A mammoth solar storm, at just the right time, could play havoc on our electrical infrastructure.


On a cool September night in 1859, people in Colorado were roused from sleep by a “light so bright that one could easily read common print,” as one newspaper described it. Confused, some began making breakfast.

Farther east, thousands of New Yorkers rushed onto their roofs and sidewalks to gaze at the heavens. The sky was glowing, ribboned in yellow, white and crimson.

It was a dazzling display of nature. Yet, it would be an utter catastrophe if the same thing happened today.

The auroras of 1859, known as the “Carrington Event,” came after the sun unleashed a large coronal mass ejection, a burst of charged plasma aimed directly at Earth. When the particles hit our magnetosphere, they triggered a fierce geomagnetic storm that lit up the sky and frazzled communication wires. Telegraphs in Philadelphia were spitting out “fantastical and unreadable messages,” one paper reported, with some systems unusable for hours.

Today, electric utilities, telecommunications providers and the insurance industry are grappling with a scary possibility. A solar storm on the scale of the 1859 event would wreak havoc on power grids, pipelines and satellites. In a heavily populated corridor, such as the Northeast or the California coast, 20 million to 40 million people could be without power – possibly for years – as utilities struggled to replace thousands of fried transformers. Chaos and riots might ensue.

That's not a lurid sci-fi fantasy, but rather a sober new assessment by Lloyd's of London, the world's oldest insurance market. The report notes that a smaller, solar-induced geomagnetic storm in 1989 left 6 million people in Quebec without power for nine hours.

“We're much more dependent on electricity now than we were in 1859,” said Neil Smith, an emerging-risks researcher at Lloyd's and co-author of the report. “The same event today could have a huge financial impact” – pegged at up to $2.6 trillion for an especially severe storm. (To put that in context, Hurricane Sandy caused about $68 billion in damage.)

When it comes to space weather, the big concern is what such a storm might do to electric grids.


Half-hour warning

In theory, power utilities could take precautions, if notified beforehand of a major solar storm. Using existing satellites, the National Weather Service's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo., can detect an incoming event that's about 30 minutes away.

Grid operators would have to react quickly. For example, PJM Interconnection operates a huge swath of the U.S. power grid from Illinois to the District of Columbia, serving 60 million people. After receiving a storm warming, human operators would re-dispatch electricity to reduce the flow of current from west to east. That would minimize vulnerability to ground currents, Frank Koza, executive director of operations support at PJM, said at a June space weather conference in Silver Spring, Md.

But there's a limit to how much these strategies can help. “The one we're really concerned about is extreme space weather, a Carrington-level event,” Koza said. “What would happen in that scenario? I would have to tell you we don't really know.”

The federal government decided to take a more serious look. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission last fall issued an order that eventually will require grid operators to prepare for a space weather event.

Koza said he expects most grid operators to have response plans within a year or two, but “engineered mitigation” could be an additional two to four years away.


Policymakers also are getting involved. For a long time, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was mostly interested in risks to electric grids posed by a nuclear weapon that exploded in the atmosphere and induced ground currents. In June, he spoke to members of the House's Electromagnetic Pulse Caucus, a group of 16 Republicans and two Democrats, about this possibility. “This could be the kind of catastrophe that ends civilization,” Gingrich said, “and that's not an exaggeration.”

Now that the Cold War has ended, however, many such doomsayers have switched to warning about solar storms, which can have a similar effect, albeit on a smaller scale. Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., a founder of the EMP Caucus, has pushed a bill to protect against both “natural and man-made EMP events.” In public, he tends to put more emphasis on solar storms.

Cockpit concerns

Airlines, too, take the sun's outbursts into account. Delta runs several flights over the poles. Given a last-minute warning of a geomagnetic storm, the planes often divert their routes or risk losing radio contact.

And those concerns only scratch the surface.

Joseph Kunches, a scientist at the Space Weather Prediction Center, said we're still learning about activities that could be disrupted by solar weather. Satellite communications can go astray. Pipelines can corrode from ground currents. Even human space travel faces a threat.

“Radiation is a big issue for space travel – particularly once you get away from the Earth's magnetic field,” he said. ” In 1972, there was actually a huge eruption that fortuitously fell between two of the Apollo flights, so the radiation didn't hurt anybody. But it's a problem.”

There's plenty more that scientists are trying to grasp. For them, it would be helpful to have more spacecraft studying the sun and giving us storm warnings. If anything, though, Earth's alert systems are about to get worse, not better.

The United States has four space satellites, which can provide roughly 30 minutes' warning of a major solar eruption. But they're reaching the end of their planned lives (and fuel tanks), and there's only one replacement scheduled to launch in 2014.

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