Part of the power grid in the USA isn’t even prepared for a chilly week, as we just found out. First rule of infrastructure funding: Don’t actually spend it on infrastructure. Just pocket it as profits and when things fall apart, say we never could have seen this coming or prepared. Isn’t that what everyone does when a bridge falls down, a gas line explodes, or an oil pipe leaks?
> First rule of infrastructure funding: Don’t actually spend it on infrastructure. Just pocket it as profits and when things fall apart, say we never could have seen this coming or prepared.
And the corollary: After things fall apart, ask for a taxpayer bailout.
Still no big anti-corruption coalition. Some of that money will be spent to buy the politicians with lobbying, campaign contributions, media focus on tribal culture wars.
The anti-corruption view that has massive support gets none of that and gets nowhere, at least yet.
This is because most people think that Congress/institutions as a whole are dirty, but ask them about their congressperson and support shoots up significantly.
If we can’t analyze our own choices as potentially contributing to the system, including not voting (which is more of an endorsement of whatever happens rather than a denial of approval), then we cannot move forward.
Is it not? The US doesn't require minimum turnout for elections, so not voting just amplifies the power of the people who actually vote. It is in effect a tacit endorsement, unless you're trying to effect legal or regime change in addition to not voting.
As far as "my vote doesn't matter", this is quite silly considering how the last two elections featured electoral votes won by ever thinner margins, and that even at the presidential level with the highest turnout most people don't vote, to say nothing of state local elections, primaries, etc. https://i.redd.it/p0z5srsw7py51.png
The idea of the internet being completely crippled, submarine cables fried, data centers zapped, backup power gone, is terrifying in itself. Almost every supply chain depends on modern communications. Everything we do is so embedded and dependent on technology losing power would just be scratching the surface of numerous catastrophic disasters. Nuclear power station meltdowns... oof.
It's funny how nuclear power station meltdowns come to mind before hospitals and building heating.
Anyway nuclear plants undergo quite a bit of study and protection against these kinds of events (solar or military/terrorist EMP) and are expected to just shut down safely.
A sensor froze on the turbine island and they shut down as a precautionary measure. As with all the Texas generators of all kinds, they were not robustly winterized.
Famous last words "a reactor melt down isn't possible". Russian disasters aside, the Fukushima meltdown happened because the backup power needed to pump water to keep the core cool as the plant shut down failed.
Now, it's not a far stretch to imagine that a CME event causes a power station shut down, as you describe, but without the generators working to keep the reactor cool as it fully shuts down you have a disaster on your hands.
Furthermore chances of this sort of thing happening are increased when the whole planet is affected.
As for hospitals, lots of things came to mind including hospitals. Just in my mind a nuclear disaster seemed to have a much higher potential for wiping out lives.
Repeaters are powered by a constant direct current passed down the conductor near the centre of the cable, so all repeaters in a cable are in series. Power feed equipment is installed at the terminal stations. Typically both ends share the current generation with one end providing a positive voltage and the other a negative voltage. A virtual earth point exists roughly halfway along the cable under normal operation. The amplifiers or repeaters derive their power from the potential difference across them. The voltage passed down the cable is often anywhere from 3000 to 15,000VDC at a current of up to 1,100mA, with the current increasing with decreasing voltage; the current at 10,000VDC is up to 1,650mA. Hence the total amount of power sent into the cable is often up to 16.5kW.
Would a solar flare induce enough current/voltage on these cable to actually cause a problem? Also by their nature of being under an ocean of conductive salt water wouldn’t there be some form of grounding providing protection?
I’m not an expert but I know enough of the physics I’ll stick my neck out and share some relevant info.
So the effects of salt water are pretty strong, but not impossible to overcome. Extremely Long Wave radio systems are actually in use to provide submerged submarines with signals indicating they need to surface and use higher bandwidth communication channels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines
Now since there’s a level of RF penetration, you’ll get some antenna effects inducing fluctuating currents which will vary along the cable depending on the depth.
On top of that, the largest CME events can and do affect the earths magnetic field, squashing and warping it. This “moves” the earths magnetic field, and electromagnetism 101 is “conductor + magnetic field + one of these two things moving = induced currents”. So the movement of the earths magnetic field will be able to induce current all the way along the cable regardless of depth, unaffected by the seawater.
How significant the induced current and voltage are... and how vulnerable the powered repeaters and head end equipment are... is something I’ll defer to appropriate experts on.
