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The Truth About Solar Storms
StartsWithABang (3485481) writes On Wednesday, The Washington Post ran a story about a very large solar flare two years ago that missed Earth, but not by too much. From a scientific point of view, what is it that happens when a solar flare interacts with Earth, and what are the potential dangers to both humans and humanities infrastructure? A very good overview, complete with what you can do — as both an individual and a power company — to minimize the risk and the damage when the big one comes. Unlike asteroids, these events happen every few centuries, and in our age of electronics, would now create a legitimate disaster.
This is one of many things that causes power outages and loss of communications. In the urban areas, in the cities, people take the stability of the system for granted. Out in rural areas we live with the knowledge that the grid goes down on a regular basis and sometimes stays down for weeks. No power. No phone. No cell phone. No internet. No outside source of water, sewer, emergency services, etc. We make do. We live to survive these events. A solar storm could produce a much more significant event. People in urban areas really need to start being more prepared. The history of stability is very short.
If the humanities infrastructure suffers, no doubt there'll be fewer English majors, and more CS majors, so it'll be a good thing, right?
Or did someone mean "humanity's infrastructure"? Yes, I know, "my people don't do editing"....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
What difference, at this point, does it make??!?!
Something between the lines jumps out and bites your arm off. Soltan Gris / London
https://theconversation.com/so...
At least it's not Zombies. In fact, if you can survive the initial purge while a great percentage of survivors fight (and die) over the food & water they can find on the ground, you will stand a pretty good chance of eventually returning to civilized living.
As sad an advantage as this may seem to be, the governors will be working overtime to get back in contact with surviving taxpayers.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I wouldn't sweat the small shit
"And long, electricity-carrying wires spark, start fires and even operate and send signals when there’s no electricity! This even includes, believe it or not, when they aren’t plugged in."
In 1859, the "long, electricity-carrying wires" were telegraph wires, and there was nothing plugged into anyone's wall as suggested by the image in the article. Yes, there were large DC voltages induced in these miles-long wires: that's because they were MILES LONG. The wiring in your house and personal electronics might have a couple of millivolts induced within: something akin to the power induced when you rub your shoes on the carpet and zap them. (There's thousands of volts there: oooooh, I'm scared! NOT!)
If these solar events could induce significant voltages in meter-sized objects, then you'd have a lot to worry about. The human body is very conductive on the inside. But, I don't hear historical reports of people keeling over dead during this Carrington Event, so I'm not particularly worried about my electronics.
If you're really concerned about what's coming into your house from such a solar event, then all you need to do is walk over to the circuit breaker and turn it "OFF". You won't have power for a few hours, but that should keep you safe from any DC voltages above 150 volts.
Honestly people: your chances of being harmed by a lightning strike are much greater than this silliness.
I saw a great documentary on this by Lucasfilms called "Howard the Duck" and I am prepared. Sure, they phonied it up a little bit, but the basics work for solar storms too. My Quackfu is second to no man!
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
If the humanities infrastructure suffers, no doubt there'll be fewer English majors, and more CS majors, so it'll be a good thing, right? Or did someone mean "humanity's infrastructure"?
If we get more CS majors then maybe we can update the voice recognition software to do a better job of picking between phonetically similar words using context.
But you don't have mile-long runs between towers. Induce enough voltage and you'll arc across the insulators to the support structure and ground the surge that way. There's also arc-horns and other things meant to handle breakdown in a more controlled fashion than arcing across the insulator itself.
High induced votlages in open wires are a problem, but they're not the big one.
The biggie is common-mode currents in long high-voltage transmission lines adding a strong DC component to the current in the substation transformer windings - high enough that when the same-direction peak of the AC's cycle adds to it, the core saturates. Then the inductance of the transformer drops to the air-core value and no longer substantially impeeds the current.
The current skyrockets. The resistive heating of the windings (and the force on the wires from the magnetic fields) goes up with the SQUARE of the current. The windings quickly soften, distort, form shorted turns, melt, open, short out to the frame, etc. The transformer is destroyed, or committed to a self-destructive progressive failure, in just a handful of such cycles - too fast for the circuit breakers to save them (even if they DO manage to extinguish the arcs with the substantial DC component to the current.) Even if the transformer doesn't explode and throw molten metal, gigawatt sustained arcs, and burning oil (or burning-hot oil replacement) all over the substation area, it's still dead.
