The Grid vs. The Next Big Solar Storm

this episode of real engineering is brought to you by Shopify my trusted partner for merch sales on July 19th 2012 the Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this incredible footage of the Sun this clip was recorded with one frame every 12 seconds meaning every second of this video represents six minutes of real time this event began with an intense solar flare a sudden release of magnetic energy sending ungodly amounts of energy in the form of radiation and light into space this particular solar flare was followed by a coronal mass ejection a massive twisted bubble shaped eruption firing a colossal cloud of electrically charged particles into space which can disrupt interplanetary magnetic fields and interact with Earth's magnetic field in what is known as a geomagnetic storm finally as the solar storm subsided and the eruption bubble began to cool we were treated to one of the most mesmerizing events in our solar system coronal rain where the remaining charged plasma cools and falls back to the surface of the Sun forming these beautiful cage-like structures as the particles follow the sun's magnetic field lines back down an astounded ly beautiful event but had it happened just a week earlier the flare would have been pointing squarely at earth and it wouldn't have been the first time a solar storm affected life negatively on earth in 1859 a similarly powerful solar flare called the Carrington event did hit earth treating people as far south as the Caribbean to the Northern Lights while also knocking out major telegraph systems in both Europe and North America in some cases the geomagnetic disturbances were so strong that they sparked fires shocked telegraph operators and even allowed the telegraph system to work with no power in 1989 a large geomagnetic storm caused a blackout in Quebec after the coronal mass ejection managed to trip circuit breakers in the grid leaving six million people without power for nine hours so clearly these storms have the power to really mess with vital technologies that keep our society moving but how exactly do they do it to understand this we first need to understand some basics of how electricity is generated in our power stations as you probably know already we generate electricity by moving a wire through a magnetic field or vice versa the basic law behind this is called Faraday's law which states that any change to a magnetic field surrounding a coil of wire will cause an electro-motive force to be produced otherwise known as a voltage the voltage can be considered the force pushing the electrons through a wire if they are free to move a current will be produced the current is a measure of the rate of flow of electrons we generally generate electricity by rotating a coil of wire inside in magnetic field we do it this way simply because rotational motion is efficient with no changing of Direction like linear motion forcing us to decelerate and loosen ershon but we can generate currents other ways like dropping a magnet through a coil of wire this moves the magnetic field itself rather than the coil of wire so stationary wires can generate currents when a magnetic field changes around them and our electricity grid happens to be made up of millions of kilometres of stationary wire we have effectively turned the planet into a massive electric generator by surrounding the Earth's magnetic core with all this conductive wire the only thing that's missing is a large shift in the Earth's magnetic field unfortunately for us that is exactly what coronal mass ejections do to Earth's magnetic field on March 10th 1989 the Sun blasted a cloud of charged particles so large that it wore our planet in size it raced through space at 450 kilometres per second before crashing into the Earth's magnetic poles the boundary between Earth's magnetosphere and interplanetary space sitting about 65 thousand kilometers above Earth it struck with such force that it literally shook and trembled our planet's protective magnetic field the first phase of this is called the sudden storm commencement where the coronal mass first arrives at our Magneto pause causing the magneto sphere to compress on the daylight side of the earth resulting in a sudden increase in the intensity of the geomagnetic field in that region the next phase results in a decrease in intensity as an electric current induced in the magnetosphere and ionosphere pushes the boundary of the magneto sphere outwards and results in a decrease in the geomagnetic field and the geomagnetic field can continue to vary from hours to days after this initial burst so these geomagnetic storms cause shifts in the Earth's magnetic field which drives induced electric currents in anything capable of carrying them that can be the ground ocean or our electricity grid if those currents enter our grid they can wreak havoc on essential infrastructure so it seems like a disaster is waiting to happen what are we doing to prepare for the worst unsurprisingly one of the largest industries on earth has taught pretty hard about this problem and has set out guidelines on how to deal with such an event as mentioned in my recent solar sailing video we currently have several satellites parked in LaGrange point one a point between the Sun and the earth where a satellite can maintain a constant position and thus allow us to receive advanced warning of any coronal mass ejection this point confused many commenters who assumed solar flares who were simply bursts of radiation traveling at the speed of light and thus no speed of light communication method could give us advance warning but these eruptions of particles travel at a fraction of the speed of light about 0.15 percent the speed of light for our above 1989 event and thus can provide up to an hour of warning time we also have some less definitive warning signs that the Sun may Point a coronal mass ejection in our direction by observing sunspots which are dips in brightness on the surface of the Sun which occur as magnetic energy bottles up in the solar atmosphere before being suddenly released these sunspots come in cycles of low and high activity