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Power Companies Brace For Solar Storms
Hugh Pickens writes "Three large explosions from the sun over the past few days have prompted U.S. government scientists to caution users of satellite, telecommunications and electric equipment to prepare for possible disruptions over the next few days that could affect communications and GPS satellites, leave thousands without power for weeks to months, and might even produce an aurora visible as far south as Minnesota and Wisconsin. 'The concern is if the electric grid lost a number of transformers during a single storm, replacing them would be difficult and time-consuming,' says Rich Lordan, senior technical executive for power delivery and utilization at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). The largest solar storm in recorded history was in 1859, when communications infrastructure was limited to telegraphs. Some telegraph operators reported electric shocks, papers caught fire, and the Northern Lights appeared as far south as Cuba and Hawaii. The first of the three solar explosions from the sun already passed the Earth on Thursday with little impact and the second is passing the Earth now and 'seems to be stronger.' "We'll have to see what happens over the next few days," says space weather scientist Joseph Kunches. '[The third storm] could exacerbate the disturbance in the Earth's magnetic field caused by the second (storm) or do nothing at all.'"
Reads like something from the Bastard Operator From Hell's excuse calendar
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The frequency and alarm with which these "OMG!!! Solar storm coming!!!" announcements are made, and the almost total lack of anything perceptibly happening, is quickly becoming a boy-who-cried-wolf situation. It's rather like tornado sirens going off just because there's a nasty storm dropping hail... it happens so frequently that everyone just ignores them, and what good is there in an early warning system if people have been conditioned to disregard it?
Cellular service from CDMA providers Sprint could be disrupted as they use GPS trained oscillators to ensure synchronization between towers. Others could be affected as well, but I'm not sure of all that they use for time synchronization. I'd be suprised if they didn't use GPS, as GPS makes an extremely accurate clock very, very, cheap and low power. Sprint uses CDMA which needs decent time synchronization. It is very possible for CDMA to run without a good time reference, but it takes longer (really it's a tradeoff with time, power and hardware) to start up- why a GPS takes some finite amount of time to find your position, for example.
Why are the power companies warning us ? There's nothing we can do. It's their responsibility to keep the grid running, not ours.
If it takes so long to get a replacement transformer, they should have ordered a couple years ago, and kept them as spares.
If anyone actually noticed the date on the article, "Published August 3, 2011" - the solar storms, FYI, were *last week*, and the peak of the impact was last Friday night, and has dropped to pretty much normal since.
Sheesh, if you're gonna panic, at least check something current like spaceweather.com, and not panic over a NatGeo article published about "the coming problem" days after it already came & went, with little impact.
might even produce an aurora visible as far south as Minnesota and Wisconsin
The submission is so old, we can say what really happened. Aurora were visible in the United States as far south as Utah, Colorado, and Nebraska. (Tip-'o-the-hat to SpaceWeather.com.)
Some Useful Links.... http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/sun_darkness.html http://www.ips.gov.au/Educational/1/3/12
For all the potential "fire and brimstone" these solar storms have the potential to cause, they still have yet to achieve the level of destruction and disturbance to our power and communications infrastructure as copper scrappers.
I can count at least three incidents this year where I was affected by scrappers removing copper that was in-use (communications and power). I can't think of one instance in my entire life (30 yrs) where a solar storm has caused me a disruption.
No man is an island, But if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie them together, they make a pretty good raft.
In space, some satellites actually tumbled out of control for several hours. NASA's TDRS-1 communication satellite recorded over 250 anomalies as high-energy particles invaded the satellite's sensitive electronics. Even the Space Shuttle Discovery was having its own mysterious problems. A sensor on one of the tanks supplying hydrogen to a fuel cell was showing unusually high pressure readings on March 13. The problem went away just as mysteriously after the solar storm subsided.
http://www.ips.gov.au/Educational/1/3/12
Service restoration took more than nine hours. This can be explained by the fact that some of the essential equipment, particularly on the James Bay transmission network, was made unavailable by the blackout. Generation from isolated stations normally intended for export was repatriated to meet Quebec's needs and the utility purchased electricity from Ontario, New Brunswick and the Alcan and McLaren Systems.
By noon, the entire generating and transmission system was back in service, although 17 percent of Quebec customers were still without electricity. In fact, several distribution-system failures occurred because of the high demand typical of Monday mornings, combined with the jump in heating load after several hours without power.
