Imagine you are a telegraph operator in September 1859. You sit at your station and use the latest technology to listen to messages from hundreds and thousands of miles away. Suddenly, brilliant auroras illuminate the night sky, from the tropics to the poles.
Then chaos.
Sparks fly from your equipment, shocking you with a jolt strong enough to knock you out of your seat as your telegraph papers burst into flames. Later you find out that some of your fellow operators were still able to send messages even after disconnecting their batteries – unaware that the telegraph wires were live due to enormous currents induced in the wires by the most powerful geomagnetic storm in history.
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That storm, caused by a colossal solar flare observed by British astronomer Richard Carrington, caused a coronal mass ejection (CME) that crashed into Earth’s magnetic field. Such a massive solar storm is known as a Carrington event.
A telegraph operator in 1859 could only marvel at today’s technology – technology that is much more vulnerable to the sun than it was then.
The sun has an eleven-year cycle and this year is the peak of the cycle. On February 1, the gigantic sunspot AR4366 – a behemoth that quickly grew from nothing to almost half the size of the monster behind the Carrington Event – unleashed an X8 solar flare, the strongest of Solar Cycle 25 yet.
In the previous 24 hours, this unstable region hurled 23 M-class and four X-class flares at Earth. Extreme ultraviolet radiation from the X8 blast ionized the upper atmosphere, blacking out shortwave radio communications in the South Pacific for hours.
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More worrying is the potential CME. The explosion ejected dense plasma that could have been aimed at Earth. If it arrives with enough force, it will compress Earth’s magnetosphere and cause powerful geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) – in other words, electrify Earth’s surface. GICs can in turn provide power to the high-voltage transmission lines that form the backbone of our electrical grid. And that can be a problem.
Modern society is infinitely more dependent on electricity than it was in the telegraph era. An event at Carrington level wouldn’t just cause a few fires in telegraph offices today. There is a risk that hundreds of huge high-voltage transformers will melt down or be destroyed, causing widespread power outages that could last months or years. Supply chains would collapse, water systems would fail, fuel pumps would fail, communications would disappear and refrigeration would cease. Estimates of economic damage in the United States alone range from $600 billion to $2.6 trillion, with untold loss of life due to lack of heat, medicine and emergency services.
But despite clear warnings, America’s power grid remains dangerously vulnerable.
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In my 2023 report for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Texas Defense, I detailed how both natural geomagnetic disturbances (GMDs) and man-made electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks pose existential risks to the electric grid.
A severe event could damage or destroy irreplaceable extra-high voltage (EHV) transformers, leading to long-term outages across the state and beyond.
But there’s good news: proven, cost-effective hardware solutions exist today. Neutral blocking devices equipped with capacitors, installed in the grounded neutral of high-voltage transformers, can prevent catastrophic damage. These devices block the quasi-direct current (quasi-DC) GICs caused by solar storms or the E3 component of an EMP explosion, while allowing normal 60 Hz AC current to flow unhindered. These devices buffer harmful ground currents, preventing overheating, destructive harmonics, voltage collapse and ultimately a meltdown.
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As a bonus, these devices also mitigate lower-level GICs, which currently shorten the life of transformers by years and cost the industry billions annually in reactive power losses.
The cost for these devices has fallen dramatically as the technology has matured. A nationwide effort to protect the most vulnerable 6,000 transformers would require a one-time investment of about $4 billion — a fraction of the trillions at risk.
Yet utilities and transmission companies remain reluctant and wary of passing on even modest costs to ratepayers. Regulators, meanwhile, have dragged their feet, relying on standards derived from studies that dramatically underestimated the threat.
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Many of these vulnerability assessments can be traced back to European research conducted more than thirty years ago, during an unusually quiet solar period. Those models assumed lower GIC intensities and did not take into account today’s more interconnected high-voltage grid – or the much more active sun we now experience in cycle 25.
Compounding the problem is the fact that most large power transformers are no longer made in America. The majority come from China, South Korea and Germany, with typical delivery times running up to four years or more under normal circumstances. If dozens or hundreds are destroyed by a massive solar storm, replacement could take a decade or more – time we wouldn’t have in a prolonged power outage.
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With sunspot AR4366 still crackling and more explosions likely in the coming days, the warning couldn’t be clearer. Congress and state legislatures should act quickly to mandate or encourage the installation of neutral blocking devices. Utilities must prioritize grid resiliency over concerns about short-term interest rates. And regulators must update standards to reflect real-world risks, not the Pollyannaish assumptions of a sleepy sun.
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The Carrington event literally shocked telegraph operators. A repeat could shock an entire civilization back to the pre-industrial era.
We have the technology to prevent this. We must act on it.
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