We really need to start harden our grid and in all ways prepare for something like this. It will happen again and I suspect we will say: “no one could have predicted it” once it does.
Any electrical circuits unshielded have potential to overload in a solar storm like the Carrington event. Induction from magnetism creates a current even in disconnected circuitry and wires. See: https://www.wired.com/2011/09/0902magnetic-storm-disrupts-te...
Telegraph operators were able to communicate even though disconnected during the event.
With better tooling this kind of status quo will change. Choosing a single worst case for design is a product of manual design processes. With modern computer technology we can run multiple cases easily, so we can now use probabilistic engineering techniques.
In the future it won’t be “this bridge is good for 1 in 100 year storm” but “this bridge has a 99.99% chance of surviving every storm during its design life.” That will include the very rare events beyond the 100 year horizon.
Wasn't society supposed to collapse from Y2K too? The people doing this research need funding, and no one is going to give them funding unless, it's to make sure that this won't wipe out society.
If the grid collapses in any meaningful way because of a solar storm, we're all f'ed, try rebuilding the grid without a grid. Something tells me this won't happen.
I'm guessing what actually happens is a few breakers trip, the grid is out for a few days and we're back up and running a few days later.
Y2K supports the point that something should be done. The reason nothing terrible happened is because lots investment was made in remediating the issue.
I doubt anything in the electrical grid or that mattered actually cared about the two digit year being 00. Best case scenario some bills were going to be messed up / reissued.
SCADA controlled water pumps never cared what the date was, maybe it ran on the cycle for the wrong day and the backup kicked in, big whoop.
This evidence supports Robert M. Schoch "Solar induced dark age" theory.
I've always been a sucker for fringe archeology. Looks like Hancock et. Al. were right about an ancient cataclysm around this time, but wrong on the cause.
If only. The now well-documented Younger Dryas event - whatever it was - was thousands of years later, and has plenty of iridium- and platinum-based proxies (and a whole lot more) worldwide ... with equally sophisticated dating techiques.
Space has -many- nasties it has thrown at the Earth. When I was kid and saw the Moon through a telescope, I wondered how the Earth could have escaped that shellacking. It couldn't. (There -was- no 'Earth Impact Database' at the time.)
There shouldn't be any effect. Solar storms cause low-frequency fluctuations that can induce significant currents in very long conductors (like hundreds to thousands of kilometers). It's a very big deal for large-scale electrical grids and any copper communication, but it doesn't matter for anything that isn't hooked up to such networks.
I had a similar thought, if high energy particles damage/affect DNA could these events contribute in some way to a period of more pronounced speciation?
>A similar solar storm today would be catastrophic for modern technological society—potentially wiping out telecommunications and satellite systems, causing massive electricity grid blackouts, and costing us billions of pounds.
I wonder if any country has a disaster recovery plan for this kind on event.
I interviewed a guy from the NOAA to ask about that. The gist is 1) the military has hardened satellites 2) they have a phone-tree system for alerting grid operators and 3) many high voltage transformers have back-up systems in hardened storage.
I won't comment on 1 and 2 but 3) is laughably untrue. I guess the word 'many' might be stretched to mean 'a few' but I've worked at more than one very large utility directly as an engineer responsible for design of large generation and transmission interface systems and these transformers are not only not spare, they're almost impossible to get quickly even at current market demand. If you toasted even 10 percent of the large generation and transmission transformers in North America it would be years before the grid would even come close to working again, and that's if there was nation state level resources applied.
These are specialized machines that require specialized labor and specialized materials from a specialized international supply chain to construct. I'd make the bet that total recovery would be decades.
This keeps coming up and I keep wondering how in the world are large transformers that complicated to build. And I don't mean that in a dismissive way but a "boy do I have a gap in my knowledge of the world" way :-)
I think that is a pretty common reaction when it comes to physical/mechanical objects. Another way of thinking about it which might be helpful is. Hundreds or thousands of very talented engineers have been working non-stop for 150+ years in a transformer arms race.
This has resulted in incredibly high performance designs and incredibly high requirements.
No doubt. But same could be said of, say, automobiles, or microchips, and many other things. Even larger objects like power plant turbines seem relatively frequently manufactured. Large transformers on the other hand appear to be closer to nuclear power plants in rarity/difficulty of replacement, and as a result for me they have a very high difficulty-of-replacement-to-perceived-complexity ratio.
