’American Blackout’: Four Major Real-Life Threats to the Electric Grid – The Great Energy Challenge Blog More » Power outage in Savannah, Georgia (Photograph courtesy Dave Hale, Flickr) A catastrophic, prolonged failure of the electrical grid—the sort of event whose effects are depicted in National Geographic Channel’s upcoming American Blackout , which premieres Sunday—may seem like just apocalyptic science fiction to some viewers. Unfortunately, though, the possibility of such a breakdown is all too real. (See related interactive: “ Survive the Blackout .”) Government and utility industry officials are so concerned, in fact, that in November, they will stage a massive emergency drill, called GridEx II , that will involve thousands of utility workers, business executives, National Guard officers, FBI antiterrorism experts and government officials from the U.S., Canada and Mexico. They’ll practice responding to a simulated failure of large parts of the electrical system across North America. (See related quiz: “ What You Don’t Know About Electricity .”) The scenario envisioned by GridEx II is a particularly scary one, in which terrorists or an enemy country stages a combination of cyber attacks and physical attacks that destroy or render inoperable crucial power facilities and take down large sections of the grid.

As a May 2013 Congressional report noted, sophisticated cyber saboteurs may already be probing our vulnerability to a massive blackout. U.S. utility companies already come under frequent attack from Internet hackers who continually try to infect utilities’ computer networks with malware and search for security flaws. One company alone told congressional investigators that it was hit with an astonishing 10,000 attacks in a typical month. If hackers managed to penetrate utility companies’ electronic defenses, they might be able to give instructions to key pieces of equipment that would cause them to fail. In a 2006 study, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory demonstrated that an attacker could instruct an electrical generator’s turbine to spin wildly out of control until smoke began pouring out, as this video illustrates. Since then, we’ve seen a real-life example of how such vandalism easily could be ratcheted up to a massive scale. In 2010, a piece of malware called Stuxnet destroyed as many as 1,000 centrifuges in an Iranian nuclear fuel-processing plant, in an attack that some suspect was launched by U.S. and/or Israeli clandestine agencies.

No wonder that former federal counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke has warned that such an “electronic Pearl Harbor” could cause devastating damage and thousands of deaths across the nation. A 2012 National Academy of Sciences report concurred, envisioning that attackers using a combination of hacking and physical sabotage could cripple the U.S. power grid and cause cascading failures of equipment that could take months to fix. “We are woefully unprepared for any large-scale geographic outage that might take place over an extended period of time,” explained Joel Gordes, research director for the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, an independent group that assesses the danger of such attacks and what it would take to thwart them. He said that while some generators and transmission lines probably would survive such an attack, they might not be able to muster enough juice to reboot the grid, which experts call a “black start.” And if critical equipment is damaged beyond repair, it might be necessary to transport replacement units long distances—an undertaking that would be difficult, if communications systems were also seriously damaged by the attack. U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz said the Energy Department had recently created a new internal cyber council, spanning four offices.

“We believe this is an area of increasing focus,” he said at a Center for Strategic and International Studies on Thursday. “Our energy infrastructures are coming under increasing and more sophisticated cyber attacks, and we have to stay ahead of that.” Besides a cyber attack, experts have envisioned other scenarios for a grid collapse. EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attack: In this scenario, terrorists or an enemy nation would detonate a nuclear weapon at a high altitude above the U.S., releasinga burst of radiation that would interact with the Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere—including the ionosphere, the thin upper layer filled with free electrons, which facilitates radio communications. As a result, a powerful electrical current would radiate down to the Earth and create additional currents that would course through manmade electrical circuits as well. Electrical infrastructure and electronic devices would receive severe shocks, causing severe, widespread damage. A 2004 Congressional commission warned that such an attack could cause “unprecedented cascading failures.” But even a localized EMP attack could cause a lot of damage.

A 2008 Congressional Research Service report predicted that an attack on the Washington DC-Baltimore region that only damaged 10 percent of communications systems and the electrical grid and 20 percent of electronic devices would still require a month of recovery time and inflict as much as $34 billion in economic losses. Solar flare: Not all of the threats to the grid are from human enemies. A solar storm, which would spew a surge of radiation across the 93million-mile distance between the Sun and our Earth, causing an electromagnetic pulse similar to the one that a high-altitude nuclear blast would trigger–except that it might be even bigger, and have even more devastating effects. While we’ve known the destructive effects of solar weather on Earth’s electrical infrastructure since the 19th century, the first really clear-cut warning came in 1989, when a moderate-intensity solar storm caused northeastern Canada’s Hydro-Quebec power grid to fail, leaving millions of people without electricity for nine hours.