Ted Koppel wrote a book about this subject (of our grid’s vulnerability in general) called “Lights Out”. Because it’s Ted Koppel, he had access to some top level officials for interviews. He came away super concerned that no one had any great answers. It was a pretty good read!
It's not going to win the Nobel Prize in Literature but it was interesting, made you think about how quickly society might fall apart after an EMP attack.
Maybe of interest in this thread, there is some current regulation in the U.S. for handling GMDs that might be induced by a CME, called TPL-007. Power operators have to start collecting data, like magnetic field data, to plan and understand how GICs may affect their grid. The hope is that in the event of another major event like Carrington, power operators would be given enough time to react before damage is done, and avoid the largest consequences.
Disclosure: I work for one of the major providers for GMD/GIC solutions: Computational Physics, Inc.
Could you do me (and others) a favor and not speak in acronyms, not meaning to sound combative, just the 2 seconds of someone passing over your comment they're likely to gloss over whatever you said because of the time it would take to search into the terms and find the correct ones. Thank you!
There is a show on Apple TV+ called "For all mankind," (without spoiling) the latest season has a solar flare event, wonder if this is what prompted this article.
Anyways, it's a really great show and recommend anyone watch it if they are interested in the space race to the moon.
I'm only a few episodes in and I'm really impressed so far. It's probably the best show that no one I know has actually watched. I really enjoy how it feels almost like a documentary at times, but there's still suspense because you don't know which outcomes will diverge from what happened in our reality.
> It's probably the best show that no one I know has actually watched.
I feel the same way about other shows on the platform like Servant and Ted Lasso. Apple TV+ is clearly an underdog in streaming, but the quality is high.
Exactly! Apple TV+ is a sleeping giant. So hooked on Servant. Ted Lasso is one of the best Sitcoms (if that's what this is called) in a long time.
Also don't forget about "See", which I laughed at, at first, but it's actually really good. Defending Jacob, Palmer (movie), and The Morning Show (which I still need to start)
I have recalled related post[1] and relevant NH discussion[2] from 2020. Also just ran across another recent related article [3] and its Reddit discussion [4].
Disclaimer: this is all far outside my wheelhouse.
But IIRC, the task of preparing our grid for another Carrington Event isn’t all that dissimilar from protecting it against an EMP attack, and last I read it was remarkably cheap.
Certainly dramatically cheaper than the F-35 program. I seem to recall it was so cheap Congress could practically pay for it with change found in the couch.
I seem to recall reading it was around $500 million to do in the US, but can’t find where I read that. If true, that seems like a tiny amount for insurance against something like this.
That's the price tag I've seen before as well, which seems like the kind of investment that should have been made a decade ago.
I didn't have the stomach to read more about it, but someone in the DOE(?) in the last administration came up with a plan to improve the grid, but because some portion of that story involved renewable energy (thus lessening the need for coal) it was dropped like a hot potato.
(I could have some portion of that wrong; I simply get too depressed reading about that cesspool.)
If that's the case, why doesn't Congress pass enabling legislation for DOE regulations that would require the power industry to provide the necessary protection and spares within a defined time frame?
I think it would be safe. In the Carrington event the damage was caused by currents induced in long wires.
Of course we have a lot more long wires now so the problems would be correspondingly larger.
I suspect that more damage would be caused by secondary effects than the direct effect of the induced currents. Some power lines would trip out and this would add extra load to other circuits which would trip out even if not affected by the direct effects of coronal mass ejection. In a poorly designed or poorly maintained power distribution system this will cause a cascade of failure that can disable power supplies and communications over a huge area. This sort of cascading failure happened in the US North East in 2003, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003.
The danger from CMEs comes from very very large scale current loops (thousands of miles in perimeter, hundreds of square miles in enclosed area). The issue is a slowly varying but intense change in magnetic flux. We're not talking even as strong as the earth's magnetic field, but over a large encircled area you can get one hell of an EMF. This is bad for power lines. This can also be bad for thousand foot tall AM radio towers and their conductive guywires.
This is not a problem for your cell phone. Your hard drive, even if it is legacy spinning metal in a live laptop disconnected from your wall power will not notice any more than it will notice you setting your credit card down on the palm rest, from some basic order of magnitude on the change in dB/dt.
Faraday cages around anything electronic that you care about. Honestly though, your digital media is going to be the last thing you are going to care about as you are starving to death with no water, heat, power, and armed people roaming the streets looking to take all your provisions.