Large transformers are built to a very specific custom specification. Each one is a custom engineered unit. A transformer is basically a sealed vessel full of volatile oil that you pass an extremely large voltage and current through. The machine has to be perfect. The smallest clearance issue, insulation problem, etc and you have a bomb. And that's just making it safe. We haven't even talked about making it effective.
Transformers are the sort of think that are not rocket science to build, but every single detail is very very important. It requires a team of people to design, construct, and validate and all these people need to have the skills from doing it many times before. These people and facilities simply don't exist in large enough numbers because they are very expensive.
There are also supply chain issues to consider - the steel used in transformer magnetic circuits for example is a very specific metallurgy and construction. During COVID it was quite difficult to find. Poor steel means poor efficiency which at the scale of these machines can mean millions of wasted mwh of power over time.
Thanks for the detail, this is very neat. I wonder if transformers like this are in an "uncanny valley" of manufacturing where there is barely not enough demand to bootstrap mass production like for example turbines. Turbines have very exact tolerances as well, but it seems that with higher unit counts orgs like GE managed to churn them out.
Perhaps the liquid piece is also making things more difficult; I'm sure a dry object is a lot easier to warehouse until needed.
They are dry until delivered, because they already max out the transport vehicle's capability (often highly specialized transformer carrier train cars with like 16 axles at each end to spread the weight).
I appreciate your perspective. Perhaps I should have said "few" instead of "many" and "parts" instead of "systems". But it does sound like your overall impression of backup and restorative capacity differs from what I gathered in that interview.
He did say damaged HV transformers would be a big deal and repairs would take weeks, but maybe that was an optimistic take. Talking about solar storms and grid damage, the range of possibilities is very large, depending on the storm's intensity and where it hits.
I work in power grids, and I can also confirm that number 3 is not true. If a large number of high-capacity power transformers are required, we are in trouble.
Half of the Earth will be unaffected by the flare. Even if a storm fries all electronics on one side of Earth, there will remain devices, networks, and factories on the other side, likely somehow protected by the bulk of the planet.
The flare itself is fairly fast. But the issue is charged particles that take longer to get us. And they are spread out in time.
As https://www.livescience.com/carrington-event describes, the Carrington Event was a solar flare lasting only 5 minutes. But the magnetic disturbances kept arriving over a week.
Reminds me of an episode of an old TV show (I think it was [0]), where one night, the Moon was shining unusually bright. While everyone else marveled at the beauty of the phenomenon, the protagonist is one of the few who understood that if the Moon is this bright, it means the other side of the Earth is currently on fire, and they all have but a few hours left to live.
Oh. I'm adding it to my to-read queue then, and bumping Larry Niven up in the queue in general too. I've been meaning to read his works ever since I learned about Known Space / Star Trek connection.
I liked the Niven/Pournell books and I still think back to them often enough. The Mote in God's Eye and Lucifer's Hammer I think I read back to back. It's been a long time but I really enjoyed them when I was younger.
And the safe half will be brimming with plentiful retro 8-bit CPU's, all the necessary support chips, and input/output devices? I can see this being a fun "what-if" project that provides a hobby but not as a serious solution.
Must be somewhat depressing to be living in a state of fear such that you build an OS specifically for when you assume all supply chains fail globally, probably this decade. Seems both stressful AND unlikely your project will truly be useful in such a position. Not knocking the tech or author, just a thought about such depressing predictions!
Well, someone's got to think of contingencies. It might as well be someone who's already prone to such consuming thoughts. I hope it's never needed, but if it is, there's also some chance we may be thankful for its existence.
That's not the disaster recovery plan itself, it's FEMA instructing a bunch of agencies and departments to make their own. Ordered by Executive Order 13744 signed by President Obama in 2016.
"telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases giving their operators electric shocks. Telegraph pylons threw sparks"
No doubt this historical one is much more significant, but even another 1859 Carrington would be a huge disaster - the lead time and transportation logistics for things like power station transformers can be months especially if now you need 100 of them
The guy's journalistic style is certainly on the alarmist side but the scholarship is pretty solid and unusually expansive.