Yousef Butt, a scientist at Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University, argued in a 2010 article in the online journal Space Review that the likelihood of a devastating EMP from a solar storm is greater than that from an intentional EMP attack. (See related story: “ As Sun Storms Ramp Up, Electric Grid Braces for Impact .”) Grid failure: There’s also the possibility that the grid simply could break down on its own. (See related photos: “ The World’s Worst Power Outages .”) That’s because of a crucial design flaw: when one part of the grid breaks down, it can cause a phenomenon called “cascading failure,” in which the whole grid progressively collapses like a stack of dominoes. “What happens is, a failure occurs somewhere and weakens the system a bit,” Iowa State University engineering professor Ian Dobson explained in a 2012 article . “On a bad day, something else happens. Usually it doesn’t, but on that day, let’s say, it does. If it’s a really bad day, then a third thing happens and the system becomes degraded.

You’re in a situation where it’s more likely that the next failure is going to happen because the last failure already happened. That’s the idea of cascading failure…Everything in the power system is protected so it doesn’t fry when something goes wrong. Things can disconnect to protect the equipment, but if you disconnect enough things, you get a blackout.” (See related blog post: “ Preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse: Are Microgrids Our Only Chance? ”) In an article published in Nature Physics in August 2013, U.S. and Israeli physicists concluded that for a system dependent upon a number of critical nodes, such as the U.S. electrical grid, such cascading failures are pretty much inevitable. We’ve already had a preview: In 2012 , three sections of India’s massive electrical grid collapsed , leaving 620 million people—nearly twice the population of the U.S.–without power for several hours in the biggest blackout in world history so far. (See related photos: “ India Power Outage Darkens Cities, Stops Trains .”) Keywords COLUMN-U.S.

orders power grid to prepare for solar storms: Kemp | Reuters Tue Feb 18, 2014 | 11:32 AM EST COLUMN-U.S. orders power grid to prepare for solar storms: Kemp (John Kemp is a Reuters market analyst. The views expressed are his own) By John Kemp LONDON Feb 18 U.S. electricity regulators have begun drafting new reliability standards to protect the power grid from a repeat of severe geomagnetic storms like those that crippled the U.S. telegraph service in 1859 and blacked out Quebec in 1989. Experts remain divided about just how much damage the grid would sustain in the event of another big solar storm, but regulators are taking a safety-first approach, ordering reliability coordinators and transmission operators to start preparing. According to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), the organisation which is responsible for grid reliability in the United States and Canada, the most likely consequence would be "voltage instability and subsequent voltage collapse." Power could be restored to customers in a matter of hours ("Special Reliability Assessment Interim Report: Effects of Geomagnetic Disturbances on the Bulk Power System" 2012). But modelling by the U.S.

Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory indicates a 1-in-100 year solar storm, such as those that struck the United States in 1859 and again in 1921, would cause as many as 300 high-voltage transformers to fail and suffer permanent damage. With only very limited stocks of spare high-voltage transformers, and a lengthy lead time for ordering and manufacturing new ones, customers could be left without power for weeks or even months. Ironically, the sun is unusually quiet at present. But the consequences of a big solar storm, if and when it arrives, would probably be much worse than a physical attack on the power network by criminals, terrorists or foreign agents . "Should a storm of similar magnitude (to 1859 or 1921) strike today, it could interrupt power to as many as 130 million people in the United States alone, requiring several years to recover," Oak Ridge warned ("Electromagnetic Pulse: Effects on the U.S. Power Grid" 2010). LITTLE WARNING Geomagnetic storms are a classic example of a high-impact low-frequency risk.

The threat on any given day may be remote, but if it occurred, the results could be catastrophic. If a solar storm struck the planet at the wrong time of day, North America could be thrown back over a century into the pre-electric age. And it could happen surprisingly fast. The worst geomagnetic storms are caused by coronal mass ejections (CMEs) in which billions of tonnes of highly charged particles are flung from the sun's surface out into space in the direction of Earth and then interact with the planet's own magnetic field. The full fury of the storm would reach Earth in between 14 and 96 hours, according to scientists, leaving hours or at most a few days to prepare after a coronal mass ejection has been detected by satellites close to the sun ("Research on Historical Records of Geomagnetic Storms" 2005). The National Aeronautic and Space Administration's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) satellite, positioned a million miles from Earth, can give indications of an incoming storm's potential severity but might give just 30 minutes warning, according to NERC.

