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
Hey, as an electric system operator, I can tell you that we were concerned about this event, and it’s a real threat.
What happens with the power grid is different than what happens to satellites. When the mass ejection reaches earth, it bends the Earth’s magnetic field. Then because of Faraday’s law, we wind up with circulating currents in transmission & distribution lines that isn’t useful power. It’s at a very low frequency, so most of our meters can’t even see it (they’re designed for 60 cycles/sec not 1 cycle/6 hours) but it can still be a substantial amount of current.
This rider current adds heat losses to the whole system. One of the most common problems we’d have as a result would be overheating. So a big CME could require us to de-rate equipment, maybe eventually push us into rolling outages.
Anyway, we’re not in peak season, weekends are always low demand, and so is night time (late edit: this time of year, also in my area – might not be elsewhere). If the solar flare had waited until a Monday in July during late afternoon we might have had issues.
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