Why experts say a solar storm could cause trillions of dollars worth of damage

[Black Phoenix]

https://www.deseret.com/2023/11/14/23960735/what-is-solar-storm

The sun is beginning to enter a more active time for flares that cause solar storms that can impact the Earth.

As Earth enters this new phase, experts have been discussing how these solar storms could affect modern advancements on the planet and even lead to what a team from George Mason University called an “internet apocalypse.”

“The internet has come of age during a time when the sun has been relatively quiet, and now it’s entering a more active time,” Professor Peter Becker of George Mason University told Fox Weather. “It’s the first time in human history that there’s been an intersection of increased solar activity with our dependence on the internet and our global economic dependence on the internet.”

Do I think is going to be as destructive as they say? I will reply the same way as the Y2K previsions of end of the world.

Yes they will be disruptions, yes probably a ton of old satellites orbiting Earth's will be rendered space junk, specially old stuff from the 80s if there is some still around. But the doom and gloom they are trying to portray? No, absolutely not.

[AndyBeez]

A Carrington level event might just clean space of all the Stariinkjunk satellites. Silver lining.

[Marco]

Without a large blackout I don't see how it should affect internet.

Shame we went with AC in the end, HVDC doesn't care about solar storms. It's just a tiny low frequency load modulation for HVDC.

[langwadt]

A Carrington level event might just clean space of all the Stariinkjunk satellites. Silver lining.

what's wrong with starlink?

[Psi]

Without a large blackout I don't see how it should affect internet.

A totally isolated internet connection using fiber might be ok, but it still has a power feed using copper, so HV arcs getting into fiber routers could take them all out.
Some roadside comms cabinets are combined DSL and fiber. The DSL stuff is toast due to the voltage induced in all the copper phone wires and that may kill any connected fiber routers nearby.  The main issue is you can't just install a replacement because everyone else is trying to do the same at the same time. There's just not enough replacements available. So it would take months, maybe years, maybe 10's of years to manufacture enough replacement electronics depending how bad it was.

The carrington event had reports of sparks showering from telegraph machines, shocking operators and setting papers ablaze. The arcs were pretty extreme and had a lot more energy than a static shock.

The carrington event is not even the biggest, just the biggest in recorded history.  There's some evidence in tree rings of an even large one happening around 14300 years ago.

It really just comes down to how big it is, small ones happen all the time and don't case many issues, they're a bit annoying for power stations to deal with but no big issue normally.
However really big ones have the power to fry a lot of modern electronics if those systems are connected to any long conductive wires. 

It's like taking a car ignition coil to your tech.
Its not going to be happy.

[pcprogrammer]

Without a large blackout I don't see how it should affect internet.

It could affect modems and other equipment when the blast is strong enough. It is not just about voltage induced in cables. In early days the telegraph system suffered from it, and it could disrupt a lot more with nowadays electronics.

Think of thunder, when it hits close enough to your house it can destroy every electronic device in your house even when they are not connected to a power outlet or a cable for TV or internet.

[Psi]

If a big one happens, and hits the side of the earth containing most of the worlds high-tech infrastructure, it as the potential to make the recent chip shortage look like a rounding error.
But we're talking about an extreme one, the kind that does not happen very often.

[Andy Chee]

Shame we went with AC in the end, HVDC doesn't care about solar storms. It's just a tiny low frequency load modulation for HVDC.

From what I understand, it’s the length of transmission lines spanning across the country, which act as a resonant antenna tuned to the ELF solar storm. And it’s the high voltage nodes at the ends of the antenna which cause the damage to connected equipment.

As such, a HVDC grid with long distance transmission lines, would still be impacted.

[tom66]

A Carrington level event might just clean space of all the Stariinkjunk satellites. Silver lining.

what's wrong with starlink?

I personally have no objection to it but I think the objections from others are along the lines of:

- It can affect night photography (because the satellites reflect light, SpaceX tried painting them black but it made barely any difference).  It's my understanding that this can be mitigated in long exposures using software that tracks the orbits of the Starlink satellites, but requires post-processing that some may not like.  Also, such issues exist already with satellites, planes, etc.

- Fears of a Kessler cascade, even though such a cascade has only been theorised and never demonstrated as a practical hazard.

- Irrational dislike of Elon Musk (don't get me wrong, he's a class-A dick, at least on social media, but I don't hate the products his engineers work on;  Starlink is one of those).

[Berni]

Without a large blackout I don't see how it should affect internet.

Shame we went with AC in the end, HVDC doesn't care about solar storms. It's just a tiny low frequency load modulation for HVDC.

DC would have the same problem.

The problem is that when the earths magnetic field swings around during the storm it induces a voltage in any long conductor. Sure if your DC circuit was a battery somewhere far away, two closely parallel wires running the distance to power a load on the other side you are technically fine. Both wires get the same voltage induced and your load is still seeing just the battery voltage. Tho with a storm extreme enough and a long enough wire you might get the common mode of the battery or load lifted so high in voltage that is starts arcing over to near by earthed objects.