Both the United States and Canada have specialist space weather forecasting centres, which use satellite data to issue forecasts, warnings and alerts about incoming solar radiation and solar storms, including to power grid operators ( Once the storm hits, power networks can be damaged almost instantly. The 1989 solar storm brought down the whole Quebec-Hydro power system in just 92 seconds, leaving six million customers without power, according to Oak Ridge. The same storm also triggered hundreds of incidents across the United States and burned out a major transformer at the Salem No 1 nuclear power plant in New Jersey. OLD TRANSFORMERS As a solar storm interacts with the Earth's own magnetic field, it produces strong geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) on the planet's surface, which can enter the power grid at transformer stations and travel along power lines, disrupting the normal operation of the network. NERC reckons the most likely impact would be wild fluctuations in voltage across the system. But those could still result in a cascading power failure as relays race to isolate vulnerable equipment and power plants shut down automatically.

The result might look a lot like the August 2003 blackout in the Northeast United States and neighbouring parts of Canada, when extreme swings in voltage led to the automatic shutdown of more than 500 generating units and cut power to 50 million people in five minutes. Some customers were left without power for as much as four days as grid operators attempted to perform a "black start" on the system. However, in the case of a geomagnetic storm, the consequences could be much more widespread, because a really large storm would hit power supplies across the entire of North America simultaneously. The biggest risk would arise if current flows and voltage swings caused high voltage transformers to become overloaded and overheat, resulting in failure or permanent damage. NERC admits some transformers based on older designs and nearing the end of their service lives could be vulnerable to burn out, especially if they are already heavily loaded at the time the storm hits. The Salem No 1 transformer was of this type. When it was inspected a week later the internal windings showed signs of charring. High-voltage transformers are not simple to replace. The power industry keeps limited spares, which are pooled among transmission operators and utilities through NERC's Spare Equipment Database (SED) programme.

But in the event of a storm that took out dozens, or even hundreds, of high-voltage transformers, there would simply not be enough spares to go around. The general manager of Pennsylvania Transformer, one of several manufacturers in the United States, recently told the Wall Street Journal: "I can only build 10 units a month." Following a really big solar storm, it might take over a year to replace all the burned out transformers. FERC ORDER 779 While the industry remains divided on the extent of the danger, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has ordered it to start making preparations anyway. Order 779, issued in May 2013, instructed NERC to initiate a two-stage planning process. In the first phase, NERC was ordered to develop reliability standards that would require owners and operators of the transmission system to develop operational procedures to mitigate the impact of solar storms. NERC has now submitted a three-point standard and submitted it to FERC for approval. Each of the regional reliability coordinators in the United States will be required to develop a geomagnetic storm operating plan and disseminate space weather forecasts to utilities and transmission operators.

Transmission operators, too, will be required to develop an operating plan to show how they will respond to an incoming storm. In some instances, that may mean cutting power supplies and reducing the loading on vulnerable equipment to reduce the risk of overheating. In the second stage, which is more controversial, NERC must develop standards requiring transmission owners and operators to conduct initial and ongoing assessments of how a solar storm would affect their equipment. According to FERC, stage two will "require owners and operators to develop a plan so that instability, uncontrolled separation or cascading failures of the bulk power system, caused by damage to critical or vulnerable equipment ... will not occur as a result of a (solar storm)". Transmission owners will not be allowed to rely on operating procedures alone.

They must also develop strategies for protecting the grid "based on factors such as the age, condition, technical specifications or location of specific equipment." Such strategies could include "automatically blocking geomagnetically induced currents from entering the bulk power system, instituting new requirements for new equipment, inventory management, and isolating certain equipment that is not effective to retrofit." The industry worries that some of these measures might not be cost effective, given the uncertain danger posed to transformers, but FERC has overruled these concerns, ordering the industry to start planning for the big one. (Editing by Veronica Brown) ADVERTISEMENT Upcoming Solar Storms Could Knock Out Power Grids, Satellites - Blog Upcoming Solar Storms Could Knock Out Power Grids, Satellites Space weather forecasters are predicting an upswing in solar activity that may result in catastrophes on Earth. The sun is on the upswing of an 11-year cycle called solar maximum, which is ripe for solar flares. The sun’s volatility is expected to reach an apex sometime in May 2013, said William Murtagh, a space weather scientist with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

Scientists are racing to understand the effects its energy might have on the U.S power grids in hopes that potential cataclysm can be avoided. At present, there is no reliable method of predicting when and if Earth will be bombarded by solar storms, or how they will affect the electrical systems on which modern man has become almost irrevocably dependent. But they happen frequently and the big one could be on its way. “We know these events are going to occur,” Richard Andres, senior fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies, said Oct. 6 at a conference on severe space weather hosted by the National Defense University. “What we’ve been doing is building up electrical infrastructure for the last 50 years.” As the nation’s power grid has become increasingly complex, little is known about what effect severe solar-generated weather would have on its reliability. Until science has answers, we’re in the crosshairs, said John Kappenman, the head of Storm Analysis Consultants, which studies solar storms. “As a society, we are playing Russian Roulette with the sun,” Kappenman said. “If you play that game too long, you’re going to lose.” The effects of a solar storm are varied and the people who understand them are few, Andres said.