This happens to MANY of the giant transformers in the power grid. Each set of three transformers that has one or more failed members means a high-voltage transmission line that is shut down until the transformer is replaced.
There are essentially no spares - these are built to order. Building one takes weeks, and there are few "production lines" so little parallelism is available. What is destroyed overnight will take years to replace, while each intercity power transmission line is not functioning until the transformers at its end ARE replaced.
The current occurs because the transformers are organized in a "Y" arrangement, and the center of the Y is grounded at each end (to prevent OTHER problems). The transformers have enough extra current handling capacity to avoid saturation from the DC through that center connection to/from ground from ordinary electrical and solar storms - just not a giant one like we get every couple centuries.
The solution is to put a resistor in that ground connection, to limit the DC in the lines (and dissipate the energy it represents). Indeed, a few lines have such resistors already.
But a suitable resistor is a box about the size of one of the transformers. It's very expensive. And it only makes a substantial difference to the operation of the lines in such a once-in-centuries event. So most executives don't spend the money (and get dinged for costing the company millions) to put them in, to prevent a failure mode that hasn't happened in the generations since Tesla and Westinghouse invented the three-phase long-line power grid.
Or at least they don't until the regulators or their stockholders require it. Which means said decision-makers need a little educational push to decide it's worth the cost and get it done.
Thus articles like this. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Their tinfoil will finally come in useful to wrap electronic devices to isolate them from stray fields.
I have a feeling that TFA is talking about the same Solar Storm as http://science.slashdot.org/st...
Please stop posting dupes, folks !
I don't need your stinkin' power. RV in the driveway? Check 100 gallons water? Check. Two generators? Check. Me? Czech.
Don't worry. If it's a legitimate disaster, our society has ways to shut that whole thing down.
At what point do agencies like the FBi, CIA, etc... think the general public will just stop paying attention to them and their demands? These agencies have become such a joke, it is actually hard to take anything they say or do seriously anymore.
I'm not an expert in this field, but I understand that the induced DC from a solar storm isn't as instantaneous as a lightning strike. It takes minutes to develop, which leaves time to disconnect the lines and affected transformers if they are properly monitored. As I understand, the induced DC is something on the order of hundreds of volts, which is much less than the tens of thousands of volts transmitted across ordinary high voltage transmission lines; disconnecting them should not result in arcing problems across the switches. It will result in thousands or millions of people going without power during the storm, but it doesn't have to destroy the electric power infrastructure if it is properly monitored and protected.
Feel free to correct my viewpoint as you may desire.
Bullshit. The biggest problem with solar flares was its negative effect on shortwave communications. Before satellites and numerous transatlantic fiber-optic cables, that was the dominant form of military and civilian communications across large distances.
If WiFi was 30MHz, then yeah, solar flares would seriously disrupt modern communications. Since it's 2.4 or 5GHz, you'll barely notice.
The effects on the electric grid are serious and notable, but we all have to be prepared for power outages that are far more frequent, from far more mundane causes, anyhow, so one extra blackout every century and a half, isn't a good reason to ring the alarm bells.
Yeah, that *might* be a risk, if nobody, anywhere, had surge protectors on their critical electronic devices.
Most consumers don't have super long runs of wire, and those who do overwhelmingly have them properly grounded, due to the much more common risk of lightning, rather than specifically for solar flares.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Slashdot has reached rock bottom with the stories lately.
What all of it?
Yep, all of it.
http://goo.gl/maps/OWORL
Or, the grid operators could monitor space weather information. (Which they do.)
We have multiple satellite systems (ACE, SOHO, STEREO, etc.) that can detect CMEs nearly as soon as they happen. The travel time to earth, even for the Carrington Event was 18 hours.
With an even shorter warning, you can do a lot to minimize damage.
In that time, you can declare nationwide power emergencies, shed load and shut down vulnerable systems.
Yes, it's ugly and takes time to come back up, but it's a lot better than zapping the whole long distance transmission system.
Much of the really critical infrastructure can disconnect and run on internal generators.
Are there places that will get caught by it? Sure. Will it be a major pain in the kiester? Of course. But it'll hardly be the "Collapse of Civilization"(tm).
famous Larry Niven short story about a big solar flare and its effects.
... the induced DC from a solar storm isn't as instantaneous as a lightning strike. It takes minutes to develop, which leaves time to disconnect the lines and affected transformers if they are properly monitored.
But ARE they monitored for DC? It's not a usual problem.