The power grid however is as the name suggets... a grid. There are many long transmission lines connecting substations together all over the place, this way they can share the load over multiple lines and provide redundancy in case a line is down, they can also build extra lines when a certain route starts running out of capacity. During a solar storm, each line would have a different voltage induced, so this would cause large circulating currents to flow in them, causing circuit breakers to start tripping all over the place. If the storm is large enough the breakers might not be able to interrupt the amount of induced voltage, causing them to arc over and destroy themselves.

A lot of the internet would likely survive tho. All the long distance communication lines tend to be fiber or microwave. The datacenters running it have careful earthing and surge protection to prevent lightning from blowing up the expensive equipment. So the storm would likely blow the heck out of the switchgear at the mains power feed, having it switch to UPS power and then to the diesel generators.

But given the widespead failiure of the power grid, the internet would likely not get to you. If you get your internet over the phone line or coax, them your modem is likely on fire right now. If you got fiber then it is likely a repeater or multiplexer somewhere might have died, cellular networks might hold up for a bit until the UPSes in the cell towers run out of power.

[wraper]

A Carrington level event might just clean space of all the Stariinkjunk satellites. Silver lining.

The first satellites that get destroyed will be geostationary satellites  . And as a byproduct of being in geostationary orbit, satellites that lost control will stay there forever as a space junk rather than naturally deorbit in a relatively short time period.

[Dan123456]

I reckon we would be pretty screwed as a species in our current form if we did get directly hit by a big solar flare (I.e. something equivalent to the Carrington Event).

We had one of our telcos go down for not even a day here in Aus recently and just that caused major havoc.

Can you imagine if all the satellites and even a good chunk of anything electronic got fried? Good bye banking, communication, logistics (including food and vital supplies - plus probably a lot of the trucks and cars used to transport it)… it would be an absolute nightmare and there would be no quick fix!

May not be world ending but would definitely cause a lot of deaths and would probably take us years to recover I reckon.

[rteodor]

During a solar storm, each line would have a different voltage induced, so this would cause large circulating currents to flow in them, causing circuit breakers to start tripping all over the place. If the storm is large enough the breakers might not be able to interrupt the amount of induced voltage, causing them to arc over and destroy themselves.

Would an early warning system help ? So that many circuit breakers would be activated in advance and the lines grounded in as many points as possible ?

[Dan123456]

A Carrington level event might just clean space of all the Stariinkjunk satellites. Silver lining.

what's wrong with starlink?

- Irrational dislike of Elon Musk (don't get me wrong, he's a class-A dick, at least on social media, but I don't hate the products his engineers work on;  Starlink is one of those).

Indeed  I despise Musk as have always thought that he is a liar, a con man and an absolute pile of shit of a human being but I do respect and feel sorry for all the workers at his companies!

If he didn’t force them to implement his terrible ideas into their products and just left them to do their jobs I bet SpaceX would be much further along and Tesla could have stayed a leader in electric cars 

[Marco]

The problem is that when the earths magnetic field swings around during the storm it induces a voltage in any long conductor.

Varying the current running in the HVDC wire induces a magnetic field swing too. From the generator's point of view it just adds or subtracts from the load to maintain the same voltage and it ain't much.

If it was inducing gigawatts of power into the circuit, even small lengths of wire would be blowing stuff up. It obviously doesn't. The problem with AC is that for very low frequencies the impedance of the roundtrip circuit is very low, so even small amounts of power can induce large currents and drive the transformer into saturation, HVDC doesn't have frequency dependent impedance.

[wraper]

If he didn’t force them to implement his terrible ideas into their products and just left them to do their jobs I bet SpaceX would be much further along and Tesla could have stayed a leader in electric cars 

Like Blue Origin which so far have shown nothing more than a tiny dick rocket that cannot even reach an orbit despite much better funding? As of Tesla, who then is the leader in electric cars in your opinion?
EDIT: If you think BYD, so far nope in numbers of BEV produced, also look at this  As always smoke and mirrors from CCP. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-china-ev-graveyards/

[Berni]

Would an early warning system help ? So that many circuit breakers would be activated in advance and the lines grounded in as many points as possible ?

Well long enough lines might still potentially develop enough voltage to arc over somewhere, or shorting both ends to ground could potentially induce so much current that it damages something. Tho perhaps the solar event would be over before any of the connections overheat and melt, since they are rather big for the high power lines. Would need to do some actual simulations to find out what would really fail.

In either case the power grid would collapse, so you would have to go trough the lengthy process of a cold restart where they slowly sync the power plants back up and gradually pick up the load.

Varying the current running in the HVDC wire induces a magnetic field swing too. From the generator's point of view it just adds or subtracts from the load to maintain the same voltage and it ain't much.