Your faraday or powered down devices also won't prevent them getting destroyed in a neighbourhood going up in fire either.
I found BluRay-R double or quad sided is truly affordable and gives up to 50-100 GB per disc. Cost is < $2 per disc for 50 GB. Put on the important stuff - photos, docs, notes and skip the overall system backups except once in a while.
Inexpensive bare device writers are available and work just fine sitting bare on your desk with a SATA-USB3 external adapter for the 1X monthly that you run a backup.
How prepared are we for any large scale natural event?
Not prepared at all.
It's costs money to be prepared for things that might not ever happen. No CEO ever got fired for choosing profits, no CEO ever will get fired for choosing profits.
> Probably similar to people living in a cave and refusing to leave it out of fear.
I'm not sure where you're getting that. People living in a cave are far less prepared than we are for pretty much any potential large-scale disaster we already know about (never mind the ones we don't know about yet!). Although you oppose it (that's good!), you seem to be making a classic mistake by thinking that technological stasis or regression is the way to prepare for or protect against disasters. But the vital point is that stasis only protects us against the danger posed by new technologies, while almost certainly condemning us against other inevitable dangers like disease, earthquakes, weather disasters, climate change (man-made or otherwise), meteor impacts, supernovae, and probably lots of unknown things we would never learn about until they hit us.
> thinking that technological stasis or regression is the way to prepare for or protect against disasters.
Well put. Regression is a very real danger in all civilizations and it's inevitable. It is the full time job to actively resist decline.
Reminds me of that plan to intercept an earthbound meteor/asteroid. It sounds absurd - until we hit an existential crisis when one such object is in our trajectory and all the bullshit stops. The sad thing is not IF but When. Could be a year or a million years.
Inexpensive mitigations in this case are things like evaluating and improving transformer designs so they are more resilient to these events, maybe speeding up replacement of some transformers (if they are especially susceptible or very critical) and maybe having a few more spares around.
Of course nothing will make sure we are 100% prepared, but there can be a lot of value in reevaluating and improving things.
> What would life look like if we tried to be 100% prepared for all contingencies?
No one is suggesting that it would make sense to be 100% for all contingencies. But most people wear their seat belts, even though your chances of dying in a Carrington-type event are greater than your chances of dying in a car crash. So it would seem rational to invest at least as much into preventing Carrington-type events as we invest into car safety.
> even though your chances of dying in a Carrington-type event are greater than your chances of dying in a car crash
That can't be right. Or am I misunderstanding something? Your chances of dying in a car crash are higher than dying in a global extinction level disaster. How likely are car crashes with fatalities? How likely are extinction level disasters?
In the US, 0.01% of the population dies in car crashes each year (I didn’t misplace a decimal, it’s actually a fairly rare event).
If there’s a 1% annual chance of a single event where 1% of the population dies all at once, that makes the risk dying of dying in such an event the same as dying in a car crash. If if either of those numbers are higher than 1%, it’s more likely than dying in a car crash. I’m not sure if the comment you responded to is correct about the numbers for this particular risk, just showing how rare extreme events can be important risks.
I think people tend of overrate rare events that only hurt a few people at a time (like shark attacks and lightning strikes) and underrate rare events that hurt a lot of people at once (like pandemics, extreme weather events, or other society-scale disasters).
It hinges massively on how correct the worst-case predictions about impact are. I don't agree with the worst-case predictions but let's entertain them for a moment as a thought experiment: let's say grid power is almost entirely knocked out for a full year in and that leads to mass starvation and a general breakdown in society. 30% of the population dies of either starvation, heat/cold exposure or from th troubles.
If, and it's a big if, that came to pass just once in five hundred years then sure, the chances of dying in such an event turn out to be higher than dying in a car crash. Much higher, at that, so the real figures don't need to be anything like this extreme. Low-frequency high-impact risks can lead to that situation and it's one reason why 'the odds' is often too simplistic to be useful in assessing risk. Humans have a general cognitive blind spot when it comes to assessing this kind of thing.
We're generally terrible at predicting how high-impact, low frequency events will impact us and play out and part of that is that our collective reaction is the most unpredictable element, with potential to multiply or mitigate the impacts to a huge degree in either direction. The current pandemic illustrates that quite well, as does Texas. A CME if/when it hits will open us up to a similar opportunity (or risk) of reacting in a way that either minimizes or intensifies the damage.