So... It caused a cascading effect, just like the most recent New York blackout, scary stuff if it occured across even a marginal size of the USA.
If The Sun scares you, why not switch to The New York Times?
This range pretty much includes all Europe (except Portugal/Spain/Italy/Balkans), Russia, Mongolia, and Northern parts of China & Japan.
This is correct, but it's not correct to assume that people in these areas can expect to see an auroral display just because one is visible in Minnesota. Auroral displays are responsive to geomagnetic, not geographic, coordinates, and the geomagnetic coordinates swing south over North America and north over Asia. One would have to be above 60N (geographically) to see an auroral event in Asia visible in Minnesota at 45N.
On Google News, IBT's headlines on the subject are:
Massive Solar Storm Could Cause Catastrophic Nuclear Threat in US
as well as
Severe Solar Storm to Create Global Chaos and Complete Darkness
and
Solar Storm Watch: Could This be Armageddon?
It's not even about "whoever screams the loudest gets the attention" anymore, it's just a loud, hollow mindset, by default. Sheesh.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
It certainly could be shielded - I believe a lot of military hardware is, but it is similar to earthquake proofing buildings in that it is hideously expensive. So without government regulation (evil, evil regulation...), companies that run on profits will certainly not spend the money to protect their systems for an event that might happen once every 100 (?) years. Considering that they aren't able (or willing) to spend the money to improve the infrastructure to deal with 'normal' use (cascading blackouts anyone?)...
And even if they were - to what extend do you need to proof it? A 8 magnitude quake (to extend the earthquake comparison)? 9? 10?
Remember the problem isn't the transformers themselves. They aren't getting hit with enough directly to cause a problem. It is the thousands and thousands of miles of wire having current induced in them, which then goes to the transformers.
If you have a suggestion for how to shield all that, for a cost that is reasonable, well I'm sure they'd love to hear it.
If all they had to do was shield large transformers, well that might be done but it isn't that simple.
In terms of surge suppressors, do you understand the magnitude of what you are talking about? We aren't talking about line voltage, you are talking about things that operate 300,000-800,000 volt range and thousands of amps. That is what the major distribution lines operate at.
Not so easy to put a surge protector on that. I don't even know how you'd design an effective one at that level, much less how much it'd cost.
EM shielding won't help as it's not that the transformers themselves are directly affected ...
The long power lines act as antenna, so it comes in as a surge in the normal input (or feedback from the output). I know it's not cost-effective to re-string every power line with something that's shielded (and that in turn could reduce the transmission ability, as they don't like making power cables more than about 5cm thick, so you minimize wind and ice loads).
So, you'd have to put in some sort of a surge suppressor into the transformer ... which of course adds cost, but also gives you something else that can go wrong ... and for something that only happens once a decade, it might not be worth the potential for extra failures, the possible efficiency loss, etc.
As for circuit breakers ... wasn't that what took out the whole north-east when Ohio lost a section of their grid?
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
This is hurting my brain a little. How do we know a third storm is coming when it's traveling at the speed of light toward us?
The photons from a solar storm (primarily, the x-rays) travel at the speed of light.
What's damaging, though, are the charged particles (primarily protons) emitted by the sun. These do not travel at the speed of light.
So you see it coming before it gets here.
Could these storms have interfered with WiFi? I had a few days during which I could not get my home network to work at all, in spite of maximum 40 foot / 13 meter distances between router and PCs, and trying pretty much every legal WiFi channel available. I'm in northeast Ohio. As of this morning things are gradually returning to almost-normal.
Nonaggression works!
A photon is the basic unit of light and all other electromagnetic radiation (radio waves/etc), it has no mass, and travels at the speed of light. When the Sun produces a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), the key word is "mass" -- on average a CME contains about 1.7 billion tons of matter. Matter cannot travel at the speed of light. So 8 minutes after the CME, the photons arrive and you can observe that there was a CME. But the actual mass usually takes 1 to 5 days to arrive here from the Sun.
FTFS:
'[The third storm] could exacerbate the disturbance in the Earth's magnetic field caused by the second (storm) or do nothing at all.'"
Oh ... is that why my TV is suddenly picking up the ISS.
I figured it was just a new odd run of Big Brother.
I LOVED the episode where they voted the astronaut off the station at the same point the Solar Storm passed through! Gave him super powers he used to swing back and exact his revenge. ... no ... wait ... that was just a troubled fever dream from lasagna too late. So hard to keep track whats "reality" TV.
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