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.'"

Comments

Excuse

[DarkOx]

Reads like something from the Bastard Operator From Hell's excuse calendar

Re:Excuse

[oneiros27]

Technically, yes, it was:

It's friday, so I get into work early, before lunch even. The phone rings. Shit!

I turn the page on the excuse sheet. "SOLAR FLARES" stares out at me. I'd better read up on that. Two minutes later I'm ready to answer the phone.

"Hello?" I say.

"WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN, I'VE BEEN TRYING TO GET YOU ALL MORNING?!"

I hate it when they shout at me early in the morning. It always puts me in a bad mood. You know what I mean.

"Ah, yes. Well, there's been some solar activity this morning, it always disrupts electronics..." I say, sweet as a sugar pie.

"Huh? But I could get through to my friends?!"

"Yes, that's entirely possible, solar activity is very unpredictable in it's effects. Why last week, we had some files just dissappear from a guys account while he was working on it!"

"Really?"

"Straight Up! Hey, do you want me to check your account?"

"Yes please, I've got some important stuff in there!"

"Ok, what's your username..."

He tells me. Honestly, it's like shooting a fish in a barrel. Twice. With an Elephant Gun. At point blank range. In the head.

Unfortunately, the excuse doesn't work when your boss also reads BOFH, is a solar physicist, and the project scientist for three the satellites mentioned in these articles.

Getting to be ho-hum....

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Getting to be ho-hum....

[Lunix Nutcase]

My issue is that Slashdot is "breaking" this story 5 days after National Geographic posted it and days after the storms already past yet the story reads like this is still an imminent event.

Cell service, too

[Matt_Bennett]

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.

Re:Cell service, too

[Cyberax]

We're talking about microsecond-accuracy clocks. Even good quartz clocks drift too fast.

There's the same problem in synchronous optic networks - endpoints _must_ be perfectly synchronized or it doesn't work at all. That's why communication companies are the biggest buyers of precise atomic clocks.

The problem is, a lot of endpoints now use simple GPS receivers and not atomic clocks.

Re:Cell service, too

[Matt_Bennett]

Realistically, the accuracy of NTP is in the millisecond range, not close to what you need for CDMA. There is a standard (IEEE1588) that can get you to better than a microsecond, but that requires a specialized hardware PHY. GPS can give you continuous accuracy on the order of hundreds of nano-seconds easily, and it's not a huge expense to get to 10s of nanoseconds.

Re:Cell service, too

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Everything you said is correct, however, in fairness, using a GPS receiver is using an atomic clock (by listening to one) -- the problem arises when your endpoint can't get a signal (say from interference due to solar flares) from said GPS/atomic clock.

Then fix it...

[Arlet]

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.

Re:bright tuesday

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Even better. . .

[dtmos]

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.)

The 1989 Quebec Solar Storm, good reading material

[freaxeh]

I always thought that the 1989 Quebec Solar Storm was a good example of what might occur: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/sun_darkness.html

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.

Re:Not as bad as copper thieves

[CubicleView]

This one seems to have disrupted your work though.

Re:Where the fuck are Minnesota and Wisconsin?

[dtmos]

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.

Re:How do we know the third storm is coming?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Do you have a plan to shield all tha wire?

[dissy]

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.

For the "low" amperage lines that operate under a few thousand amps, they actually do make surge fuses rated for that amperage. They are pretty interesting, using a special mixture of basically sand. At a high enough amperage level, the sand melts into glass and expands destroying the connectivity metal and turning into a non-conductor.

Granted, these are more like fuses than surge suppressors, and need replacing after being 'blown', but they do protect the low end transformers.

For the very long transmission lines at high amperage however, I do not believe there are any solutions in place to handle that type of energy.

Either way, your point stands. What we can do about the problem is very limited, and requires manual intervention with a lot of lead time.