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Solar storms have the potential to affect our power grid and cause widespread blackouts. Watch how researchers and engineers are working together to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Aurora is the beautiful result of space weather.

Solar storms have the potential to affect our power grid and cause widespread blackouts. Watch how researchers and engineers are working together to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Can Solar Storms Knock Out Our Power Grid?

Aurora is the beautiful result of space weather.

Planet Earth

Can Solar Storms Knock Out Our Power Grid?Published: June 24, 2021Narrator: Could a massive solar storm knock out our electrical grid?Kelly Korreck: All this plasma that comes rushing towards us actually interacts with the Earth's magnetic field and all those energetic particles come rushing in. They can induce currents and end up overloading the system, and when you overload the power grids it could cause blackouts.Narrator: Imagine, you wake up to go to work one morning only to discover that it is not morning yet. What you have mistaken for the sunrise is actually a massive space weather event, causing bright auroras.Kelly Korreck: Aurora is the beautiful result of space weather. As those energetic particles from the sun are funneled by the Earth's magnetic fields down towards our atmosphere, those energetic particles hit nitrogen and oxygen atoms in the atmosphere and they light up.Narrator: This is exactly what happened to many people including miners in the Rocky Mountains in 1859 during the Carrington Event, the largest geomagnetic storm, or major disturbance of the Earth’s magnetosphere, in recorded history.Kelly Korreck: What happened there is you were able to see the aurora down to Hawaii. Aurora normally is centered on either the North or South Pole. This was a major disturbance in the atmosphere.Narrator: Even though the miners were not observing the sunrise, this event can be traced back to the Sun.Kelly Korreck: A solar flare is when the magnetic fields on the sun reconnect in an absolutely explosive way.Rob Steenburgh: When the magnetic field snaps and reconnects you get a huge release of energy and that release of energy is the solar flare.Narrator: A solar flare is often accompanied by a coronal mass ejection — or CME. This is what caused the Carrington Event.Emanuel Bernabeu: The sun expels billions of tons of charged particles that travel through space, and once they reach Earth, they interact with Earth's magnetic field compressing Earth's magnetic field.Rob Steenburgh: In one way you can think of it as when you ring a bell and it vibrates. Well the CME smacks into Earth and Earth's magnetic field vibrates.Narrator: The Carrington Event did cause a disruption in communication due to damaged telegraph lines but it is nothing compared to the impact an event like that could have on the modern electrical grid.Emanuel Bernabeu: Basically, the power grid is like an antenna and we have this current that gets induced in our transmission line. We call it geomagnetically induced current.Narrator: And it is this induced current that can wreak havoc. In 1989, the Quebec region experienced a geomagnetic storm resulting from a CME of significant magnitude, causing 6 million people to lose power for up to 9 hours.Emanuel Bernabeu: The blackout was a wake up call for our industry. The root cause was that between Quebec and the United States we have long corridors of transmission lines. To transfer this huge amount of power between Canada and the United States, you have to support and maintain a healthy voltage across the network. During this geomagnetic disturbance we lost seven of these devices that are critical to maintain voltage, and we saw a voltage collapse — a blackout. There's truly no other phenomena that can cause such a wide area failure. So slowly but surely, we put all the pieces together and we figured out that the root cause was this geomagnetically induced current.Narrator: This particular event led engineers and researchers to better understand the harmful impacts of geomagnetic storms on the power grid and prompted them to create new industry standards.Rob Steenburgh: The power grid operators have to take certain protective actions to maintain the stability of the grid.Emanuel Bernabeu: It's very much like a chess game. Good chess players can almost visualize moves and countermoves. Well, that's exactly what we do. Every minute we're running thousands upon thousands of what-if scenarios trying to checkmate this geomagnetic disturbance.Narrator: The power grid isn’t the only thing on Earth affected by geomagnetic storms. They can also wreak havoc on GPS technology.Kelly Korreck: You really don't want to land a plane when you don't have GPS.Rob Steenburgh: Airlines might reroute based on a threat from space weather.Narrator: And it can really confuse pigeons.Rob Steenburgh: Pigeons get lost. We interact with the pigeon racing community and provide them with details of the geomagnetic activity before they launch their pigeons, because if it’s too geomagnetically disturbed, they might not return.Narrator: For many reasons it is important to know when space weather might impact Earth and researchers are getting better at being able to predict it.Kelly Korreck: Today we are where terrestrial weather was about 20 years ago.Rob Steenburgh: There's a lot we learned in that evolution of meteorology that we can apply to the evolution of space weather.Kelly Korreck: When we see a solar flare we have eight minutes from the time that that flare happens until the most energetic particles get here, 12 hours to 18 hours for the coronal mass ejection itself to hit.Rob Steenburgh: We can put out a watch when we first detect this thing and determine that it's earth-direct. That gives the utility companies time to get ready for this.Narrator: We are now entering a new 11-year solar cycle which means for the next several years the activity on the sun will increase until we reach what is called solar maximum in 2025Emanuel Bernabeu: As you approach solar maximum, the probability and likelihood of having more and more CMEs increases.Narrator: So, as we start a new cycle and approach solar maximum again should we be concerned about the next big geomagnetic storm?Rob Steenburgh: Your worry level should be low, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't prepare for it because there's no guarantee that it won’t happen tomorrow. For power companies, for airlines, for human space flight, for satellite operators, maybe pigeon racers, you know, they have to keep this in mind because it impacts them.Emanuel Bernabeu: We can say that we understand the problem, we have situational awareness, we have operating procedures, and we continue to engineer the problem out, designing a grid that can withstand a one-in-100 year type of event. We've done our homework and we're ready to handle the next solar cycle.

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Can Solar Storms Knock Out Our Power Grid?

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Support Provided By

Explore More

Texas' Power Grid Trouble is Far From Over

Evidence of ancient solar storms in tree rings could pinpoint major historical events

Steve the ‘aurora’ serves up a double scoop of celestial magic