From the text:
"Because most utilities have not protected their giant transformers, and there are no replacements, the grid would stay down for at least a year, or a decade, or forever. There are ways to protect the system, but a captured Washington regulation system has not pushed for these simple steps.
A hostile power aside, our expert guest tells us an EMP hit is “inevitable” within the time of those living now, because the Sun can also crash our electrical systems world-wide.
A large solar storm, big enough to do it, was seen in 1859. It’s called the Carrington Event. If part of the Sun blows our way, all satellites are knocked out. The wires of our electric system act like antennae, receiving the deadly pulse."
I doubt the doomsayer timetable but the industrial capacity and delivery concern is absolutely valid.
If this actually happened, I think community solar would be choked as it gets ramped up everywhere at once and some neighborhoods would have power centers to go charge lithium ion portable power packs as the overall grids become decentralized. Shelf-stable, non-refrigerated food would become the norm and people would just make do with less electricity. We'd go back to a cash economy and things like night time entertainment that relied on sound systems and electric lights would become almost non-existent. Without street lights, nighttime in general would be dramatically quieter
The real problem would be people who have to use battery powered medical devices who don't have convenient ways to charge.
Seriously though. It wouldn’t be hard to make a dynamo and some incandescent (or carbon arc!) lights with material already available in most metropolises. The bars would get prioritized, hah.
In the UK, the National Grid Operator maintains "black start" plans[0] for rebooting the entire national electrical grid from a zero power situation, and they pay individual plants to conduct annual drills. However, for obvious reasons, these plans have never been tried in anything close to real-world conditions, and it's something of an open question whether it would work.
The earth and everything in and on it is part of an electrical system, as solar emissions wash across the landscape they’ll stimulate the flow of electrons in everything especially metal and circuit based items. Since circuits in many items are delicate things, designed for very specific currents, it will be a near guarantee that electrical components will be damaged.
This is incorrect. A solar flare is not like an EMP. It's low frequency so only wires that are miles long would be energized. It could possibly destroy electronics that aren't protected by a power strip. But no, it's not going to destroy your cellphone or the electronics in your car.
Being properly prepared for a once-in-15k-years storm would likely require such a cost over such a long time for the expected benefit that it's not worth it. Hardening infrastructure against extremely rare disasters likely means less infrastructure, and probably fewer social programs.
Sometimes the objective rational choice is to do nothing for the mega-disasters and instead just prepare/harden for once-a-century or once-a-millennium event.
I believe that solar storms able to cause widespread havoc on our modern infrastructure are a much more frequent occurance.
The Carrington event in 1859 caused serious damage to telegraphs, for instance.
It's a risk that is more once a century than once a millenium... so we may very possibly see one this century.
Considering how reliant we are on electricity, if everything goes down for more than a couple of days at most there is bound to be extremely serious civil unrest on a global scale: just imagine no access to money and thus not being able to buy food, fuel, etc. and then supply chains shutting down anyway.
I'm aware of the Carrington event, which is why I mentioned being prepared for 100-year or 1,000-year events. The GP was specifically asking if any governments had plans for "a similar storm today", where the referenced storm is this one found in tree rings, not the Carrington event.
That means that the power is inversely proportional to the frequency. This is common. You see it in word frequency, river length, population sizes of cities, etc.
So over a 15,000 year period, the biggest solar flare should be about 2x as big as the next biggest. And random Miyake events, which we've had 9 of over roughly 50,000 years, should be about 10x as big as a once every 160 year event like the Carrington event probably was.
All very rough, of course. But it may help give some intuition.
This event is twice as powerful as the previously known largest event, which is at least 10X as powerful as the largest event in recorded human history, back in the 1800s, which set telegraph poles on fire. So, yeah, it's a big Twinkee.
> if everything goes down for more than a couple of days at most there is bound to be extremely serious civil unrest on a global scale
Forget about civil unrest. Chain of command in the military goes down and every unit is on it for themselves. Imagine generals not knowing if the President is still alive.
> Hardening infrastructure against extremely rare disasters likely means less infrastructure, and probably fewer social programs.
Or less dividends. This solar storm is a very extreme example, but we've all witnessed how greed got us very unprepared for a pandemic, climate changed induced weather events, new wars, etc.