NDU’s primary mission is to act as a conduit between experts, industry and government to hit on a plan to deal with a potentially crippling solar storm. Grids are also potentially vulnerable to cyber-attacks or to manmade electromagnetic pulse weapons, but those scenarios were outside the scope of NDU’s investigation. The conference was the culmination of several days of exercises involving industry, government, researchers and defense officials aimed at parsing out what the impact and aftermath of a massive solar storm would look like. Agencies that monitor the sun’s behavior, including the National Weather Service, have a limited ability to predict when solar flares, also known as coronal mass ejections, are earthbound. There is only one satellite designed for that purpose and it is insufficient, Andres said. Still, the likelihood and magnitude of future space weather is a “big uncertainty,” Murtagh said. And it may not be the most intense solar activity that causes the most damage. Solar storms in 1921 and 1859, the two considered the most destructive since measurements have been taken, were both lower than average intensity for solar storms over the past century.

More frequently, solar storms have caused hours-long disruptions in high-frequency radio communications and GPS satellites, Murtagh said. Understanding the effect on communications has profound implications for the accuracy of military and civilian vehicles that rely on the navigation system. In 1989, a solar storm — a massive burst of plasma and energy emitted by the sun — disabled the entire electrical grid of Quebec. The magnetosphere protects the planet from most of this energy. It acts as a shield and deflects most of it, but strong storms can penetrate these natural defenses. Once a large storm hits, the nation’s power grid and electrical infrastructure is at risk, but industry representatives at the moment can only say they don’t know how bad the damage would be, Andres said. “This is a very serious problem and we need more science on this. We have a fairly good idea of what would happen if an EMP from a manmade device occurred,” Andres said. “We’re not quite as certain of what would happen if a massive event occurred based on a solar storm.” Scientists at the Idaho National Laboratory are studying the effects of energy pulses on transformers such as those scattered throughout the nation’s energy grid.

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is sponsoring the experiments, is preparing to release a report on its findings Feb. 1. “What we really did not get a grasp on, and this is very important, is what would happen to society as a whole,” Andres said. “What would happen if you had the effect of a Hurricane Katrina, except instead of hitting one city, it hit 100 cities at once.” Worst-case scenario, the nation’s entire electrical grid collapses under the strain of disruptive energy from the sun. Kappenman said power supply is the “scaffolding of modern society and if it fails, all other critical infrastructure will fail.” It would be the “worst disaster society could imagine,” he added. Everything that runs on electricity — food production, waste treatment, potable water distribution, computers — would fail immediately. Society would be plunged into the 18th century. “We have become a hugely dependent society,” said Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, D-Md., and co-chair of the Congressional electromagnetic pulse caucus. “We are dependent on the electric grid and on electricity.

If you think about your life and the things you do, if the electric grid is down, almost every one of the institutions in our country is down.” Image: NASA U.S. Power Grids Prepping for Solar Storms U.S. Power Grids Prepping for Solar Storms By John Kemp | February 20, 2014 Comments U.S. electricity regulators have begun drafting new reliability standards to protect the power grid from a repeat of severe geomagnetic storms like those that crippled the U.S. telegraph service in 1859 and blacked out Quebec in 1989. Experts remain divided about just how much damage the grid would sustain in the event of another big solar storm, but regulators are taking a safety-first approach, ordering reliability coordinators and transmission operators to start preparing. According to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), the organisation which is responsible for grid reliability in the United States and Canada, the most likely consequence would be “voltage instability and subsequent voltage collapse.” Power could be restored to customers in a matter of hours (“Special Reliability Assessment Interim Report: Effects of Geomagnetic Disturbances on the Bulk Power System” 2012).

