Kind of self explanatory in the title, but yeah, I’ve been curious about this ever since I read about the Carrington Event and how it would effect us in modern times.
In: Planetary Science
For the most part it will knock out the power grid and anything connected to it, and it could take decades to recover from it.
You can protect a lot of your electronics by just disconnecting them from the power grid, so flipping the breakers in your house for that week. But a large coronal mass ejection like the Carrington event would wreck havoc on the power grid’s infrastructure. Basically when you move a magnet near a wire it will produce a current in that wire because of a change in magnetic fields, now you can think of the power grids as a large coil of wire the Carrington event will bend the earths magnetic field enough that it will cause a very large current to be induced in the power grid which will fry most anything connected to it, like transformers.
In America we have enough residential transformers to get some stuff back up and running definitelynot all or even close to a quarter but some, however for larger transformers like at step down stations (substations) those we have some replacements and some mobile transformers that could fill the gap but not enough to cover everyone in a mass event like this. Not only that but generators which are essentially a type of transformer will also break if connected to the power grid.
So now we have no way of generating power and no way of transmitting that power. The big things to get back up and running are going to be industry and power generation, this way we can make the infrastructure we need to fix the power grid but this will take a long time, essentially this will be like boot strapping industry again.
Now then how to protect against this. One of the best ways to protect against this is going to be making the grid more distributed, solar panels for residential houses, residential and rural wind turbines, small hydro, and gas/diesel generators. As long as they are not connected to the grid during the event they should survive, this will allow for small areas where there is power, and they could supplement power to the grid to help for bootstrapping.
Now hopefully we will have enough notice for the relevant agencies to react to atleast save the generators and power plants, and even some of the substations, but usually this will amount to a few days of notice for coronal mass ejections and in the mean time important areas of the economy will lose power, like hospitals, water, and of course power.
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