I thought large solar eruptions or solar storms (not sure proper terminology for most recent event) were expected to cause a fair amount of damage to electrical grids, communication services, and GPS, but I haven’t seen any reports of that. Why?
In: Planetary Science
I’m a reliability coordinator for the western interconnect. It did damage some equipment. You just didn’t hear about it. It didn’t damage any major equipment bc we monitor ground current flows in areas where there’s igneous rock and take that equipment offline prior to the current becoming powerful enough to cause catastrophic failure. We have failsafes and experience in dealing with this type of thing now that didn’t exist 20 or 40 years ago. But equipment absolutely was damaged. The general public just hasn’t heard about it and will not. It also happened on a relatively cool couple of days and on the weekend. Both of those things mean less current flow. If it was a hot Wednesday when it happened… you absolutely would have heard about some of the equipment that was damaged and removed from service due to ground current flows because people would have experience load shed and relays would have tripped additional equipment offline
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