Strong Solar Storm Tests Electric Grid
Jan 25, 2012; 11:34 AM ET
Electric power grids in the United States and other nations can handle what is proving to be the largest solar blast since 2005 -- and a cloud of fast-moving particles headed toward the Earth, scientists say.
A solar flare that erupted Sunday night unleashed a burst of electromagnetic radiation and particles known as a "coronal mass ejection" that is traveling toward Earth at 4 million miles an hour, said Doug Biesecker, a physicist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo.
The storm already has triggered a wild display of auroral displays around the world and an uptick in errors for satellite operators and has forced flights through polar regions to be rerouted, he said.
The storm also damaged some equipment this morning on NASA's orbiting spacecraft, said Antti Pulkkinen, who leads the space agency's "Solar Shield" satellite-based detection system at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
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A solar blast that erupted Sunday night. Click the image to watch a video. Photo courtesy of NASA. |
Even so, the global electric grid is likely to see only moderate current fluctuations in regions like Canada and northern Europe and possibly the northernmost parts of the United States, Pulkkinen said.
"We're not expecting this storm to be extreme; we're expecting a moderate impact," he said. "We're going to have to wait another day or two to see exactly how this plays out."
Biesecker said the U.S. grid could see moderate "geomagnetically induced currents" that transformers on the grid will smooth out, as long as the fluctuations are small enough. "The transformers themselves will take a little bit of an extra beating, but this for the power grid will be a small storm," he said, "the sort of thing they handle on a fairly regular basis."
Transformers -- devices that transfer electricity and change voltage -- act like antennas during space storms and send fluctuating electric currents from near space onto the grid, Pulkkinen said. Distortions on the electric grid can then cause power lines to overheat, damage transformers, trip relays and cause blackouts, he said.
Scientists are expecting an uptick in solar storms in the next two to four years, and grid operators need to be aware and safeguard the grid, Pulkkinen said. Although some high-voltage power lines may trip as a result of the disturbances, the public has no reason to be alarmed, he added.
"In the near future, we can expect to have more of these kinds of disturbances from the sun, more impacts on the grid, more auroral displays," he said. "Our view here is that there is no reason for major concern."
Even so, the North American Electric Reliability Corp., which oversees grid reliability, has warned that solar storms have the potential to trip key transmission lines and induce irreversible physical damage to large transformers.
Grid operators have been discussing the need to beef up stockpiles of spare transformers, which are not currently manufactured in the United States, in the event of such an emergency (ClimateWire, June 9, 2011).
Joseph McClelland, director of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's Office of Electric Reliability, told a Senate panel last May that solar storms of the past could inflict serious damage on today's transmission system.
He pointed to a March 2010 study by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory that found a solar storm similar to the one that occurred in 1921 could interrupt up to 300 bulk power system transformers and knock out power to 130 million people for "a period of years" (Greenwire, May 5, 2011).
Pulkkinen said the last major solar storm that rerouted flights and affected electric grids around the world occurred in 2003 and is known as the "Halloween storm." That disturbance knocked out power to one town in southern Sweden but otherwise left the grid unharmed, he said.
A more significant storm occurred in 1989, when a massive solar storm blacked out the entire power grid in Quebec for more than 10 hours, he said. The strongest storm on record hit in 1859 and damaged the nation's telegraph system, but no high-voltage power lines were in place at the time, he said.
Reprinted from GreenWire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. 202-628-6500.
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Hannah Northey, E&E reporter
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