every 11 years this warning time can provide grid operators a little to prepare for any anomalies but they are more useful for GPS satellites whose accuracy is affected by ionosphere disturbances as their radio waves refract through it and thus need to adjust their signal to compensate force in severe solar storms these warnings would give industries where GPS malfunction could lead to loss of life like airliners vital time to prepare to protect our grid it's really a matter of designing it in a way to be able to deal with these induced currents let's take a deeper look into that 1989 blackout to see what really happened and see how grid operators can prepare the first malfunction occurred as a result of transformers becoming saturated power transformers are placed at intervals between high-voltage transmission lines and power generators or local distribution lines to step up or step down voltages so what is saturation mean transformers work by winding wire from the source around a ferromagnetic core this generates a magnetic field inside the core which can in turn induce an electric current in our secondary winding if our primary wire has more windings than the secondary wire it will step down the voltage and if the secondary wire has more windings to the primary wire it will step up the voltage these transformers form an essential part of our grid but when the core becomes saturated it interferes with their operation saturation just means that the magnetic core has reached its maximum magnetic flux capabilities so an increase in current and voltage will not result in a subsequent increase of magnetic flux if this happens the voltage induced in the secondary winding can no longer match the wave form as the voltage powering the primary coil so the wave form of the secondary wire becomes distorted when this happened in Quebec the grid voltage became unstable causing the protective relays to disconnect five high voltage transmission lines including one from a hydroelectric facility as the hydroelectric facility was disconnected it experienced a rapid loss of load meaning its power had nowhere to go which caused the voltage to suddenly increase which damaged two step-up transformers as a result of excessive heating saturated transformers are the root cause of most great malfunctions during magnetic storms however in 1989 the knock-on effect of these waveform distortions is what caused the majority of the damage as electromechanical protective relays tripped and cut off sections of the grid electromechanical relays are essentially switches that turn on and off when electric current flows in the control circuit creating a magnetic field in an electromagnet and pulls an armature down to complete a circuit in a secondary circuit these can be combined to form logic gates that are more complicated but are in general not programmable to deal with anomalies like distorted waveforms caused by transformer saturation today we have much smarter microprocessor technology that can be programmed to deal with these issues better and maintain grid stability but because of the electromechanical relays reliability and long service life there are still thousands of these older devices in the grid infrastructure but they are slowly being phased out for more modern technology especially in northern and southern regions more susceptible to Geo magnetically induced currents we can also block geomagnetic lee induced currents because they are direct currents where our normal power is alternating current capacitors can only transmit alternating current because capacitors don't physically complete circuits they are just a large stores of positive and negative potentials that switch every time the current flips DC currents don't flip and thus capacitors do not allow DC currents to flow so we do have options to minimize the effects of these disturbances I expected this to be a dramatic video that would drag viewers in on the fear of their grid failing from solar flares you can probably tell from the shift in tone from the start of the video to the end as I researched this topic more thoroughly it really seems like mainstream media's fear-mongering on the effects of solar storms on our electricity grid is completely overblown with only one notable blackout caused by geomagnetic aliy induced currents that were today's technology was completely preventable there isn't much evidence that grid operators need to spend vast amounts of money on these systems although DC blocking our systems have been installed in countries in northern locations more at risk of geomagnetic disturbances like Finland and England in the end the only recent electricity grid operators have not implemented these DC blocking devices and other mitigating technologies is because they would cost more to model and implement than the risk geomagnetic disturbances actually posed to the grid in reality the risk from hurricanes and other terrestrial weather events pose a much bigger risk to our electricity grid the electricity grid makes the internet possible and the Internet has changed the world in almost every way possible including allowing people to start and run entire businesses without ever leaving their homes reaching customers all over the world I am able to sell my graph paper notebooks t-shirts and pins with the help of Shopify who have all the tools you need to set up an online store if you want to start your own online selling business Shopify is the perfect place to start it has logo generators plug-and-play themes so you can make your page look professional with zero coding experience has the tools to organize ad campaigns and analytics to analyze your success it was crazy to see my analytics spike last month when I announced the graph paper notebook with over 2000 sold so 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Channel: Real Engineering

Views: 883,081

Keywords: engineering, science, technology, education, history, real, solar, storm, cme, coronal, mass, ejection, grid, emp, electricity, satellites, transformers, capacitor

Id: LLO9WxVO9s8

Length: 12min 59sec (779 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 28 2019