#solarflare #EMP #electricalinfrastructure #powergrid #safety #preparedness
Have you ever wondered why we can’t simply “turn off” our electrical infrastructure before a solar flare hits? It’s a common question that arises when considering the potential damage that solar flares can cause to our power grid. Let’s dive into the details and explore the reasons behind this phenomenon.
### What are Solar Flares?
Solar flares are intense bursts of radiation that come from the sun. They are caused by the release of magnetic energy stored in the sun’s atmosphere. When a solar flare occurs, it can send a wave of energy and particles towards Earth, potentially disrupting our planet’s magnetic field.
### Understanding Electromagnetic Pulses (EMPs)
An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is a burst of electromagnetic radiation that can disrupt or destroy electronic equipment. When a solar flare hits the Earth’s atmosphere, it can generate an EMP that can have devastating effects on our electrical infrastructure.
### Why Can’t We Turn Off the Power Grid?
Like how you can fry your electronics if they’re plugged in when the power comes back on from an outage, why can’t we “unplug” everything so to speak?
1. **Complexity of the Power Grid**: The power grid is a vast and interconnected system that spans across continents. It is not as simple as flipping a switch to turn off the entire grid. There are thousands of substations, transformers, and power lines that would need to be shut down individually, which is a time-consuming and challenging task.
2. **Impact on Essential Services**: Turning off the power grid would have severe consequences on essential services such as hospitals, emergency services, and communication networks. These services rely on uninterrupted power supply to function effectively, and shutting down the grid would put lives at risk.
3. **Unpredictability of Solar Flares**: Solar flares are unpredictable and can occur suddenly without warning. It is difficult to predict when a solar flare will hit Earth and how severe its effects will be. This makes it challenging to implement a preemptive shutdown of the power grid.
4. **Cost and Feasibility**: Shutting down the entire power grid comes with significant costs and logistical challenges. It would require extensive planning, resources, and coordination between various stakeholders. In many cases, the cost of implementing such a shutdown outweighs the potential benefits.
### Strategies for Mitigating the Impact of Solar Flares
While we may not be able to turn off the power grid before a solar flare hits, there are some strategies that can help mitigate the impact of these events:
1. **Hardening Infrastructure**: Enhancing the resiliency of critical infrastructure against EMPs can help reduce the potential damage caused by solar flares. This includes retrofitting existing infrastructure with protective measures such as shielding and surge arrestors.
2. **Early Warning Systems**: Developing early warning systems that can detect solar flares in advance can provide valuable time to prepare for potential disruptions. This can help utilities and emergency services alike to take necessary precautions to minimize the impact of a solar flare.
3. **Backup Power Systems**: Implementing backup power systems, such as generators and battery storage, can help ensure continuity of essential services during a power grid outage caused by a solar flare. These systems provide a reliable source of power when the main grid is offline.
### Conclusion
In conclusion, while it may not be feasible to turn off the power grid before a solar flare hits, there are steps that can be taken to mitigate the impact of these events. By investing in infrastructure hardening, early warning systems, and backup power solutions, we can better prepare for the potential disruptions caused by solar flares. It is important to continue research and development in this area to safeguard our electrical infrastructure against the effects of solar activity.
Next time you ponder the question of why we can’t “unplug” our electrical infrastructure before a solar flare hits, remember the complexities and challenges involved in such a task. Instead, focus on preparedness and resilience to ensure that our power grid remains operational in the face of solar flare events. Stay informed, stay safe, and be proactive in protecting our electrical infrastructure from the unpredictable forces of nature. 🌞🔌💡
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The damage isn’t done because something is turned on. Solar flare, or any EMP is just a massive burst of electromagnetic energy (obviously by its name). Some of those wavelengths of energy like microwaves and radiowaves can cause current to flow inside conductors the same way a wireless charger can charge your phone. The flow happens whether or not the device is on and the flow is powerful enough to damage sensitive electronics.
We do, but it isn’t 100% effective. Solar flares and storms can induce currents in electronics even if they’ve unplugged/powered down and which can still cause damage.
Because of induced voltage in conductors.
