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
I saw a story on farmers GPS units malfunctioning in their John Deere tractors, and read that the GOES 18 weather satellite is currently down due to the solar flares.
Because despite what the doomsayers will tell you, our modern electrical systems are designed to resist such occurrences. People learned lessons from the Carrington Event
On top of everything that has been said here, this solar storm was a baby compared to the Carrington event of 1859, which had estimated solar wind magnetic field strengths of -800 to -1700 nT. The highest I noted during this storm was -60 nT. Even the 1989 geomagnetic storm that collapsed the Quebec power grid was recorded at around -400 to -500 nT. I’m sure we’ll see visible effects if we get a storm of that level again.
Anyone have any vivid dreams lately?
I dont know if it was just coincidence, but a transformer blew up and my neighborhood was out of power and internet for about 8 hours this weekend
It screwed upthe network card on my home PC… I mean it screwed it or the card just randomly and coincidentally went out about 25 mins after the lights were visible in my area. Had to reboot the machine to bring it back up and this motherboard was only a few months old.
I’ve got wireless Internet here. Not sure if that matters.
It actually caused some issues at my job. We run fully autonomous dump trucks and we had a lot of comms issues during it and had to park the fleet up for an hour or two.
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