This article was written in 2012 by Boston U. geophysicist Robert M. Schoch. It’s no less true in any way today (although power companies are somewhat better prepared thanks to articles like this one - and they were nervous last week).
Auroras would be much easier to see if it this happened and the lights went out for months. Website:www.robertschoch.com
Regarding transformers: it’s easier to let a power grid trip offline (and transformers are designed to behave so instead of being overpowered) rather than to keep operating despite a Carrington level solar storm and suffer failure on all longer east-west connections.
“Their first application dates back to 1928 when GE installed such a bank – rated 1.2 MVar – at the Ballston Spa Substation on the 33 kV grid of New York Power and Light. Since then, series capacitor banks have been installed on systems across the globe.”
Also, failure on north-south connections isn’t nearly as likely, so a considerable part of the transformer “population” would be spared from impact.
Thus, while a single strong solar storm within the limit charted out in 1859 would be an extreme inconvenience and strong economic setback, it seems unlikely to end civilization.
A long period of severe solar storms could also result in ozone depletion in the atmosphere and become another extreme inconvenience - through increased UV exposure. However, most forms of life have seen such things in their evolutionary past, and humans have the ability to wear glasses, clothes and apply sun screen.
They don’t talk about it a lot, but. If it looks really bad, I suspect that what the grid operators will do is disconnect and shut down as much of it as possible and wait it out. Better to have no electricity for a week than for hundreds of transformers to be ruined …
It’s strange that we didn’t see more impact from this event; recent photos of the cme appear to be the same scale as the carrington event. I don’t know if that’s due to forewarning and mitigation, system hardening, something different about this particular star burp, or…? but the scale was 50 earths wide lol
I noticed a journalist mention (hopefully based on good sources) that this months’s storm was estimated to be 4-5 times weaker than the 1859 storm.
NASA, in their article mentions the recent storm as a G5 level geomagnetic storm caused by an X8.7 level solar flare.
X is the strongest class of solar flares and G is the strongest class of geomagnetic storms, but this was definitely not a record - an X20 flare has been observed once, but as I understand, the ejected particles didn’t hit Earth.
Where I live (latitude 59), a short electrical grid event occurred during the display of auroras. Something tripped and something immediately switched over to replace it, most people didn’t notice anything, but some had to restart various heat pumps and similar devices. Then again, in Europe, the power grid has relatively short lines and many transformers between them, which makes it comparatively less vulnerable.
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