Any electrical conductor in a coronal mass ejection ( plasma getting blasted off the sun) is going to have voltage introduced to it whether it’s plugged in or not.
Read about the Carrington event: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event)
telegraph operators would get shocked even when the telegraph was not hooked up to anything
The “X-class” events that can really hurt us are hours long, and even during those, 99.something% of the time our infrastructure can handle it.
Basically, the multi-hour shutdown we’d need to make ourselves safe would be more disruptive than the “fry” events we’d be likely to get, so risk management says leave stuff on. (They leave our city power on during lightning storms too, because of pretty much the same reasoning.)
The issue is that an EMP causes electricity to start flowing on its own, even without a power source. That’s how we generate electricity in the first place (mostly): a spinning magnet will cause electricity in a wire near it.
An EMP is a massively powerful magnet forming, and it will cause electricity to “materialize” inside most metal things. It would be easy to build a light bulb that light itself up in response to an EMP going off using the EMP itself as the power source even at a distance.
Unplugging stuff isn’t going to help much. Electricity will just happen anyway, and electricity at the wrong voltage and flowing the wrong way through parts can ruin them.
We have 12 to 48 hours of warning, coronal mass ejections don’t move at the speed of light. Induced voltage is proportional to length of conductor. So pull all the breakers in your house, unplug everything and you should be okay. If you’re worried about phones or whatnot wrap them in aluminum foil (to form a Faraday Cage) and lean them against a water pipe. You’ll be fine.
For the electrical grid, they are going to need to disconnect it into shorter segments. Reconnecting the segments and synchronizing the grid will be a huge pain in the ass, but not impossible. Yes, we will take some damage, but it won’t be catastrophic. All the fiber optic stuff will be fine, the glass doesn’t conduct.
In the US, the devices that protect electrical infrastructure are required to meet a certain level of EM shielding — electromagnetic pulses are a much smaller concern than other kinds of radiation, including EM interference generated by other devices in an electrical substation.
Any event that causes an EMP powerful enough to damage the modern power grid is going to cause other, much more significant problems.
Thing about a radio antenna. What a radio antenna is basically is a wire either sticking up in the air or running horizontal to the ground. ( like in the classic TV antenna).
The distribution wires of the power grid are also wires running horizontal to the ground.
Because of this they can work as antennas. So a solar flare can create additional currents in the wires. Currents that are not supposed to be there. It doesn’t matter of the power is on or off its going to get currents that are not intended.
In it’s simplest form of explanation, EMPs *cause* current inside of electronics in massive waves, even if something is unplugged.
If it’s not shielded (*like most electronics aren’t)* the components inside will still get hit with that electromagnetic blast and current will flow through everything at a disastrous rate by destroying most sensitive electronics. The current either flows in the wrong direction, or is way too much, and things inevitably break.
There was a large solar storm event back in the days of Telegraph where operators were able to unplug their batteries and turn off all power while still sending clear signals. There was enough power getting energized into the wires themselves connecting the poles to zap operators as they worked.
With a big enough flare or solar storm event it doesn’t matter if we turn the devices off, there might be enough energy in the “air” that it powers the devices and bypasses all the safety features. Like holding a florescent tube light up to a Tesla coil and getting it to glow without touching anything.
With power coming from “everywhere” all at once it’s a grand mal seizure but for electronics.
In the case of a direct hit from a massive solar flare the length of the wires plays a huge role.
You could probably unplug and turn off home electronic devices and they would be fine.
We can and do turn off entire power grids to try and protect them.
But the power grid, phone lines and other cables of great length could still suffer catastrophic overloads causing thousands of fires simultaneously if we were hit by a strong enough solar flare emp.
Assuming we managed to put out all the fires we still would not have the parts nor manpower necessary to repair the entire electrical grid and it would be a long and frustrating road to recovery.
Could Solar Storms Destroy Civilization? Solar Flares & Coronal Mass …
YouTube · Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
Jun 7, 2020
Imagine this, the transformer circuit which create electricity from AC to DC, has 2 coils.
The first coil connect to the wall which alternates current, the 2nd coil produce DC current which connect to your digital devices.