> If, and it's a big if, that came to pass just once in five hundred years then sure, the chances of dying in such an event turn out to be higher than dying in a car crash.
Wait, do you mean "if you were involved in a car crash you'd be less likely to die than if you were involved in a CME"?
Is that what you and the OP were saying? If so, I could agree with that, rephrased as "the lethality of a CME is higher than that of a car crash".
But what I was thinking is that CMEs are far less likely, so their lethality doesn't matter as much when predicting what you'll die of. I'm far more likely to be involved in a car crash than in a CME, and since fatal car crashes actually occur, I'm far more likely to die in one than in a CME. Simply because the CME is very, very unlikely to happen.
To rephrase it in terms of things that actually happen in our lifetimes more than once: the lethality of plane crashes is very high: you're very unlikely to survive one. Their lethality is higher than that of car crashes. However, if I were to ask you: "is this person, Jane Random, more likely to die of a car crash or a plane crash?", you'd have to bet on the car crash -- simply because plane crashes occur far less often.
(This is purposefully excluding other, likelier causes of death, of course).
> Wait, do you mean "if you were involved in a car crash you'd be less likely to die than if you were involved in a CME"?
Car crashes kill around 35k Americans per year. Whereas let's say a CME would kill 300M Americans. Even if a CME only happens once every 500 years, your chances of dying in a CME would still be vastly greater than your chances of dying in a car crash, because 35,000 * 500 < 300,000,000.
Now granted a CME might not kill 85% of Americans, but they also happen more like every 100 years, rather than every 500. So yeah, the math should actually be pretty terrifying no matter what assumptions you plug in.
By that logic, no preventive measures should ever be taken. But individual measures have varied costs and returns, and it is worth considering those and selecting measures that make sense.
Would you never screen for cancer because you can use chemotherapy?
Who's suggesting we be 100% prepared for all contingencies?
At a high level, there's a tension between efficiency and resiliency. Profit growth necessarily demands an increase in efficiency, and resiliency necessarily drops.
Texas's power grid is a recent good example of this issue. Texas chose to skip many resiliency measures w/r/t cold temperatures even though they suffered this same issue 10 years ago. The expense, for the businesses, may be lower to rebuild after disasters. But these types of catastrophes often cost people their lives.
It's not incredibly effective for the disasters that happen, no. It still may be the right approach, though.
There are many possible disasters. Being prepared for all of them takes all your time and resources - more than all, in fact. We don't have enough time and resources to prepare for all possible disasters. So we put more effort into preparing for the most likely ones, and sometimes one of the less likely ones gets us. Note that there are more "less likely" scenarios than there are "more likely" ones.
Also note that, after a disaster has occurred, it suddenly seems very probable, which makes it look like we mis-evaluated which risks were likely. On the other hand, sometimes we really do mis-evaluate or under-prepare. It's hard, in advance, to get the balance right. And even if we did, after a disaster we say "yeah, should have seen that one coming".
> Being prepared for all of them takes all your time and resources - more than all, in fact.
Most of the time preparing for most disasters has a few common features to it.
- Food
- Power
- Transportation
- Housing/Shelter
These are common issues with every single possible disaster that can happen. So instead of preparing for "every disaster possible", you need to prepare for the outcome of "every disaster possible."
These four things can reduce lives lost by a significant amount, and as a 21st century society we need to limit our growth to the point where we're keeping up with the potential disaster situation, less we regress a thousand years because we didn't.
So no you're absolutely wrong. You don't need to plan for disasters at this scale. You plan for the outcomes of it.
Many areas have natural water sources that could be used in a serious emergency, but having some potable water on hand and a way to purify more, is pretty easy and inexpensive.
OK, but... take power, for example. Ensuring power after a Carrington Event is completely different from ensuring power after cold weather in Texas. Not completely different because of scale; completely different because the intersection of the solutions is very close to the empty set.
So, while your "consequences" approach has a lot of merit, what you have to do to handle the consequences still depends significantly on what the cause of the problem was. Which brings you back to preparing for multiple scenarios. (I'll give you this, though: It may be fewer scenarios than a cause-based approach.)
The solution to keeping the entire grid powered is very different between the two events, but the solution to keeping hospitals powered is basically the same (diesel backups with huge tanks).
