Coronal Mass Ejections - CME

how the sun is going to destroy the electrical grid

Coronal Mass Ejections - CME

the end of our conductor networks

William Abbott

Feb 17

NASA

“Geomagnetic storms discovered in the 1700s, solar flares discovered in the 1800s, and SEP (solar energetic particles) events discovered in the 1900s are all now found to be closely related to CMEs via various physical processes occurring at various locations in and around CMEs, when they interact with the ambient medium.” History and Development of Coronal Mass Ejections as a Key Player in Solar Terrestrial Relationship - N. Gopalswamy

CMEs were discovered in 1971. The sun belches out great blobs of plasma waves filled with charged particles. Trillions of tons of solar energetic particles (SEP) head off at a million miles an hour in the direction ordained by the ejection. Sometimes they head for earth. When they arrive, the charged particles are inducted into conductor material by earth’s magnetosphere - Geomagnetically Induced Currents (GICs).

For most of mankind’s history this was not a big deal. Ominous auroral light shows were about the sum of it. GICs are a big deal now. Let’s consider the global electrical grid. The US has 5.5 million miles of distribution line and over 160,000 miles of transmission line. Very rough guessing gets rougher when you estimate the global grid. China? I can’t find national statistics. Africa’s sub-Saharan population is about 15% electrified. My guess is there are 50+ million miles of global, primary, electrical conductor.

Transformers are a critical component of the electrical grid. About five million transformers are in service in the USA. Transformers are vulnerable to rouge, induced, voltage fluctuations caused by GICs. For example, an electrical service primary line gets struck by lightning and is undamaged, but the transformer connected to it - is fried, damaged beyond repair, toast. I’ll skip the other technicalities. Transformers transform current from one precise voltage to another. They don’t play well with rogue amps or spiked-voltage intruders. LPTs, Large power transformers - these are at the generating stations, some weighing up to 800,000 lbs. LPTs take years to build. There are six manufacturers of LPTs in North America. Each LPT is special, a one of a kind. No utility keeps spare LPTs laying around. The Dept. of Energy has published studies about the grid’s vulnerability to LPT failures. It’s concerning. North America is not unique. If every LPT failed at the same time - who knows when the global grid could be resurrected? However long it would take, the time-span would be measured in years, probably decades.

Are CMEs capable of destroying LPTs? In 1989, in Quebec, it happened.

Damage done to a LPT transformer during the 1989 solar storm. Credit: NASA

The 1989 ‘solar storm’ was a big CME event. The 1859 Carrington Event was bigger. The Carrington Event was the industrializing world’s introduction to GICs, geomagnetically induced currents. September 1, 1859, at 11:00 AM GMT, in England, Richard Carrington was looking at the sun on a screen in a shadow box when he saw an extremely bright light coming from the large sunspot he was sketching; a big solar flare. The next day, September 2nd, telegraph operators were shocked, showered with sparks, saw their buildings and papers catch on fire and their batteries explode. Some men were badly injured. Some unhooked their batteries and were able to send messages using the induced current in the lines for power. Compasses went haywire. The Northern lights headed south. Birds and men both thought it was morning and began their day at midnight the auroras were so bright. The ocean and beaches on the Carolina coast were so red many thought the sea looked like it had turned to blood.

Unfortunately for modern mankind, Carrington-class solar events are not uncommon. We thought they were. Recent examination of the historical evidence is conclusive: ‘the big one’ is coming. CMEs of similar intensity to the Carrington Event seem to occur two or three times every one hundred years. Below is a list of years when either the historical record shows auroras were visible near the tropical latitudes or, in the earlier years, a carbon-14 spike is present in tree rings and ice-cores. The list is not exhaustive:

2012* (no effect on earth)

2003

2001

1991

1989*

1972

1967

1946

1938

1921*

1909

1882

1872

1859*

1770*

1582*

1279

1052

993-994**

774-775*** largest C-14 spike in the dendrochronological record

660 BC**

The geomagnetic storms in the years with two or three asterisks are several orders of magnitude more intense than the Carrington Event. (Just guessing - no such thing as doing an experiment in the past)

This is not controversial. There are no contrarians. The ‘big one’ is coming. I have footnoted nothing because anyone can verify what I am saying. Google is like that. Congress has listened to testimony repeatedly over the last ten years about CMEs. Congress passed and Trump signed “The Space Weather Research & Forecasting Act” on October 22, 2020.