When the first coil is producing +ve and -ve, it cuts the electromagnetic field and induce current to the 2nd coil giving it a certain flat voltage(assuming there is a bridge rectifier to correct all the sawtooth waveform and transform to a dc voltage).
Now, emf hits, it induce a very large current to the 2nd coils and fry your transformer in which potentially kill the circuit breaker. You can’t power up your device anymore.
Anything that has coil inside will have this effect.
This is very dangerous to sensitive digital equipment as their operation voltage and current are usually less than 3.3v.
It’s basically a lightning strike in EMF Form.
So what kills it? If current is high, so is voltage. alternating current may kill human but dc will burn things with high amperage.
So how to prevent this? Have a shield, what shield? Watch a movie and you know, faraday shielding.
Anything conductive can potentially have moving charges during the event.
If it were strong enough, everything from a metal roof to the circuits in your cellphone would have current “generated” in it.
EMP doesn’t come from the wires, it comes from the air and you can’t unplug something from the air. The only way to “unplug” is to have equipment in bunkers
You can. Turning off the power grid will protect it completely.
Solar flares are not EMP. When a solar flare hits, it generates tiny amounts of DC current in very long power lines. The problem is that the power grid only works on AC current. If any DC at all gets into it, equipment starts malfunctioning and losing efficiency. The malfunctioning equipment then starts heating up because it can’t handle the strain of the AC.
In other words, the energy in the power grid is what causes the damage, not the energy in the solar flare. It is just that the solar flare energy allows the normal power flow to cause the damage. If there is no normal power flowing, there is no damage.
The problem is that shutting down a whole power grid is extremely inconvenient, especially if you have to do it for days. Forecasting of solar flare impact is not very precise and it is not really possible to predict what effect one would have on a power grid in order to shut down selected parts.
Many power companies have installed real time DC monitoring equipment in their power lines. This allows them to monitor early impacts of the solar flare before damage occurs and then shut down selected parts as soon as they start to malfunction but before damage starts.
Even this can be inconvenient. For example, Canada has real time monitoring. The problem is that they get hit so hard by solar flares so often, that repeated automatic shutdowns of parts of the grid became a problem. They ended up installing DC blocker equipment on critical lines which blocks the effect of th solar flares, making those power lines immune to the effect.
Let’s start with how radio works. Radio is electromagnetic waves that travel through the air. We received this waves using an antenna. When the waves hit the antenna they create a flow of electrons – and the device we call a radio figures out how to turn this into sound.
An EMP is a big loud radio. And antennas are just pieces of metal. So, in the solar flare (or nuclear explosion) scenario, every single piece of metal turns into an antenna and starts having electricity flowing through it. If it’s attached to something important and generates more electricity than that thing can handle… Bzzzzt.
If right now someone said: Solar flare, unplug everything!, what could you do? What could the cashier at the supermarket do? What could a chirug do?
Early warning, turning off everything that can be turned off is a good ting, but too many things aren’t built with unplugging in mind, especially not remote unplugging while you’re at work.
So I actually took a class on this. Having devices unplugged is going to protect them the most. Anything connected to a mains that doesn’t have grid- level interrupts is going to fry.
It depends on the EMP, the object, and how it’s turned off.
The things that are going to be messed up the most by an EMP are unshielded magnetic storage and semiconductors. Unshielded meaning that there’s nothing in place to mitigate or redirect the pulse, such as conductive outer casing that is insulated from the main body (a Faraday cage). Semiconductors are used on every type of modern electronics and are prone to experience significant chemical changes when enough electromagnetic energy is passed through them in the wrong direction, burning out the chip. Magnetic storage can have its data corrupted and rendered unreadable by a strong enough EMP.
I’m not seeing this mentioned in the first few comments. The electromagnetic radiation that damages electronics gets here at exactly the same time as any flash of light or radiation that we could detect as a warning. You would not see a flash of light and “oh no, the EMP” run to turn off your computer before the EMP reached you. The flash of light is the EMP. Your computer’s already dead. You’re too late. The visible solar flare is gas and matter that moves slowly and lasts longer. By the time some scientist sees that flare in a telescope, the EMP has already been here and done its damage.