But lower dividend yields mean lower yielding retirement funds, with quality of life effects downstream from that.
Now, there's plenty to be said about the funding side of the equation to improve wealth inequality and/or increase budgets, but that's orthogonal to the spending-side necessary tradeoffs to harden against extremely rare disasters.
In other words, supposing you had the political pull to get more money entirely from the richest 0.01%, 1%, or 5% (and putting aside that not everyone agrees that would be good), that extra money would probably still be better spent on more infrastructure and social programs, not on hardening against extremely rare events.
Edit: simplified version of my assertion: current budgets are X. It would cost Y to harden infrastructure against an event 10 times as large as the Carrington event. Even if it were trivial to increase the budget from X to X+Y, it's probably not a good use of money to perform such extreme hardening. This is true for all positive finite values for X and Y in a world where we still have cancer, heart disease, poverty, etc.
If I read you correctly, you're making an argument regarding the marginal effort to increase the budget by Y.
My argument is about the millions of things we could do with Y that would be more beneficial to human flourishing. Even if it's trivial to increase the budget by Y, that doesn't imply that it's trivial to increase the budget by Y enough times to run out of more important things to do.
Q: Are governments prepared to handle a solar storm 10 times as big as the Carrington Event?
A: Probably not, and that's not something we should fault them for or worry about.
Original (longer) argument:
It's possible that hardening against a Carrington-level event is a good use of money, but that's not the original question. The original question is about an event 10 times as big, twice as big as the previously known largest event.
If I understand your assertion, you're asserting that the money could easily be raised with little downside. Maybe it can be. For the sake of argument, I'll grant you that.
But my assertion is that it's not a question of if the money could be raised to harden against a 15k-year solar storm. My assertion is that even if the money were already in hand, hardening against such an extreme event is probably not worth the cost.
Whatever the budget is, it will be finite. Given present technology, whatever that budget is, it won't be sufficient to give all people worldwide a utopian lifestyle while fully funding all promising medical research, etc. Tradeoffs will need to be made. Hardening against a 15k-year event an order of magnitude more powerful than the Carrington event is probably not the best use of finite budget.
If I could start a side gig in a polka band and sell plasma to raise enough money to make my Florida home polar bear proof, that wouldn't have any bearing on the wisdom of polar-bear-proofing a home in Florida. Even assume that cost were the only downside to polar-bear-proofing a home, the availability of the money wouldn't be the problem with the plan. The problem is that the other things I could do with my limited resources would be much more beneficial. Yes, all else being equal, a polar-bear-proof house in Florida is better than a non-bear-proof house in Florida. In the real world, all else is not equal.
There is almost always a trade-off. Some risks aren't worth mitigating, and we're better off accepting them than either worrying ourselves over them or wasting limited resources on unwise mitigations.
My point is that a lack of political will to come up with the funding isn't the biggest obstacle to such extreme measures.
Perfect safety is a bad goal, and worrying that we aren't perfectly safe is unwise.
Edit: if I've missed something and you're talking about some hypothetical world where we've already solved cancer, heart disease, poverty, wealth inequality, climate change, polio, dementia, put basements / tornado shelters in all of the houses and trailer parks in Tornado Alley, figured out why the laundry always contains an odd number of socks, etc. Sure, then if we could scrounge up enough money to harden against a solar storm 10 times as powerful as the Carrington event, then go for it.
I picked polar bears assuming probability of zoo (public or private) escape or ice age over the next 15k years means there's some real, but minuscule, risk.
From the abstract: "The resulting Δ14C record exhibits an abrupt spike occurring in a single year at 14 300–14 299 cal yr BP and a century-long event between 14 and 13.9 cal kyr BP."
The oldest living tree has seen 9,565 birthdays (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tjikko), but it doesn't have 9,565 rings. Even if it did, there's a gap of at least a few thousand years ;-)
I'm impressed they got it exact, but wasn't by ring-counting (only).
Not necessarily. You can compare dead trees in the same vicinity that were alive at overlapping time intervals. Patterns in the width of the rings will reveal the period over which their lives overlapped. With enough dead trees, if they are preserved well enough, you could go back significantly further and age trees that are long dead.
