By R. Richard Geddes Sol Gruner
The sun is both friend and foe. The immense energy released by the sun radiates into space as the sunlight that sustains life on Earth. Occasionally a violent solar flare, technically called a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), erupts from the sun’s surface. A CME is not a blast of sunlight. Instead, it is described by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as “a massive, balloon-like bubble of magnetized plasma and hot gas that is blasted from the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, into space.”
Those jets of magnetized plasma (think of lightning, a common example of a plasma) travel at speeds ranging from 500,000 to nearly 7 million miles per hour. They sometimes head directly to Earth. The resulting “geomagnetic storms” can be incredibly destructive to our infrastructure. The induced currents produced by a CME can permanently destroy the high-voltage transformers intrinsic to high voltage electrical transmission lines, thereby resulting in cascading blackouts. Recovery is a lengthy process because the transformers are custom-built items that have replacement times of months to years.
A catastrophic CME is not wild-eyed speculation. The most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history, known as the “Carrington Event,” hit the U.S. in 1859. American electrical infrastructure was confined entirely to telegraph lines at that time. Even so, the damage was extensive, with widespread disruption of telegraph systems and telegraph operators reporting massive electric shocks and fires.
There have been smaller but still destructive CMEs since the 1859 Carrington event. In March of 1989 a geomagnetic storm caused the Hydro-Quebec electrical grid to collapse within 2 minutes. It also blew out electrical transmission equipment as far south as the Salem, New Jersey nuclear reactor complex. Another geomagnetic storm in October 2003 damaged electrical grid equipment in North America, Northern Europe, and South Africa. Other examples could be cited.
How destructive could a geomagnetic storm be today, given America’s near-total dependence on the electrical grid? In 2013 the international insurance giant Lloyd’s of London released a study of potential damage to the U.S. from a Carrington-level CME. Their worst-case scenarios included extended power disruptions affecting up to 40 million people. Lloyd’s estimated that fixing the damage could take up to 2 years, resulting in an economic cost of up to 2.6 trillion dollars. This level of economic damage would be utterly catastrophic, dwarfing any U.S. natural disaster in modern times.
Importantly, the question is not whether a large CME will strike, but rather when. The likelihood that a Carrington-level event will strike the Earth in any given year is estimated to be about 1%. Further, there is little reason to believe that a Carrington-level CME is the largest that the sun can throw at us.
Today it is possible to detect a CME within minutes of its formation via solar observational satellites. A CME typically takes between 15 hours and 3 to 5 days to reach Earth depending on its speed. This affords time to implement mitigating steps, if they have been prepared in advance.
Studies over the last few decades have examined how a CME damages the electrical grid. These mechanisms are now well understood and suggest how the damage could be avoided through appropriate preparation. That includes: (1) straight-forward hardware modifications to grid substations that interface long distance transmission lines with the generators and consumers of electricity, (2) pre-stocking of parts prone to damage that have lengthy procurement times, and (3) implementing equipment to safely disconnect long-distance transmission lines if the CME is exceptionally strong. Moreover, these mitigations would be inexpensive relative to the possible harm: Most of America’s grid could be hardened at a cost estimated to be comparable to that of an aircraft carrier.
These mitigations have been known for well over a decade, yet few have been implemented. Why has so little been done to avoid this ticking time bomb? The problem is primarily a reluctance to spend on events that are certain to happen, but on an unpredictable date. This results in a lack of requisite urgent coordinated action.
There is growing awareness that America’s electrical grid needs a major upgrade. About 70% of U.S. transmission lines are over 25 years old; some parts are almost a century old. Artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, data centers, and new manufacturing facilities are rapidly increasing electrical demand.
It is past-due time to make upgrading America’s grid a national priority. Preparing for the inevitable CME should be a foundational pillar of that effort. Even so, implementing CME mitigations on existing grid structures must not wait for decades until new infrastructure is installed. That would indeed be “dancing with the Devil.”
R. Richard Geddes is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a professor in Cornell’s Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and the Founding Director of the Brooks Center for Infrastructure Policy. His research focuses on infrastructure technology and policy.
Sol Gruner is a former Director of the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source and the John L. Wetherill Emeritus Professor of Physics at Cornell.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