But… we ought to be imagining a CME of colossal magnitude is imminent. That is the way safety assessments work. We are singularly vulnerable to, ‘the big one.’ Millions of people will die. Maybe billions. I am familiar with workplace safety and aviation safety. I can write a SRS (safety requirement specification). You mitigate for hazards of great magnitude even if they are remote and infrequent. Conversely, you mitigate for minor risks that constantly are occurring. Only hazards that are minor and infrequent can be left unmitigated. The modern world tends to go overboard when it comes to safety. The recent pandemic is my, Overboard for Safety, Exhibit “A.” Yet we do essentially nothing to prepare for a Carrington class event. Let alone the ‘big one.’

We are starting the solar cycle upswing for cycle 25. The solar max will be in three or four years. Space Weather? We are heading into the CME season. We are unwise to assume - the ‘big one’ isn’t coming soon. Not because we know it is coming now, but because we know it is coming soon. Just how bad is the ‘big one’ going to be?

Now Imma gonna put up an iconic picture:

The Icon of Scale - Evergreen Marine’s EVER GIVEN - 20,000+ TEU containers. Over 1300 feet long. 220,000 tons. The Edmund Fitzgerald was 13,000 tons empty and had a bigger crew. The Titanic, 48,000 tons. One EVER GIVEN-class ship stuck in the mud and world trade is disrupted. Scale. In the past, when one ship got stuck in the Suez Canal, other ships went around. Look yonder to the distant shore. That’s one long ship.

Everything is being scaled to the proportions of the EVER GIVEN. United Airlines, Huawei, UPS, Verizon, Samsung, Apple, are the iconic names of huge global enterprises. Every enterprise scales for efficiency. Ancient armies had to be big enough to compete. It’s not a new idea. Our technology has allowed us to scale up enterprises to unimaginable size. Take dairies for example - In the past, if you wanted to drink milk you had to live close to a milk cow. Now our milk comes from a store. When there is no electricity at the store or at the five-thousand head dairy farm - there will be no milk. All the cows will die or wander off if you can’t feed them. You can’t milk 5000 cows without electricity; you can’t refrigerate milk without electricity, and you can’t pump fuel into your truck/tractor without electricity. Food comes from a store for almost all of us. We can’t change that fact.

When the ‘big one’ takes down the grid, you won’t spend any time looking at your cell phone. You will be looking for something to eat. Our pumps won’t work: no water, no fuel. If the ‘big one’ is big enough, the micro-conductor networks will fry too, not that it will matter if the chargers won’t charge. The car needs gas - but gas pumps need electricity. EVs? hahaha. So, no food in the stores. No water in the pipes. How will you flush the toilet? How will the firemen put out the fire? Actually, I can understand why people don’t want to think about all this. Maybe if we all wore masks? We could do that! But would it help? All of us will be completely out of sorts.

Except in Congo. Less than one percent of rural Congo is electrified. They don’t have anything, and they are used to grinding poverty. The auroras will be ominous and strange. Other than that, just another day. But then the trade stops. Men have always traded and that means stuff gets moved around. Lots of food goes both directions in even the poorest locales. No more trucks and even the Congolese get their style cramped. Still Congo’s going to be a happy place compared to our fragile, scaled, modern ecosystems. Our new habitat for humanity depends on conductor networks. Our electrical grid is going away soon, I don’t know if it will come back. We aren’t ready. We will miss it when its gone.

Look on the sunny side: It should take care of our worries about anthropogenic global warming. We will be worried about more important things. Space weather changes more than climate.