I have posted before on this
topic and welcome the recent attention paid to it. Efforts are now under way to engineer
solutions for the emerging national power grid that can handle the inevitable
solar storm or worse, a real attack with high altitude nuclear blasts producing
an EMP or electromagnetic pulse.
Both threats are real and have
the same solution. The best solution is
to establish mandatory requirements and let the engineers bid for the work with
as many working solutions as possible.
Our present vulnerability is high
and a major storm is able to shut down all power and even outright destroy our
entire electronics civilization. The
good news is that few should die and replacement is easily accomplished. It is not hurricane Katrina, but it is a
massive inconvenience as our civilization will need to reboot.
The second item places simple
resisters between core circuit components such as transformers and their
grounds. It is an uncomplicated solution
to part of the problem and cheap to engineer into the circuits. It does not solve the whole problem as
nothing does that, but is shows us that protesting the grid itself may be
surprisingly simple. Blocking ground
surges and knocking out all the breakers may do it nicely. We would notice, but would retain immediate
power to operated anything still working.
Getting Ready for the Next Big Solar Storm
june 21, 2011: In Sept. 1859, on the eve of a below-average1 solar
cycle, the sun unleashed one of the most powerful storms in centuries. The
underlying flare was so unusual, researchers still aren't sure how to
categorize it. The blast peppered Earth with the most energetic protons
in half-a-millennium, induced electrical currents that set telegraph offices on
fire, and sparked Northern Lights over Cuba
and Hawaii .
This week, officials have gathered at the National Press Club inWashington DC
to ask themselves a simple question: What if it happens again?
This week, officials have gathered at the National Press Club in
Modern power grids are vulnerable to solar storms. Photo credit: Martin
Stojanovski
"A similar storm today might knock us for a loop," says Lika
Guhathakurta, a solar physicist at NASA headquarters. "Modern society
depends on high-tech systems such as smart power grids, GPS, and satellite
communications--all of which are vulnerable to solar storms."
She and more than a hundred others are attending the fifth annual Space
Weather Enterprise
Forum—"SWEF" for short. The purpose of SWEF is to raise
awareness of space weather and its effects on society especially among policy
makers and emergency responders. Attendees come from the US
Congress, FEMA, power companies, the United Nations, NASA, NOAA and more.
As 2011 unfolds, the sun is once again on the eve of a below-average
solar cycle—at least that’s what forecasters are saying. The
"Carrington event" of 1859 (named after astronomer Richard
Carrington, who witnessed the instigating flare) reminds us that strong storms
can occur even when the underlying cycle is nominally weak.
In 1859 the worst-case scenario was a day or two without telegraph
messages and a lot of puzzled sky watchers on tropical islands.
In 2011 the situation would be more serious. An avalanche of blackouts
carried across continents by long-distance power lines could last for weeks to
months as engineers struggle to repair damaged transformers. Planes and ships
couldn’t trust GPS units for navigation. Banking and financial networks
might go offline, disrupting commerce in a way unique to the Information Age.
According to a 2008 report from the National Academy
of Sciences, a century-class solar storm could have the economic impact of 20
hurricane Katrinas.
As policy makers meet to learn about this menace, NASA researchers a
few miles away are actually doing something about it:
"We can now track the progress of solar storms in 3 dimensions as
the storms bear down on Earth," says Michael Hesse, chief of the GSFC
Space Weather Lab and a speaker at the forum. "This sets the stage
for actionable space weather alerts that could preserve power grids
and other high-tech assets during extreme periods of solar activity."
They do it using data from a fleet of NASA spacecraft surrounding the
sun. Analysts at the lab feed the information into a bank of
supercomputers for processing. Within hours of a major eruption, the
computers spit out a 3D movie showing where the storm will go, which planets
and spacecraft it will hit, and predicting when the impacts will occur.
This kind of "interplanetary forecast" is unprecedented in the short
history of space weather forecasting.
"This is a really exciting time to work as a space weather
forecaster," says Antti Pulkkinen, a researcher at the Space Weather
Lab. "The emergence of serious physics-based space weather models is
putting us in a position to predict if something major will happen."