But modelling by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory indicates a 1-in-100 year solar storm, such as those that struck the United States in 1859 and again in 1921, would cause as many as 300 high-voltage transformers to fail and suffer permanent damage. With only very limited stocks of spare high-voltage transformers, and a lengthy lead time for ordering and manufacturing new ones, customers could be left without power for weeks or even months. Ironically, the sun is unusually quiet at present. But the consequences of a big solar storm, if and when it arrives, would probably be much worse than a physical attack on the power network by criminals, terrorists or foreign agents . “Should a storm of similar magnitude (to 1859 or 1921) strike today, it could interrupt power to as many as 130 million people in the United States alone, requiring several years to recover,” Oak Ridge warned (“Electromagnetic Pulse: Effects on the U.S. Power Grid” 2010). LITTLE WARNING Geomagnetic storms are a classic example of a high-impact low-frequency risk.

The threat on any given day may be remote, but if it occurred, the results could be catastrophic. If a solar storm struck the planet at the wrong time of day, North America could be thrown back over a century into the pre-electric age. And it could happen surprisingly fast. The worst geomagnetic storms are caused by coronal mass ejections (CMEs) in which billions of tonnes of highly charged particles are flung from the sun’s surface out into space in the direction of Earth and then interact with the planet’s own magnetic field. The full fury of the storm would reach Earth in between 14 and 96 hours, according to scientists, leaving hours or at most a few days to prepare after a coronal mass ejection has been detected by satellites close to the sun (“Research on Historical Records of Geomagnetic Storms” 2005). The National Aeronautic and Space Administration’s Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) satellite, positioned a million miles from Earth, can give indications of an incoming storm’s potential severity but might give just 30 minutes warning, according to NERC.

Both the United States and Canada have specialist space weather forecasting centres, which use satellite data to issue forecasts, warnings and alerts about incoming solar radiation and solar storms, including to power grid operators ( Once the storm hits, power networks can be damaged almost instantly. The 1989 solar storm brought down the whole Quebec-Hydro power system in just 92 seconds, leaving six million customers without power, according to Oak Ridge. The same storm also triggered hundreds of incidents across the United States and burned out a major transformer at the Salem No 1 nuclear power plant in New Jersey. OLD TRANSFORMERS As a solar storm interacts with the Earth’s own magnetic field, it produces strong geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) on the planet’s surface, which can enter the power grid at transformer stations and travel along power lines, disrupting the normal operation of the network. NERC reckons the most likely impact would be wild fluctuations in voltage across the system. But those could still result in a cascading power failure as relays race to isolate vulnerable equipment and power plants shut down automatically.

The result might look a lot like the August 2003 blackout in the Northeast United States and neighbouring parts of Canada, when extreme swings in voltage led to the automatic shutdown of more than 500 generating units and cut power to 50 million people in five minutes. Some customers were left without power for as much as four days as grid operators attempted to perform a “black start” on the system. However, in the case of a geomagnetic storm, the consequences could be much more widespread, because a really large storm would hit power supplies across the entire of North America simultaneously. The biggest risk would arise if current flows and voltage swings caused high voltage transformers to become overloaded and overheat, resulting in failure or permanent damage. NERC admits some transformers based on older designs and nearing the end of their service lives could be vulnerable to burn out, especially if they are already heavily loaded at the time the storm hits. The Salem No 1 transformer was of this type. When it was inspected a week later the internal windings showed signs of charring. High-voltage transformers are not simple to replace. The power industry keeps limited spares, which are pooled among transmission operators and utilities through NERC’s Spare Equipment Database (SED) programme.

But in the event of a storm that took out dozens, or even hundreds, of high-voltage transformers, there would simply not be enough spares to go around. The general manager of Pennsylvania Transformer, one of several manufacturers in the United States, recently told the Wall Street Journal: “I can only build 10 units a month.” Following a really big solar storm, it might take over a year to replace all the burned out transformers. FERC ORDER 779 While the industry remains divided on the extent of the danger, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has ordered it to start making preparations anyway. Order 779, issued in May 2013, instructed NERC to initiate a two-stage planning process. In the first phase, NERC was ordered to develop reliability standards that would require owners and operators of the transmission system to develop operational procedures to mitigate the impact of solar storms. NERC has now submitted a three-point standard and submitted it to FERC for approval. Each of the regional reliability coordinators in the United States will be required to develop a geomagnetic storm operating plan and disseminate space weather forecasts to utilities and transmission operators.

Transmission operators, too, will be required to develop an operating plan to show how they will respond to an incoming storm. In some instances, that may mean cutting power supplies and reducing the loading on vulnerable equipment to reduce the risk of overheating. In the second stage, which is more controversial, NERC must develop standards requiring transmission owners and operators to conduct initial and ongoing assessments of how a solar storm would affect their equipment. According to FERC, stage two will “require owners and operators to develop a plan so that instability, uncontrolled separation or cascading failures of the bulk power system, caused by damage to critical or vulnerable equipment … will not occur as a result of a (solar storm)”. Transmission owners will not be allowed to rely on operating procedures alone.

