Credit: North American Electric Reliability Corporation and the US Dept. Growth of the High Voltage Transmission Network and annual electric energy usage in the United States over the past 50 years. A 2009 report by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) and the US Department of Energy concluded that modern power systems have a "significantly enhance vulnerability and exposure to effects of a severe geomagnetic storm." The underlying reason may be seen at a glance in this plot: While many utilities have taken steps to fortify their grids, the overall situation has only gotten worse.
#North american power grid series#
A similar series of "Halloween storms" in October 2003 triggered a regional blackout in southern Sweden and may have damaged transformers in South Africa. The storm damaged transformers in Quebec, New Jersey, and Great Britain, and caused more than 200 power anomalies across the USA from the eastern seaboard to the Pacific Northwest. This actually happened in Quebec on March 13, 1989, when a geomagnetic storm much less severe than the Carrington Event knocked out power across the entire province for more than nine hours. Powerful GICs can overload circuits, trip breakers, and in extreme cases melt the windings of heavy-duty transformers. These magnetic vibrations induce currents almost everywhere, from Earth's upper atmosphere to the ground beneath our feet. When a coronal mass ejection (a billion-ton solar storm cloud) hits Earth's magnetic field, the impact causes the field to shake and quiver. The troublemaker for power grids is the "GIC" – short for geomagnetically induced current.
"We believe we can zero in on specific transformers and predict which of them are going to be hit hardest by a space weather event." "Solar Shield is a new and experimental forecasting system for the North American power grid," explains project leader Antti Pulkkinen, a Catholic University of America research associate working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The sun rises behind high-voltage power lines in North America.Ī new NASA project called "Solar Shield" could help keep the lights on.
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