Unless there's extreme weather you don't need to keep the entire grid operational for people to survive, only key infrastructure. So you can cut out those concerns if you have preparations for extreme hot and cold events (with cold being much easier to prepare for)
Carrington Event does have overlap with EMPs, if I understand my physics correctly, so there's at least an overlap with military concerns, which is tied to unlimited budget.
At what point do you allow for any risk management whatsoever? Your arguments against risk management rely on an an event space being large enough such that attempting to prepare for at least some events is absurd. That's the charitable version anyhow since I'm assuming that you actually do want to do risk management, which you discounted out of hand at the beginning just because there are many risks.
Any heuristic to make this more tractable (including ones that eschew having to work with probabilities and thus event space sizes, like the consequence-based approach) works in favor of more prep.
I said that you can't mitigate every possible disaster. It is a logical fallacy to conclude that I meant "do no risk management whatsoever"; that does not at all follow from what I said.
If you do any camping you can easily be prepared for most disasters that happen when it's not winter. Buy some serious sleeping bags and you could be ready for disasters in winter also.
Well, its just that people who made the decision are not paying for all the business disruption, productivity and health damages (including deaths) they caused.
For some reason if you mop the floor without the "wet" sign, you could be liable, but if you let the whole powergrid collapse twice, you bear no fault
Yup. Money is a surprisingly good metric for these things, but it's how you count money that matters. That a power grid can collapse due to a predictable natural event tells us that the accounting we use here is wrong, as it doesn't correctly allocate costs of failure.
You make good points. Please consider, however, that historically those decisions have not been made on relative likelihood, they’ve been made based on who we didn’t care about. New Orleans is a prime example - experts had warned for decades about what would happen if NO were to be hit by a cat 5.
The cost of a company not preparing for a catastrophe is hugely externalized, resulting in a lopsided risk equation that represents a market failure.
In texas, the cost of that market failure can be measured in preventable deaths, none of which private energy companies needed to account for when managing risk.
In the event of a solar flare knocking out national power for months, the cost could be the collapse of modern civilization.
In this scenario you would have to rebuild all of civilization. I do not think modern civilization could survive the loss of the entire electrical grid.
No problem: I'm surrounded by thousands of acres managed by people who can grow food easier and cheaper than me. I can buy a pickup truck of #2 cull carrots for $20 in October. There are mountains of carrots, turnips, beets, parsnips, potatoes etc. left in the fields in the fall, not to mention tons of apples in the orchards. Of course I pay the farmer, but to him it's gravy: we both cut out the middle man for our mutual benefit. You would not believe how little of what you pay at the supermarket, winds up in the farmer's pocket.
Pick'em yourself, stock your root cellar, and you don't have to go to the store for vegetables until summer.
Once you move to the countryside, producing food in small quantities is relatively easy, provided you have the time and resources. The hard part is staying alive until it's time to harvest.
The key is to have food stores that will last for months, and skills to repair and maintain equipment etc.
The real preparation to protect the power grid is fairly simple.
A> Someone has to be authorized to shut down the grid, and willing to do so with no consideration of politics, nor profit, in the hours before the proton flux hits the earth.
B> Everyone has to obey those instructions despite the politics that will inevitably happen as the bean counters attempt to eek out the last drop of profit and push things too far.
C> The Black Start plans that grid operators have, which would restart the grid from everything off, to a fully functional network, have to survive contact with reality.
The Carrington event cause high voltage discharges in telegraph systems. The power grid handles lightning strokes all the time, way more voltage and current all at once.
The real danger is the large low voltage DC currents, the could cause the iron in the core of transformers to become saturated, after which they will stop working as transformers, and simply become very large heaters as there is suddenly no inductance to stop the flow of current through their primary windings. If the system is off, the currents can flow, and no damage will occur.
TL;DR - if the grid is OFF, it is safe... and someone has to have the authority to make that decision with some lead time to allow it to happen in an orderly manner.
The GB network tends to have relatively short lines and has used a GIC resistant transformer design since the 1990s so would probably only lose 1% or so of its transformers in a Carrington event.
Three phase transformers with five limb cores are particularly vulnerable and have not been installed since 1997 on the GB grid.
Yeah. I'm on a tablet - about 60% of the horizontal space is lost to padding and ads/whitespace, and after a minute of reading a video moves in bottom-left with no close button, scooping up 25% of the screen.
Effectively, only 30% (!) of the surface are used for displaying content. What an utter disgrace. And the data volume that is wasted for all of this nonsense...
