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
Because there’s widely held misunderstandings about what a solar storm will actually do.
If you’re a satellite operator (SpaceX, NASA etc) the CME, when it reaches orbiting satellites has the ability to push them around a bit, like a really windy day when you’re driving your car on the motorway. In general, satellites have little baby rocket engines to correct for their drifting slightly from their assigned positions. They’re normally sufficiently powerful to keep the satellites relative close to where they should be, but at the expense of using up some fuel to do so. Once your satellite’s out of fuel (usually a number of years of normal operations), it’s doomed to drift off somewhere it shouldn’t be (or you de-orbit it to prevent it really going for a wander).
As far as stuff on the ground goes, the effect of a solar storm really depends on the lengths of wires that are connected to your stuff. The solar storm superimposes a very slowly changing (but small) voltage on these wires.
Two things that have long wires are telco stuff (cables between your house and the phone exchange) and mains power distribution (cables between the power station and the substation transformer near your house).
Telco stuff, if it’s the copper cable to your house, usually has 48v DC on the wiring, and a few volts one way or the other is of little importance. Long-distance telco lines now are all fibre optics (non-conductive) so superimposed voltage doesn’t apply.
Where it is a problem is the cables feeding the big transformers on the power grid. They’re intended to only operate on AC (rapidly changing positive and negative) voltage, and the addition of even a tiny amount of DC (or very, very low frequency AC which appears like DC) causes magnetic saturation of the iron core and rapid and significant temperature rise. If you overheat one enough, it will fail in a destructive manner. They’re huge, heavy, costly, not-off-the-shelf items which require a lot of effort to strip out and replace.
Small things (your laptop, your phone) simply aren’t big enough to see a meaningful voltage gradient and so are completely unaffected by what a solar storm can do.
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