You still have to figure out when it did. If there's a tree with 800 rings, but it died 100,000 years ago, then there's 100,000 years you have to date by some other method, and add 800 on top.
In theory, no. But in theory, we weren't supposed to have the first Fukushima to begin with. A bunch of things went precisely the wrong way.
That said, Fukushima ultimately wasn't bad, especially in terms of atmospheric releases / land contamination. It was scary, but nowhere near many of our worst "conventional" industrial disasters, let alone Chernobyl.
verb (vitrifies, vitrifying, vitrified) [with object]
convert (something) into glass or a glasslike substance, typically by exposure to heat: the option of vitrifying nuclear waste presents problems | glazes and paintings on pottery are vitrified by firing in the furnace | (as adjective vitrified) : the use of vitrified clay pipes inside buildings is prohibited.
Given the trees continued to reproduce, the "solar energetic particle (SEP) spike" was probably not as bad as this characterization.
Abolishing part of core human nature... anything less ambitious?
Its so easy to be the doomsayer, the 'I told ya so' guy etc... It takes much more mental strength to see the forest for the trees - we humans are extremely resilient and adaptable, and even in worst situations there is always tons of natural good in our hearts. And no society didn't collapse during covid, far from it. Some folks simply mistake change with end, I guess reading too much economic news can do that to even best minds.
If current society would collapse, another would pop up instead, walking in the shoes of previous one, even if quite different. With fall of Rome its inhabitants didn't simply vanish into the air in Thanos style.
I would be much more worried about things like search for immortality since folks like Putin would burn this world completely to the ground to get and maintain it. Or properly rogue AI, if we ever achieve that.
It's not meant as a doomsayer - we developed effective vaccines and we failed at distributing them to all humans - western countries paid ton's of tax money and some people got very rich - every else people died preventable deaths. From a technological point of production and distribution of the vaccines was possible. It didn't happen because there was no profit. Same reason even in Germany you can't get antibiotics. I'm not even go as far as in the US where a lot of people can't afford basic healthcare. In an catastrophic event goods necassary for survival will have a price and there will be a black market that will be brutal. I think and hope there is a way to distribute and create required goods fairly but I don't know how to establish and enforce such a system.
Google says we can have 1-4 days of warning for this kind of thing. Is there any approach to circuit breaking that can help appliances against such an event?
I went to Europe years ago for work. And the adapter for my macbook work gave me wasn't grounded. Whenever I plugged my computer in I could feel a buzz when i touched the aluminum body. Others thought I was crazy. But it freaked me out and only charged when I wasn't touching it.
You make me feel like I wasn't making it all up. haha!
Has anyone simply tried measuring the voltage difference between the macbook case and the nearest ground connector, and also the other two prongs in a normal electrical socket? This isn't exactly a difficult test to do.
The worst I felt was touching both a charging device and the skin of another person at the same time, did someone experienced this ? It feels weird, almost like magnet sticky, but also almost like you aren't touching the other person.
I think it's Apple's weird choice of not using a Schuko plug, opting for a two-pole connector attached to their MacBook power brick instead, even where ground is available, isn't it? I thought old school VDE rules were such that if your device has conducting parts outside, you're supposed to ground these, but I'm not an EE. Anyway the Apple power brick makes a poor impression indeed.
The plug part is still detachable, and at least previously you'd receive both a long cord with Schuko to attach there and a short plug with just two prongs. I guess the two prong thing is standard now?
Yeah, got both with my old 2015 MBP but only the two-prong with the 2023 one. Though the two-prong plug is still detachable from the brick so I presume Apple would be happy to sell me a Schuko+cord for some exorbitant price.
I have an old house that had ungrounded outlets. My MBP made me take on costly electrical repairs cuz I got so sick of the shocks and tingling sensation whenever id touch it while charging. I should've put a multimeter on it to see what voltage and current it carried, didn't "hurt" but it was certainly a noticeable tingling.
It's common to conflate the effects of a solar storm with an EMP; when in reality they're opposite extremes of the same mechanism (i.e. voltage varying over distance).
An EMP is a short-duration high voltage spike; i.e. short-wavelength/high-frequency.
A solar storm acts on a large scale and causes a long-duration high voltage spike; i.e. long wavelength/low-frequency.
