Much of the damage to the power grid can mostly be mitigated by turning off electricity, although this is a difficult thing for power companies and grid operators to do. One issue this article doesn't discuss is the risk to undersea internet cables[0]. Undersea fiberoptic cables need repeaters, these need electricity, so they have very long conductors and it's expected that sea water's conductivity could make induced currents worse. Shutting off power won't necessarily work, because induced currents could be 100x more than the equipment is rated for. Although, global connectivity is still likely to exist.
> Much of the damage to the power grid can mostly be mitigated by turning off electricity
That isn't entirely true.
I guess, in reality, "turning off electricity" can work, if "turning off" means shutting down generation at the same time throughout an entire interconnected grid and physically disconnecting literally every transformer throughout that transmission grid before they're cooked by geomagnetically-induced current (GIC).
Induced DC current alone can heat the windings in high-voltage transformers to the point of catastrophic failure, and that's assuming they can disconnect the AC current already flowing through the windings—if they can't, it heats even faster. This can possibly be mitigated by using a CT or hall sensor combined with a separate winding to cancel out the flux in the transformer's core, but I suspect that kind of work hasn't been done because there's no cost benefit.
Some electricity providers have relaying systems in place meant to protect equipment, but the last time that was tested in real-world conditions (1989, in Québec) they failed to prevent equipment damage.
That says nothing about the transmission lines themselves, most of which are nowhere near protected from GIC, and could either overheat or allow enough DC to flow through smaller pole-mounted transformers , which magnetizes them and dramatically reduces their serviceable life (if not outright destroying them).
In the case of Hydro-Québec, GIC didn't cause equipment damage; their protection systems—the stuff meant to "turn off the electricity"—allowed damage to occur anyway.
Turning the power off would work, but is that feasible? Even if we’d be able to spot the CME, would then have enough time left to shut down the entire power grid?
The time between detection and the CME hitting us would probably be measured in minutes. I don’t think it’s possible to shut down the grid in that timeframe.
The problem is figuring out how big the event is, and how directly it will hit us. So while we have over 17 hours to prepare, there might be some false positives due to our limited prediction skills. And, no matter the real consequences, people have limited patience for large economic disruptions over things that turned out to be nothing.
Even better, if you turn off the electricity and prevent major destruction and nothing happens (other than the power down/up) then you're the one who caused "the problem".
There's no reward for fixing a problem that doesn't happen and that people don't want to believe even exists. Bonus, if other networks are damaged while yours aren't, it must be because you protected your network so you're responsible!
17 hours sounds like a long time, but it's not like there's a big red button and a guy standing by to press it.
So the information chain, starting with the telescope that detects the flare, and then has to work it's way up the food chain, so that sufficient people agree, and take presumably synchronised action, well, good luck with that.
You'd also ideally need a multi-hour warning, planes gotta land etc.
Make no mistake, shutting it down will result in some deaths [1]. And those deaths will be on the news tomorrow (if indeed news still exists.) On the other hand not shutting down will cause more deaths and massive destruction.
[1] think hospitals where the backup power failed, or didn't last long enough. Traffic intersections. Elevators. Water pumps. Airplanes. Trains. Take your pick.
CME are "Coronal Mass Ejection" with mass being the operative word here.
Electromagnetic radiation (electrons photons) can make the trip between
sun and earth in about 8 minute but anything with neutrons or protons
(such as the coronal plasma) takes much longer as in,
a day and a half to several days.
CME are not hard to spot leaving the sun with even with tiny amateur telescopes
(the sun does not require much in the way of light gathering) so even without
the professional scopes (SOHO) with dedicated satellites leading and trailing earth orbit
constantly viewing around the edge of the sun as seen from earth
or being able to acoustically "hear" (if you can call 5 minute pressure waves sound)
the far side of the sun,
it is not conceivable to me we would not be warned a CME was incoming,
doing something about it is another story.
It takes 15-24 hours for CME to arrive at the Earth after solar flare. The particles are much slower than the radiation which arrive immediately. We have pretty good prediction if CME will hit Earth.
Since it is light, the concept of immediacy breaks down, right? Do events outside our light cone exist yet?
Let’s ask the photon how much time has passed between it being created and hitting our eyeballs. I’m sure it will produce a very sensible answer—oh dear, hmm…
I can do a lot in 8 mins. If you had 8 minute warning for an earthquake, what could you do? Luckily, we get more notice than that now for tornadoes, but 8 minutes is enough time to seek shelter. In 8 minutes, there's plenty of time to ctrl-s on everything, and then close apps and shut down computers.
The problem is communicating to everyone when that 8 minutes starts and how much time is left.
It is something we computed. Why? Because there is no way to measure the time it takes for light to get from the sun to the earth. You cannot synchronize a message. There is no "hello". There is no beginning. This is not like firing a starting pistol. We cannot ever know what is happening at the sun with less than 8 minutes of lag. It is a fundamental limit. Even sending a highly robust and extremely precise clock into the sun to measure events, then comparing those events to timelines on earth, would not work. You cannot do it in real time, but even after the fact is pretty much not possible due to relativistic effects.
Even more pedantically, you'd be measuring the round trip time from the earth to a mirror located near the sun and back, but not at the sun. Does there even exist a mirror anywhere in this universe that could survive and float on the "surface" of the sun? Does the sun even have a surface? Is there a laser powerful enough to overcome all of the electromagnetic radiation from the sun such that you could actually discern it's signal? Not pedantically, I stand by my assertion that it cannot be directly measured.