Some of the computer models are so sophisticated, they can even predict
electrical currents flowing in the soil of Earth when a solar storm
strikes. These currents are what do the most damage to power
transformers. An experimental project named "Solar Shield" led
by Pulkkinen aims to pinpoint transformers in greatest danger of failure during
any particular storm.
"Disconnecting a specific transformer for a few hours could
forestall weeks of regional blackouts," says Pulkkinen.
Another SWEF speaker, John Allen of NASA's Space Operations Mission
Directorate, pointed out that while people from all walks of life can be
affected by space weather, no one is out on the front lines quite like
astronauts.
"Astronauts are routinely exposed to four times as much radiation
as industrial radiation workers on Earth," he says. "It's a
serious occupational hazard."
NASA keeps careful track of each astronaut's accumulated dosage
throughout their careers. Every launch, every space walk, every solar
flare is carefully accounted for. If an astronaut gets too close to the
limits ... he or she might not be allowed out of the space station!
Accurate space weather alerts can help keep these exposures under control
by, e.g., postponing spacewalks when flares are likely.
Speaking at the forum, Allen called for a new kind of forecast:
"We could use All Clear alerts. In addition to knowing when it's
dangerous to go outside, we'd also like to know when it's safe. This is
another frontier for forecasters--not only telling us when a sunspot will
erupt, but also when it won't."
The educational mission of SWEF is key to storm preparedness. As Lika
Guhathakurta and colleague Dan Baker of the University of Colorado
asked in a June 17th New York Times op-ed: "What good are space
weather alerts if people don’t understand them and won’t react to them?"
By spreading the word, SWEF will help.
Over 2.4 Billion Needed to Fix US Power Grid
Monday, 17 January 2011
Dr. Weblog – NestLink
Over 2.4 billion dollars, that’s $2,500,000,000 US, is needed to fix
the United States of America ’s
Power Grid from total collapse during the 2013 Solar Storm Maximum; currently
predicted by The Solar Cycle 24 Prediction Panel.
John Kappenman, CEO of electromagnetic damage consulting company
MetaTech, talks to Wired.com on 4/17/2009 about the possibility of geomagnetic
apocalypse and how to stop it.
"We’ve got a big, interconnected grid that spans across the
country. Over the years, higher and higher operating voltages have been added
to it. This has escalated our vulnerability to geomagnetic storms. These
are not a new thing. They’ve probably been occurring for as long as the sun has
been around. It’s just that we’ve been unknowingly building an infrastructure
that’s acting more and more like an antenna for geomagnetic storms.
Large currents circulate in the network, coming up from the earth through
ground connections at large transformers. We need these for safety reasons, but
ground connections provide entry paths for charges that could disrupt the grid.
What we’re proposing is to add some fairly small and inexpensive
resistors in the transformers’ ground connections. The addition of that little
bit of resistance would significantly reduce the amount of the geomagnetically
induced currents that flow into the grid.
###
In its simplest form, it’s something that might be made out of cast
iron or stainless steel, about the size of a washing machine.
We’re still at the conceptual design phase, but we think it’s do-able for $40,000 or less per resistor. That’s less than what you pay for insurance for a transformer.
If you’re talking about the
Big power lines and substations can withstand all the other known environmental challenges. The problem with geomagnetic storms is that we never really understood them as a vulnerability, and had a design code that took them into account."
I’m not in the camp that’s certain a big storm will occur in 2012. But given time, a big storm is certain to occur in the future. They have in the past, and they will again. They’re about one-in-400-year events. That doesn’t mean it will be 2012. It’s just as likely that it could occur next week"
Two years later, not much has been done to protect the
It’s not if the US
will lose power, it’s when.
Additional Information about John G. Kappenman
John G. Kappenman is a 1976 graduate in Electrical Engineering from
1 comment:
We agree that we need to be prepared and protected in case such an event takes place. While we wait for our nation to get on board we have come up with a way to be protected, as individuals, in our own homes. We have come up with an inexpensive and convienant way to protect electronics from an EMP. Our bags meet the military spec. They are designed with a zip seal for easy access to put something in, and take out without destroying your faraday "cage" bag. There is also an iron seal that is optional for long term storage if that is prefered. Our website is www.techprotectbag.com. Come check it out! Learn a little more about EMP protection and contact us with any questions.
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