Warnings on the order of minutes might be useful if the transmission line were the only one invoved. Unfortunately, the power grid is a GRID. Lots of multiple, parallel, transmission lines, and many, many, more going elsewhere and often creating loops.
Redundancy is a good thing in most situations. But when you have to drop a high line, and don't drop all the others simultaneously, you shift the load onto those that are still connected. When you're cutting off because you're near the limit - either due to heavy load at the time or because of the DC issue - you can drive the others beyond their limits (or throw things out of sync and add a bunch of "reactive current" to the load) and create a cascading failure. (Indeed, this is how the first Great Northeast Blackout occurred: Three of a set of four high-lines crossing the St. Lawrence Seaway near Niagra tripped out, and the redistributed load put one after another generator above its limits, blowing its protective breakers and making it progressively harder on those remaining.)
Gracefully shutting down the grid is not something you do on a couple minutes' notice, even if you have a plan in place.
As I understand, the induced DC is something on the order of hundreds of volts, which is much less than the tens of thousands of volts transmitted across ordinary high voltage transmission lines; disconnecting them should not result in arcing problems across the switches.
First, the problem with the induced near-DC is not the voltage, but the current. Transformers and transmission lines have as little resistance as possible, because it's pure loss of valuable energy. The magnetizing alternating current (i.e. the part of the AC that's there all the time, not just when there's a load) is also limited by the inductance of the transformers, but that doesn't impede the direct current at all. A couple hundred "DC" (very low frequency - fractional cycle per minute) volts, induced for minutes around the loop, can drive a hysterical amount of current.
Once the transformer is saturated, most of the damage comes, not from the direct current, but from the line power, which ends up dissipating lots of energy in the transformer. Meanwhile, at these voltages and currents, the switches that interrupt the AC are largely dependent on the momentary off time as the cycle reverses to quench the arc. If, say, the event happened when the line was running at about half its rated load, the direct current will be higher than the alternating current, so there will be no off time. This can keep the current flowing even through an open breaker (while dissipating megawats IN the breaker). Interrupting DC is MUCH harder than interrupting AC.
Heck, at these voltages even interrupting AC is hard. (The video is of an interrupter where the jet of arc-suppressing gas failed for one leg.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Thank you. And now I think we agree that under your worst scenario:
1. A few transformers (but probably only one) will be fried if the effects of a solar flare aren't noticed. (Which is unlikely because the sun is being constantly monitored for flare activity.) 2. The safety features in the rest of the grid will automatically shut transmission down if/when an affected transformer fails. (A cascading failure is fine if all you care about is protecting the grid infrastructure.) 3. The voltages induced by the flare (being much lower than the ordinary AC voltages across the transmission lines) won't arc across the open safety switches and/or breakers that have tripped. 4. The entire grid will remain substantially as it was before, but perhaps down for a few hours for most people who are dependent upon the few blown transformers. 5. Civilization will not be coming to an end as suggested elsewhere in this thread.
We can argue about how much DC current will be flowing in the event that a transformer fails. But my point is that once it fails, there are safety features in the grid as it is that will protect it.
how I have missed thee, oh invaluable source of links to unreadable websites.
But ARE they monitored for DC? It's not a usual problem.
I can't comment on the proportion of lines that monitor for this, but quite a few of the bigger lines due monitor DC voltage through the transformer because they already have to deal with the effects of much smaller magnetic storms (or a few setups with a rare fault that can generate DC), and will have it be part of the breaker tripping system. But even without that, as the transformer starts to saturate, they will start tripping AC current limits too.
This problem seems to be easily solvable by installing electronic cut-off switches near the transformers throughout the entire system. These switches could be remotely triggered by some in-band means, at least, such as an pulsing of the electrical current. This would protect homes and businesses as well as the power company infrastructure and it would seem would be a relatively inexpensive, cheap piece of electronics that could be widely deployed throughout the grid. When a solar flare is detected that would hit, the switches would be activated through the signalling. This would throw disconnect switches on each side of the unit. The switches could be turned back on with a pole later on when the event is over. Yes, this would temporarally bring down the electrical grid, but bringing it down for a few hours or days is a heck of a lot less of a problem than it being out for months.
I know the countryside
In the countryside live the animals, good for eating and BBQing and the plants so supermarkets can sell salad as a side to the BBQs
Done by people who either never had to go without electricity for more than 24 hours due to environmental conditions.
OR WORSE - people who went through something like that without learning anything.
