equipment on critical lines which blocks the effect of th solar flares, making those power lines immune to the effect.
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