They must also develop strategies for protecting the grid “based on factors such as the age, condition, technical specifications or location of specific equipment.” Such strategies could include “automatically blocking geomagnetically induced currents from entering the bulk power system, instituting new requirements for new equipment, inventory management, and isolating certain equipment that is not effective to retrofit.” The industry worries that some of these measures might not be cost effective, given the uncertain danger posed to transformers, but FERC has overruled these concerns, ordering the industry to start planning for the big one. (Editing by Veronica Brown) Yikes! Solar storm that almost hit Earth could have caused chaos - latimes Yikes! Solar storm that almost hit Earth could have caused chaos March 20, 2014 |By Amina Khan | This post has been updated, as indicated below. Phew! You may not have known it, but Earth barely missed the "perfect solar storm" that could have smashed into our magnetic field and wreaked havoc with our satellite systems, electronics and power systems, potentially causing trillions of dollars in damage, according to data from NASA’s STEREO-A spacecraft.

On July 22, 2012, STEREO-A spotted what looked like an enormous solar eruption sending out a coronal mass ejection at blazing top speeds of roughly 1,800 miles per second – the fastest ever recorded by the spacecraft. By the time it actually passed STEREO-A a mere 17 hours later, the magnetic cloud was still traveling at 750 miles per second. That’s about three times faster than your typical coronal mass ejection, which runs into Earth at an average speed of about 280 miles per second, according to a study in the journal Nature Communications. [Updated at 6:28 a.m., March 20: It's a good thing this incredible blast wasn't pointed at us, scientists said. "This record solar wind speed and magnetic field would have generated the most severe geomagnetic storm since the beginning of the space era, if the event had hit the Earth," the study authors wrote."] This above-average event was the result of a perfect storm in outer space, according to an international team of researchers, led by Ying Liu of China’s National Space Science Center.

There was actually not one, but two coronal mass ejections that erupted from the same region of the sun within 10 to 15 minutes of one another that tangled close to the sun and then barreled into space. And while most storms tend to slow down pretty quickly, this one didn’t, because an earlier coronal mass ejection four days before had blazed a path through space and cleared out any obstacles that would have slowed it down. If the solar onslaught had occurred just nine days earlier, it would have rivaled the 1859 Carrington event, a solar storm that zapped the telegraph system, delivering shocks to telegraph operators, and triggering aurorae -- a typically polar light show in the sky -- as close to the equator as Hawaii and the Caribbean. Today, such a storm would have caused far more damage in our now highly wired world, utterly dependent on electronics. (As further comparison, a much weaker geomagnetic storm in 1989 caused Quebec’s power grid to fail.) There are multiple dangers to a solar storm. A massive eruption of material from the sun, known as a coronal mass ejection, can release roughly a billion hydrogen bombs’ worth of energy.

This sends a magnetic cloud of material at extremely high speeds barreling into space. And if this cloud slams into Earth’s magnetic field, the resulting mashup can cause a geomagnetic storm that can disrupt satellites and power grids. Such solar eruptions can also hurl out a super-fast blast of energetic protons traveling near the speed of light that can disrupt radio communications, including those made by airline pilots. At the time, STEREO-A was sitting about 89 million miles away from the Sun – roughly the same distance as the Earth, which is about 93 million miles away. Luckily, the storm was pointed away from Earth, in the direction of STEREO-A. A recent study indicated that a storm like the 1859 Carrington event would have caused up to $2.6 trillion in damage here on Earth. This near-miss storm could potentially have caused damage on a similar order. And the fact that it did happen during what was a historically weak solar cycle hints that such dangerous storms might be more common than we think – and may require more study in order to accurately predict and prepare for them.

“Observations of such a solar superstorm during a very weak solar cycle indicate that extreme events are not as infrequent as we imagine,” the authors wrote. ALSO: Solar Storm Warning - DSCOVR satellite By Carl Franzen Dec 18, 2014 For years, sci-fi stories and real scientists have warned about the possibility of a catastrophic solar storm frying Earth's power grid, GPS satellites, and aircraft radios. But today, humanity is set to get its most advanced warning system ever created for detecting these storms in enough time to take preventative action. A new satellite called DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate Observatory) is scheduled for to be launched into space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday, February 11, 2015. Over the next three and a half months, it will float nearly a million miles away from the Earth and enter into orbit around the Sun, beginning a host of observations of our star and its effects on our planet. Most critically, DSCOVR was designed to provide a lead-time of 15 to 60 minutes before a surge of charged solar particles strikes the Earth.