>If you had 8 minute warning for an earthquake, what could you do
That's not how it works. There may be detectable precursors that could actually give warning, but the 8 minutes referenced is the time it takes light from the sun to reach earth. It's immediate in the sense that it is physically impossible to detect that before those 8 minutes have already elapsed and the light is hitting your detectors. You could try to move your detectors closer to the sun to detect earlier, but any signal you can possibly send back to earth goes at the same speed, so it doesn't help.
It's pointless to talk about that 8 minute warning because the speed of light is effectively the speed of causality. There is no way we can signal back faster than that initial wave of radiation hitting us. There is no way to alert us that that 8 minutes is starting because are theoretical fastest communication will still take 8 minutes to get to us.
But we're not worried about that part of things anyway - it's the mass part of the CME that is the issue.
We can, and have, shut off large portions of the grid in seconds.
Take the 2003 blackout. Yes, the whole shut down took 15 minutes (?). But thats because it was a cascading effect that had to travel down the lines. Once the fault was detected by a particular segment of the grid, the relays responded in milliseconds. They have since the 1920s? Add in an "incoming solar flare" fault condition and we can trip the whole grid in seconds and send a start signal to the diesel generators to warm up to bring her back up.
Pretty nifty trick.
Question is why would we? The grid has been undergoing a lot of strengthening against EMPs and flares for decades. Its not obvious to me that a flare can take it out, especially if we shed dumb loads (partial blackout, say data centers) before it hits to give the conductors and transformers head space.
If we had done enough to mitigate EMPs, the nuclear powers of the world wouldn't have space-based nuclear EMPs as the first step of their attack plan. We still do, and so does Russia.
Geomagnetically-induced current is different from the plain-vanilla EMPs anyway—GIC can last for hours.
I don't think there are any space-based EMPs, at least no publicly known ones. There have been and perhaps still are plans to detonate high-yield nuclear weapons at high altitude above enemy territory to cause an EMP, but that is a very different situation from a CME solar storm. We're able to spot a CME hours in advance vs mere minutes for submarine-launched ICBMs, and the latter would only ever be deployed in the opening minutes of an all-out nuclear war, in which the electric grid and all grid-level precautions against solar flares are likely to be irrelevant, because most of its critical components would be vaporized or torn to shreds by attacks on ground targets anyway. Even just forcing the other side to keep burning money on military countermeasures that do work might be worth a few launchers and warheads.
Ish. There seems to be some vocabulary fuckery going on around the term "orbital", most likely due to a poor choice of wording upstream. "Orbital" in the shit-blew-up-outside-the-atmosphere sense EMP strikes are absolutely phase 1A of any large scale nuclear attack and such capabilities are trivially executed by ICBMs with appropriate warhead selection and detonation altitude parameters. "Orbital" in the EMP-weapons-literally-orbiting-the-planet sense violates several international treaties. Given the levels of secrecy required to pull that off for any length of time it seems unlikely but is impossible to rule out entirely.
I fail to understand why we don't do more to make equipment robust to this kind of thing. There's a whole range of problems that this solves looong before we get to general nuclear exchange.
If stuff was shielded, isolated, and grounded better, everything from your phone to your WiFi would work a lot better and have longer range. Wind slapping power lines together wouldn't destroy everything plugged in inside your house and solar flares wouldn't be more than a passing concern. The design changes to affect all of this aren't remotely expensive or difficult, we just don't.
There is no need to shield electronics. The induced currents only cause damage to long conductors, to the electrical grid and to long fiber optic cables.
That's a complicated one, it's still the electronics but they need a particular circuit that can stop short rise time transients. Also, any larger devices probably want to have shielding and ethernet devices will need some extra hardening, we're talking 25+kv/m events here so unless your computer can handle the monitor being at a 25kv differential from the tower you're gonna have a bad time.
It's not very different in terms of amplitude, though rise times for an E1 EMP impulse can supposedly be single digit nanoseconds so equivalent to a >400 MHz impulse. I know from experience that modern electronics can't handle that because I've fried USB ports by operating radio systems in that band, though there are some obvious differences there.
We might easily be unprepared, but that the military tries things that might not work. Military attack is all about trying things that might cripple the enemy and/or increase the cost of an effective defence. So an EMP isn't necessarily because it is expected to do horrific damage. It is just part of a thorough test of an adversaries preparations, making it harder to protect their infrastructure.
> We can, and have, shut off large portions of the grid in seconds.
Speaking from personal experience, this is BS. During a bad wind event, a bunch of lines came down, started a huge forest fire around 10 or 11pm which was heading for a small town with 50-70mph winds. First responders couldn't get in to warn anyone because the downed lines were energized, so they called up the power plant. The whole process to de-energize took hours. There is a kill-switch now, but most power plants apparently can't shut off the juice in a matter of seconds, and they may not even have a plan to do so in an emergency.
Yeah I question if it's something we even could do.
But even if is, it's going to kill and hurt a lot of people. Probably less than setting every electrical device on (half of) the planet on fire or whatever, but good luck convincing people of that when their dad is on dialysis or all their food spoils and they can't get to the store.
I thought it was incredibly difficult to "cold start" a system after such a complete shutdown. You'd prevent infrastructure damage which is fantastic, but the blackout could still last months anyways.
[0]https://ics.uci.edu/~sabdujyo/papers/sigcomm21-cme.pdf