If it was inducing gigawatts of power into the circuit, even small lengths of wire would be blowing stuff up. It obviously doesn't. The problem with AC is that for very low frequencies the impedance of the roundtrip circuit is very low, so even small amounts of power can induce large currents and drive the transformer into saturation, HVDC doesn't have frequency dependent impedance.

It is not practical to have a isolated DC/DC converter at every substation. Most distribution substations are just a glorified "fuse box" at a gigantic scale, switching the various paths while monitoring and protecting them. Transformers are just used to feed smaller substations or costumers from the main grid connections. So you end up with long pieces of wire that are physically connected to each other, as multiple paths connect together they form a large single turn loop of wire that will pick up a huge current going around it from even the smallest changes in magnetic field trough it.  And even if you had DC, such a isolated DC/DC converter would have some sort of limit on the isolation voltage between the sides, the solar storm might induce voltages exceeding its isolation capability and blowing it up. The induced currents wouldn't flow trough the transformer windings, they would flow in the loop areas formed by the wires forming redundant paths that connect the transformer stations.

AC does make a lot of sense on the big scale of power transmission and oldschool iron transformers are incredibly resilient, yes they can saturate too, but that doesn't destroy a transformer. It just makes it draw a massive current for a bit before the fuses blow and disconnect it.

[Marco]

And even if you had DC, such a isolated DC/DC converter would have some sort of limit on the isolation voltage between the sides

Just Earth all low sides, it doesn't matter. A ground loop in a circuit isn't going to burn the earthing straps, it's not a lot of power except to a transformer based system which can saturate. It's the power from the generators which blew up the transformers after they saturated due to current imbalance, not the power of the earth magnetic field flapping in the solar wind. Wouldn't even happen today with automated protection systems, but a large scale blackout and need for a blackstart would be an immense problem regardless.

[langwadt]

https://www.deseret.com/2023/11/14/23960735/what-is-solar-storm

The sun is beginning to enter a more active time for flares that cause solar storms that can impact the Earth.

As Earth enters this new phase, experts have been discussing how these solar storms could affect modern advancements on the planet and even lead to what a team from George Mason University called an “internet apocalypse.”

“The internet has come of age during a time when the sun has been relatively quiet, and now it’s entering a more active time,” Professor Peter Becker of George Mason University told Fox Weather. “It’s the first time in human history that there’s been an intersection of increased solar activity with our dependence on the internet and our global economic dependence on the internet.”

Do I think is going to be as destructive as they say? I will reply the same way as the Y2K previsions of end of the world.

Yes they will be disruptions, yes probably a ton of old satellites orbiting Earth's will be rendered space junk, specially old stuff from the 80s if there is some still around. But the doom and gloom they are trying to portray? No, absolutely not.

the absolutely massive amount of work that went into preventing Y2K is why didn't become doom and gloom 

[SiliconWizard]

Note that it's still looming for 2100, as some still haven't learned the lesson. Some significant amount of software/firmware still uses only 2 decimal digits to store years in dates.

[langwadt]

Note that it's still looming for 2100, as some still haven't learned the lesson. Some significant amount of software/firmware still uses only 2 decimal digits to store years in dates.

there's also going to be some stuff left with 32bit time running out in 2038

[coppercone2]

could nations take advantage of disabled communications ? we should not allow for a solar storm gap.

[SiliconWizard]

Note that it's still looming for 2100, as some still haven't learned the lesson. Some significant amount of software/firmware still uses only 2 decimal digits to store years in dates.

there's also going to be some stuff left with 32bit time running out in 2038

Yes, due to the epoch time stored as 32-bit. 1970+(2^32-1 seconds). Brilliant.

[SiliconWizard]

could nations take advantage of disabled communications ? we should not allow for a solar storm gap.

We should not allow the sun to have storms. How dare he.

[edpalmer42]

I've always thought that in the case of a big solar storm, damage/loss to connected equipment is nothing more than a nuisance compared to damage to the grid.

If the substations and/or generators are destroyed by arcing or thermal overloads our entire civilization could be in jeopardy.  All this equipment is either customized or manufactured upon order.  How long will it take to manufacture thousands of transformers and tens of thousands of high voltage switches and circuit breakers?  What happens to society in the meantime?  We've already seen what happens during an ordinary storm or a power outage that lasts for a day or two.

It doesn't matter if the manufacturers try to stockpile equipment - they can't afford to stockpile enough.  The same applies to the power companies themselves.

I'm hoping that the power companies are planning for this and are installing equipment today to allow them to make the hard decision to shut down the grid when - not if - they get the warning that a large solar storm is going to hit their area in a day or two.

Many years ago I heard about a newly installed multi-megawatt generator that was undergoing initial testing at a large power station.  Somebody made a mistake and the multi-million dollar generator had to be shipped back to Japan for months of repairs.  Multiply that by hundreds or thousands.

Ed