So an EMP (i.e. a high altitude nuke) will tend to induce high voltage in small "antennas"; i.e. circuits in an SSD or other transistor electronics like your concern.
Whereas a solar storm will induce high voltage in large antennas; think power lines or long cables. However these days there's enough warning and contingencies to mitigate the worst of these effects; i.e. preemptively shut down vulnerable power systems. The grid "crashing" and needing to do a cold start is still very bad, but far better than also getting damaged.
----
Edit: I also want to point out that the above is specific to "on the ground" effects as we're shielded by earth's magnetic field. Satellites still get bombarded directly with heavy radiation/particles, which is much closer to an EMP in terms of acute impact.
My understanding is that solar storms and high-altitude EMPs have similar effects. Both energize the upper atmosphere which induces currents in long conductors. High-altitude EMP does not harm electronics.
It is close-by EMP from nuclear blast that harms electronics.
Hopefully one day we'll have a grid designed to carry high voltages over long distances instead of using inefficient low voltage transmission which exposes the grid to these dangers.
Is this supposed to be sarcastic? The grid does carry high voltages over long distances. The standard voltage in North America is 765kV, and for HVDC lines it can be 2MV. But that's for long-distance transmission lines, not more local distribution lines, which are necessarily lower voltage (36kV I think) for practical and safety reasons.
A large solar storm is unlikely to damage many transformers. Transformers have low impedance, yet solar storms have the biggest impact on high impedance systems (like copper telephone cables, especially when 'on hook').
The only time a power network is high impedance is when it isn't connected (ie. when part of the power network is switched off). Trivial operational changes could be made to ensure that offline parts of a power network are grounded during a solar storm.
Reserve transformers might be a good plan for other reasons - eg. fast recovery after a war on US soil - transformers are usually early targets in war, and hard to defend.
Even a Carrington-level event, which refers to a solar coronal mass ejection (CME) observed in 1859, is indeed a concern for modern electrical infrastructure. During such an event, geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) could flow through electrical grids, potentially overheating transformers and causing them to fail. These GICs are particularly harmful to transformers because they can lead to half-cycle saturation, increasing the reactive power demand and causing internal hotspots.
While transformers themselves may have low impedance, it’s the connectivity and expanse of the grid system that makes them vulnerable during geomagnetic disturbances. The longer the conductive path, the more susceptible the system is to GICs, regardless of the impedance characteristics of individual components like transformers.
An X500-level solar flare would be many times more powerful than the Carrington event and could wreak havoc on our electrical infrastructure. Given our increasing reliance on electricity for everything from communications to transportation, the societal impact would be significant.
Hence, the idea of a Strategic Transformer Reserve isn’t just about preparing for solar storms; it’s a multi-hazard approach that also considers other threats like cyber-attacks, terrorism, or even conventional warfare.
The key question remains: do the potential catastrophic consequences justify the financial and logistical costs of maintaining a transformer reserve? From a risk-assessment standpoint, considering the dire impacts of a severe solar event or other threats, investment in a transformer reserve could be seen as a rational and scientifically justified precaution.
Particularly when the lead time to manufacture such equipment is in the order of years. A grid outage of that duration would be biblically catastrophic: without electricity, we have no water, no gasoline, no communications. We’d survive, but the suffering is not something it seems wise to consider an acceptable cost. Especially at a time of enhanced geopolitical competition, the effect of a storm whose severest effects would likely be localized to the sun-facing hemisphere, seems important not to underestimate.
I think it would be great if, instead of countries merely having arms races, they had preparedness races. I guess for us ape-brained humans, tribalism feels more compelling than a threat you can’t bite the face off.
> geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) could flow through electrical grids, potentially overheating transformers and causing them to fail.
yes, but such currents are typically measured in milliamps or, during the biggest storms, amps. Most utility scale transformers would be needing DC currents of the order of thousands or tens of thousands of amperes before failure.
Even then, overheat sensors would detect such a condition, and operationally the circuit could be de-energised and connected to earth to protect it.
Also, where there are perhaps thousands of transformers connected to a particular distribution grid, the load from the GIC's is shared amongst them, further reducing impact.