DSCOVR was designed to provide the Earth a lead-time of 15 to 60 minutes Advertisement - Continue Reading Below These surges, called coronal mass ejections (CMEs), happen when the Sun's magnetic fields fluctuate, causing large portions of its surface (corona) to warp and expand, leading to the sun ejecting huge streams of particles at high velocity. The sun regularly emits particles in a stream called the solar wind, which strikes the Earth, but is mostly harmless. Every once in a while, though—especially around solar maximum, the peak of an 11-year natural cycle in solar activity—a big one of these coronal mass ejections is released. Directed toward our planet, it could cause the solar wind to rip parts of Earth's own magnetic field asunder, an event known as a geomagnetic storm. Most Popular While the result is beautiful auroras in the sky, the damage these storms can cause isn't just theoretical: In 1989, one overloaded the power grid in Quebec, Canada, causing a nearly province-wide blackout.

One such storm in 1859, dubbed " the Carrington event " after the astronomer who described it) coursed through the global telegraph system, causing damage, sparks, and paper to catch fire. With so much of our planet now reliant upon orbital systems and satellites for communication and guidance, future events could be even more devastating — such a storm could knock out power for up to 130 million Americans, according to a recent White House report . NASA Since 1997, a NASA satellite called ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer) has stood watch over the Sun, looking for these types of events and providing data to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), the U.S. government's official source for space weather forecasts, alerts, watches and warnings. SWPC delivers solar forecasts to affected industries, giving them time to prepare by reducing power loads or shifting flight patterns, in the case of aircraft pilots. But the ACE satellite is now more than a decade beyond its intended lifetime. If it were to fail, planet Earth would have little warning about solar weather. That's why DSCOVR's success is so crucial.

Operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), it will provide more accurate forecasting than ACE and measure solar wind 100 times faster than its predecessor. Plus, it will measure the radiation reflected by the part of Earth lit by the Sun and capture 2048 x 2048-pixel images of our planet, which will improve the datasets used by climate scientists. That's not bad for a spacecraft already on its second act. DSCOVR was originally commissioned in 1998 by then-Vice President Al Gore as an Earth-monitoring satellite called Traina, but the mission was cancelled and the spacecraft put into storage for seven years. In 2008, scientists figured out the spacecraft could be useful for solar observations, revived it, and re-christened it. Perhaps they should called it Phoenix instead. Editor's note: this story was initially reported in late 2014, and we've updated it to reflect the Falcon 9's delayed launch.

More from Popular Mechanics: Extreme Solar Storm Could Cause Widespread Disruptions Extreme Solar Storm Could Cause Widespread Disruptions on Earth By Miriam Kramer, Space.com Staff Writer | May 21, 2013 07:00am ET MORE A burst of solar material leaps off the left side of the sun in what’s known as a prominence eruption. This image combines three images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured on May 3, 2013, at 1:45 pm EDT. Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA WASHINGTON — If an extreme solar storm aimed at the Earth hits in just the right way, it could put interconnected electrical grids around the world at serious risk, experts say. In addition to creating beautiful auroras, extreme solar storms could knock out a wide range of electric utilities needed to keep life in the United States and around the world functioning normally, according to presenters here at the fourth annual Electric Infrastructure Security Summit. "What [a solar storm] can do — even if it isn't causing a continental-scale outage — it can really cause a regional blackout," said Daniel Baker, director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado .

"Imagine something like, for example, Superstorm Sandy. Imagine that kind of severe storm — but causing regional outages for weeks. Living without power really cascades and propagates in remarkable ways throughout our society." [ The Worst Solar Storms in History ] As the sun reaches the peak in its 11-year cycle this year, scientists expect that active regions of the star — known as sunspots — will erupt, flinging streams of charged particles out into the solar system. Relatively minor storms can also create temporary radio blackouts and disrupt GPS navigation. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that all solar eruptions will impact the Earth. Most coronal mass ejections are not aimed toward the planet, and instead shoot out harmlessly into other parts of the solar system. But once every century or so, an extreme solar storm is expected to impact the Earth, Baker told SPACE.com. The last documented solar storm in this category is known as the Carrington event. Particles from a powerful coronal mass ejection overloaded telegraph wires, setting paper messages on fire in 1859. These kinds of storms from the sun are notoriously difficult to predict.