There's a reason why mobile ads are so much more expensive - it is extremely hard to block them. Chrome and AOSP webkit don't support any kind of adblocking plugins, and editing /etc/hosts requires rooting (which gets ever harder and harder) or weird VPN/fake VPN solutions that have their own massive security and battery life implications.
Pihole works pretty well. I have it set up on a VPN, and the difference between regular internet and no ads internet on mobile is pretty impressive. As a bonus, it blocks ads in native apps too.
I have quite the adblocking setup for my network and browser. Every now and then I get a glimpse of what the bulk of humanity has to endure on websites. I can't believe the difference. Those of us who enjoy an ad free Internet experience a completely different Internet lifestyle.
GIC[0] is a pretty interesting risk factor but popular reporting on it is not great. The posted article has some interesting history on the Carrington event and good details on what CMEs are but falls down on when talking about the risk to the power system.
Example: "The power grids of most countries would be completely and effectively leveled. The top way to mitigate the effects of such a flare would be through increased grounding, so that the large currents that would otherwise flow through grid wires would instead flow directly into the Earth. Every time power companies attempt to do this, however, what winds up happening instead is that the conducting substance used for grounding (such as copper) is stolen for its material value."
Power grids would not be "completely leveled". And "grounding" is not the issue (although yeah, copper theft is a thing). Source[1] states that Hydro-Quebec tripped for over current on long transmission lines. This has nothing to do with inadequate grounding and the solution was to increase the over current settings because the system could handle the induced current. The system was restored in 9 hours. Another event[2] listed resulted in "disturbances" across a large geographic area: a voltage collapse and unusual power flow but not outages.
If the induced current was much higher the system would trip off to protect itself while the GIC lasted. This could take a while to recover from if it was a wide spread outage but we're not talking a civilization ending event like headlines suggest.
What power companies are most concerned about are damaged transformers. Replacement transformers (at transmission levels anyway) are very expensive and have months to years long lead time so if a few get damaged restoration could take a very long time. But we have literature[3][4] that tells us what transformer designs are susceptible to overheating due to GIC. TLDR: Most modern transformers will be fine.
What I'm more concerned about are satellites. I don't know how many satellites would be disabled and are at risk of collision. That sounds bad. What critical things rely on satellite infrastructure? GPS seems like a big one. Power systems use GPS timing, in some cases to enable differential current protection. But usually these systems will default to impedance protection on a loss of GPS signal and at any rate the industry is probably moving to terrestrial time sources because of the risk of GPS spoofing anyway.
I contemplated writing a book on the implications of a CME a few years ago, did some research but didn't have the time.
An example of a critical thing that relies on satellite infrastructure are most gas pump payment processing and operations as I understood it.
Regarding transformers there have been various US government level efforts to have back up Replacement transformers ready to go in storage in the last 20 years, the situation has not improved at all and like much single point of failure infrastructure an over reliance on China.
I find it astounding the Pentagon can spend trillions on 'defence' but we can't scrape together the pocket lint to have
back up offline infrastructure for the power grid ready to go with staffing and processes in place.
Having said this there is a lot of alarmist information arguably primarily driven by page views floating around.
The Sun Kings by Stuart Clark is a terrific read on the historical context of all this, highly recommend
> I find it astounding the Pentagon can spend trillions on 'defence' but we can't scrape together the pocket lint to have back up offline infrastructure for the power grid ready to go with staffing and processes in place.
Astounding yes, but it doesn't surprise me. "Defence", no matter the country, and much of aeronautics/astronautics is mostly a jobs creation program. Just look how immensely widespread Airbus, Boeing and EADS are - their operation spans continents, mandated by the lawmakers who fund their programs. No wonder that SpaceX (and Tesla!) who are to a large-ish part privately funded can be so cheap and agile - they simply don't have to account for logistics of transporting all the stuff and produce as much as they can on-site, without nasty politicians shouting from the sideline they want a return (=jobs).
Transformer production doesn't yield to creating many jobs or wide-spread jobs in contrast, and thus it isn't high up on priority lists of politicians. Also, keeping large amounts of spares isn't ideal because the technology itself can date - oils can go rancid, metal can rust, and especially isolator material can break down.
> Also, keeping large amounts of spares isn't ideal because the technology itself can date - oils can go rancid, metal can rust, and especially isolator material can break down.