Every single thing made by man has multiple fail-safes built in, which have been either designed from the start OR have been evolved into the object through generations of use.
Only it is so obvious to us that those parts should be there, we don't even see them now.
A simple thing like a container for carrying water with you, only couple of decade ago didn't have a built in system which prevents accidental opening and spilling of the contents.
A screw-on cap.
Not so long ago we used cork plugs. And breakable bottles.
Evolution and additional fail-safes.
We've been building civilizations about as long as we've been making knives or bottles.
There are fail-safes upon fail-safes built in.
From education which creates people who know how to fix and make and work things, to society control and guide systems like morality, various allegiances and duties, laws... even religion.
And that's not taking in account simple things like building infrastructure with backups, shielding and hardening - particularly the things that are build to function 24/7, 366 days a year, for at least 40-50 years.
Humans build things that WORK.
Because that is their primary function we build them for. Followed closely by "it needs to keep on working".
Built-in obsolescence had to be invented so we'd keep on spending money.
So we'd have an economy that "keeps on working" once we got it to work.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
True, but only one of those - ACE - provides definitive storm strength and arrival time, by sampling the solar wind directly upstream of Earth for magnetic field & plasma properties (density, speed, and temperature). SOHO and STEREO let you know that something left the sun using imagery and estimate the arrival time. All of those are old NASA satellites long past their design lives, and never intended as reliable weather forcasting assets. The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) will take over for ACE next year.
Grid operators respond by reducing the output of baseload power plants (nuclear, coal, etc.) and bringing up small local generators (e.g. natural gas) to reduce the load on long distance transmission lines and their transformers. That is sufficient for the more common small events. Probably not for events like Carrington and the May 1921 geomagnetic storm, but at least they will be in a position to respond. The big danger would to be blindsided because the government couldn't get their act together enough to fund reliable forecast & warning systems. The worst events can take as little as 18 minutes from a satellite at L1 to Earth.
An alternative way of minimizing the effects of a severe solar storm on the grid would be placing series capacitors on the long AC transmission lines. This is done already to increase power transfer capacity of some lines.
Since the solar flare is visible many hours before CME hits, the utilities should have time to configure the grid for the storm. The oerative word here is "should".
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
I suspect that a wiser society would have a bunch of transformers built and in storage. These days it is not only solar storms that might wreck us. The military apparently has E bombs that wipe out electronics as well as power lies. That means that an enemy will probably also have e bombs at its disposal. One unit is a miniature designed to be used in cop cars that can be aimed at a car that refuses to stop and hit it with a focused wave of power that destroys the cars electronics and brings it to a stop. The device works and hes been demonstrated but needs more work to make it convenient to install in squad cars.
I would be curious to see these capacitors -- they would be gigantic. Do you have a link?
The current best way to make a large EMP, which is what we're looking for, is to burst a large thermonuclear bomb high over the target. That's going to have a whole lot of other consequences, and the people launching it are in real trouble.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Imagine: (Fukushima + Chernobyl) x 1000 x 1000
Maybe we can get the last 1000 down to 10-100 (number of plants), but it will truly suck for the next thousands of years to have them spread all around the globe and failing...
Captcha: bulked
Any component for a high voltage transmission line is going to be gigantic. Google term "power transmission line series capacitors" should get you started.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Well, I guess I learn something new every day. Siemens sells them to power companies: they look like they'd mount on a semi with a flatbed. The installations look like banks of those mounted on a metal framework. It looks like they've installed them into lines at about 20 sites in the world. I have little doubt that would work to stop the DC current from a solar event.
Don't ask me how much an installation costs. (The website didn't have a retail price. :-) )
I first heard about use of series capacitors in an electric power systems class, 1H 1975, so they have been around for quite a while. It would seem to me that the caps should be able to withstand the DC potential set up by a Carrington event.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
The Siemens website described an installation on a 750KV line, so I'm sure you're right.
The current skyrockets...
And all the breakers and other fail safes kick in (I have seem thermal trips on some). The transformer is saved. Even with the last event only *one* large transformer failed and that was because the breakers failed. Oh and it was fixed/replaced routed around in just 9 hours. There was no "wait for a new one on order for weeks".
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
The scifi guy in me thinks that after the singularity, skynet & carbon-based life forms enter a symbiotic relationship, where AI protects the planet & organic life from asteroid strikes; and Organics protect the planet & AI from solar flares and electric storms.