Experts understand the general conditions under which solar storms occur, but it's hard to forecast just how powerful the storm will be, said Karel Schrijver, a solar scientist and fellow at Lockheed Martin. "A [coronal mass ejection] takes two to four days to get to the Earth, so if we had more observational resources, to map its motion — and if we had some measurements of the structure of what's going to hit you — there are ways by which we can certainly improve the forecast," Schrijver told SPACE.com. Scientists can use sun-observing satellites like NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory to monitor, and possibly forecast, solar weather that could be heading toward the planet, Schrijver said. "There's a lot of space to be explored in terms of computer models that are becoming ever more powerful," Schrijver added. "The heliophysics division at NASA has a wonderful fleet of observatories that looks at the space between the sun and the Earth and the Earth's environment." More Fallout: No Medicine, No Water Medicine With transportation systems down, hospital generators run out of fuel after a few weeks, or even days. Ventilators and heart and lung pumps will no longer work. Drugs that need refrigeration will soon spoil.

Insulin goes bad after 28 days. Water Pumps Municipal pumps fail, causing backflow--water runs backward through pipes and gets contaminated with bacteria. Water pumps shut off in residential homes and apartments, leaving millions without potable water. Cities issue boiling advisories, but most stoves can't work without power or natural gas. After a month running backup diesel and batteries, nuclear plants' water pumps for cooling pools stop. Spent fuel rods melt down, and radiation can escape into the air. One of the biggest disasters we face would begin about 18 hours after the sun spit out a 10-billion-ton ball of plasma --something it has done before and is sure to do again. When the ball, a charged cloud of particles called a coronal mass ejection (CME), struck the Earth, electrical currents would spike through the power grid. Transformers would be destroyed. Lights would go out. Food would spoil and--since the entire transportation system would also be shut down--go unrestocked. Curious about what a CME would mean for us?

Check out our [feature.]( Within weeks, backup generators at nuclear power plants would have run down, and the electric pumps that supply water to cooling ponds, where radioactive spent fuel rods are stored, would shut off. Multiple meltdowns would ensue. "Imagine 30 Chernobyls across the U.S.," says electrical engineer John Kappenman, an expert on the grid's vulnerability to space weather. A CME big enough to take out a chunk of the grid is what scientists and insurers call a high-consequence, low-frequency event. Many space-weather scientists say the Earth is due for one soon. Although CMEs can strike anytime, they are closely correlated to highs in the 11-year sunspot cycle. The current cycle will peak in July 2013. The most powerful CME in recorded history occurred during a solar cycle with a peak similar to the one scientists are predicting in 2013. During the so-called Carrington Event in 1859, electrical discharges in the U.S. shocked telegraph operators and set their machines on fire. A CME in 1921 disrupted radio across the East Coast and telephone operations in most of Europe.

In a 2008 National Academy of Sciences report, scientists estimated that a 1921-level storm could knock out 350 transformers on the American grid, leaving 130 million people without electricity. Replacing broken transformers would take a long time because most require up to two years to manufacture. "We need to build protection against 100-year solar storms."Once outside power is lost, nuclear plants have diesel generators that can pump water to spent-fuel cooling pools for up to 30 days. The extent of the meltdown threat is well-documented. A month before the Fukushima plant in Japan went offline in March, the Foundation for Resilient Societies, a committee of engineers, filed a petition with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission recommending the augmentation of nuclear plants' emergency backup systems. The petition claims that a severe solar storm would be far worse than a 9.0-magnitude quake and could leave about two thirds of the country's nuclear plants without power for one to two years.

Paul Souders/Getty Images Plasma Shock Hurtling at up to six million mph through space, a coronal mass ejection produces shock waves that can damage satellites and electrical surges that can bring down the grid, potentially leading to nuclear meltdown. Preventing a surge from a CME would be costly. With enough warning (at least a few hours, probably), power companies could shut transformers off entirely, turning them back on after the storm. But shutting down the grid on such a large scale would cost billions. To confidently do so, forecasting must be accurate. Last October, NASA scientists announced its Solar Shield program to monitor solar eruptions and predict storms. Though a good step, the system uses a satellite that was launched in 1997 and designed to run just five years. No other country has anything similar, or as advanced. Our backup systems aren't in place yet, either. The Department of Homeland Security is funding the development of an emergency replacement transformer, but it won't be field-ready for several years. Kappenman has developed a $100,000 capacitor to block storm-induced surges, but these are unproven in emergency situations.

"A massive solar storm is a 'low probability' event the same way a 100-year flood is," Thomas Popik, the author of the NRC petition, says. "Just as we build levees to protect against 100-year floods, we need to build protection against 100-year solar storms." Tags:

Question: What type of storm could cause the power grid to fail and also damage satellites?
Answer: Solar Storm