Couldn't that be a good source of jobs, though? Warehousing, guarding, inspections, ongoing maintenance and replacement, logistics for all this. I think it could achieve both meaningful job creation (particularly if you threw in some procedural inefficiencies under the guise of "national security") and meaningful impact on real defensibility of a country.
The Carrington event supposedly took 17 hours to hit Earth, wouldn't the best option be to detect the CME and shutdown the grid before hand? I'd rather be without power for 24 hours vs 3 months or longer.
As a consumer what/is there anything we can do to better protect say a 100W mobile solar panel + chargeable battery + phone? Maybe there is not threat?
Though perhaps useless if the phone can't connect to anything...
Headlines sound like "The next Carrington event could fry anything with electronics!" But it's not true. The danger is that a CME can interact with the Earth's magnetic field to induce a large current in the Earth. Long conductors parallel to the Earth are going to experience an induced current due to coupling with the ground. This is what got the telegraph system in trouble in 1859. We had transcontinental lines and primitive protection. Household scale cables aren't long enough to see a problem.
This is why the UK National Grid switched its transformer specs to no longer install three phase five limbed in the 1990s. Those are particularly vulnerable to damage.
> How Prepared Are We for the Next Giant Solar Flare?
As well prepared as we were for the Next Big pandemic. We even have a whole ideological system to shirk responsibility and run unchecked into disaster.
Every nation on this planet should by now have a 3 year basic food reserve, to buffer against failing harvests due to global warming weather events/changes.
Its currently difficult to setup, costs too much, we already did it during the cold-war and yet, soon as the wall fell, it was all slashed and cut. I blame the retirement of politicians who remembered how starvation feels.
First real long-term drought with aquifer failings or a cold-burst pre-harvest, will hit us like a hammer.
Nothing like mass-starvation, to re-calibrate political priorities.
The St. Lawrence Island famine is interesting -- though a very small incident that seems more due to extreme geographical isolation than anything else.
The word "famine" doesn't appear once in the 5000+ word article on the Dust Bowl; and, we know it wasn't really a famine. Poverty-inducing, for sure, but mass starvation is an entirely different type of disaster that is almost always man-made by bad economic policy or war, which I believe is what OP's point was.
As the sibling comment notes, there have been, but one major reason they are not more common is the mysterious extinction of the Rocky Mountain Locust in the late 19th century, leaving North America as the only continent (other than Antarctica) without an extant locust species: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mountain_locust
You are correct, but sadly it won't happen in my opinion.
Why? MBAs have made way too much money advocating Just In Time (JIT) supply chains. To go back on that would make a fair number of "super smart" business people look short-sighted.
I think about 95% of preparing for Tunguska-type events is to be able to see it coming before it hits, so you can get out of the way or hunker down. I'm not sure where we are on that front in general, but the collapse of Arecibo means we've lost our most powerful terrestrial asteroid-tracking radar system.
It's also worth noting that there's a reasonably good chance that we might prevent one or more future Tunguska events by spotting asteroids not right before the collide, but much earlier when they're on a trajectory that will eventually collide with Earth years or centuries in the future.
Most of the earth’s surface is still unpopulated, we’re probably fine assuming the same blast size. Even over a population center, it’s a local problem.
Otoh, there’s a lot of risk from human factors, especially if over a city. With the right placement and timing, it could trigger a nuclear exchange.
> Even over a population center, it’s a local problem.
Local? An impact in any large city with financial or industrial hubs would have global scale effects. NYC, Tokio, Shenzhen, London, Beijing, Shanghai. Throw a rock at any of those and the world will devolve into chaos.
Yeah, but most cities aren't global commerce centers, and the ones that are take up relatively little area compared to the total planet.
We could lose most of the cities on earth with largely local impact. NYC would be a problem, but what about Buffalo? Even most national capitals aren't that important globally.
The best way to prepare for that is to go outside, and enjoy the sunshine. You'll either be killed in the immediate blast, or, far more likely, not have your life be impacted at all.
Before backing up, generate an MD5 checksum file for all the files you are backing up. Then verify the backup by re-calculating and comparing the checksums on the DVD.
This way you can verify the disk at any point in the future.
CME refers to coronal mass ejections[1]. The 1859 Carrington Event is a case where one of these happened[2].
The US power grid is susceptible to some real damage from one of these. It would take a long time to fix.
The US, at least, isn't prepared.
[1] https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena/coronal-mass-ejections
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event