I dunno. The American Geophysical Union seemed to think it was a BFD in one of their conferences back in the 2000s. Had a whole presentation about how certain parts of the US grid would lose large transformers that would likely take months to years to replace as there are few spares and they have to be wound with miles and miles of copper by hand. Said that large swaths of the US would be without grid power for very long periods.
Said that third world countries would fare pretty well though.
It sounds like they need some type of automatic or robotic winding system... Even without some catastrophe, they surely have to make new transformers from time to time, and winding miles of copper by hand sounds ridiculously inefficient for a manufacturing process.
Hand winding allows for a high degree of precision and quality control that may be difficult to achieve with automated machinery, particularly for specialized or custom designs. Skilled technicians can closely monitor the process and make adjustments on the fly to ensure that the winding is as precise as possible. This is crucial for large transformers, where even minor imperfections can lead to inefficiencies, increased heat, or failure.
Transformers for electrical grids can vary greatly in their specifications depending on a variety of factors, such as location, usage, and existing grid architecture. Customization is often necessary, and hand winding allows for this level of customization to meet specific criteria, including the number of windings, the type of core used, and other design elements.
Copper wire is both flexible and delicate. It needs to be handled carefully to avoid nicks, kinks, or other imperfections that can compromise the transformer’s performance. Human technicians can adapt to the nuances of the material more effectively than machinery in some cases, ensuring that the wire is handled with care throughout the winding process.
Geomagnetically Induced Currents (GICs) are often measured in amps rather than milliamps, and their values can vary significantly depending on the specifics of the geomagnetic storm and the electrical grid. During the 1989 geomagnetic storm that led to the collapse of the Hydro-Québec power system, GICs of hundreds of amperes were measured. While transformers are designed to handle thousands of amperes of alternating current, they are generally not designed to handle direct current like GICs, which can lead to transformer saturation and increased reactive power demand.
Now, let’s talk about resonances. The electric grid can have resonant frequencies due to the combination of inductive, capacitive, and resistive elements. Resonances can cause the system to magnify the effects of incoming disturbances, much like how a tuning fork resonates at its natural frequency. When a geomagnetic storm induces currents in the Earth, those currents generate a magnetic field that interacts with the magnetic fields of transformers and transmission lines. If the frequency of these geomagnetic disturbances happens to match or come close to a resonant frequency of the electrical grid, the amplitude of the induced currents can be significantly magnified.
To be specific, resonances can occur in multiple parts of the system:
1. Transformer windings have their own resonant frequencies, at which the impedance becomes high, leading to larger voltage across the windings for the same amount of GICs.
2. Long transmission lines can have characteristic impedances that interact with the impedances of transformers and other elements to create resonant circuits, thus amplifying the GICs in localized regions.
3. Harmonic resonances can occur when nonlinear elements like transformers generate harmonics that coincide with resonant frequencies in the grid, thereby magnifying the effective GICs.
So, even though individual transformers may be able to handle small DC currents without immediate failure, the presence of resonances and the cumulative effects across a large, interconnected grid make GICs a non-trivial concern.
> The key question remains: do the potential catastrophic consequences justify the financial and logistical costs of maintaining a transformer reserve?
isn't this something that can be trivially answered with game theory? you just need the cost and the probability.
IIRC, the main argument for spare transformers is that the lead time on them back in 2017 was 2+ years, and we have no domestic sources. I can't imagine the covid era supply chain issues have improved things. If North America is facing the sun during a major event, many countries would be fighting for replacements, and it could easily take a decade to get everything back online.
Where are they made? This sounds a bit like a national security failure. A country as large and world-dominating as the US should be able to manufacture its own electrical distribution infrastructure.
> The ground connections of Hydro-Québec’s transmission system of high-tension lines and transformers eventually started conducting some of these earth currents, and at 2:43 AM, protective circuit breakers tripped at the Chibougamau substation in central Québec. This caused an imbalance on a 750 kV transmission line, which tripped breakers 150 km away.
> Within one minute, the cascading failures ...
So the actual problem was that all their power grid was turned off... ie. disconnected... ie. high impedance... ie. the most vulnerable state.
Operational changes could be made so that all 'tripped breakers' lead to at least one or other side of the breaker being grounded rather than left open circuit, which would solve the problem. That only needs to be the case during a solar storm, and electrical power lines are frequently grounded during maintenance for safety anyway.
