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
It was a big storm but still not big enough to do that. Though there were issues with a number of radio systems here on earth.
It might have in years past.
Major systems have gotten much better in the last 10-20 years against solar weather, and we have a lot more warning now with specialized satellites that sit between the Earth and Sun and give us information about what’s coming.
That said, we still have a long way to go in protecting our electrical grid. And changes are slow because there’s a lot of money involved. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get these needed changes done before something *really* bad comes our way.
no, it was never “expected to” cause any damages or disruptions at all; official reports were that it “might” or “has potential to”…….only the crazies on social media said that it would.
solar storms of this magnitude or greater do carry some risks that are worth talking about; but our technology is also built with protections and redundancies for this exact reason. We knew solar storms like this happen and built infrastructure and spacecraft with a reasonable mitigation strategies
Where some say it wasn’t big enough I say it was prior planning, preparation and engineering work. Like Y2K which had a big potential for problems but turns out to be nothing, like a plane which you never consider the engineering behind it til it fails, same for a bridge. Just because you can’t see the people working these issues, considering them when designing electrical systems, both terrestrial and orbital doesn’t mean they aren’t part of the spec sheets.
The threat of solar storms is generally speaking massively overhyped by people that do not understand either them or modern electrical infrastructure.
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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The people who run power grids understand solar storms and know how to protect against them. At risk components can be disconnected when they’re at risk. That’s really one of the main reasons we invest in solar weather satellites.
There’s a lot of Internet doom about what these things do to electronics, but the reality is that there only dangerous to very long power lines over particular types of rock.
Luckily Earth has a magnetic field that basically deflects all of the stuff that would cause damage, and that’s basically why there is the northern lights. It’s not infinitely strong, maybe one day we will see the kind of damage you are talking about, but not today.
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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