'Controlled' power cuts likely as Sun storm threatens national grid

Officials in Britain and the United States are preparing to make controlled power cuts to their national electricity supplies in response to a warning of a possible powerful solar storm hitting the Earth. In an interview with The Independent, Thomas Bogdan, director of the US Space Weather Prediction Centre, said that controlled power "outages" will protect the National Electricity Grids against damage which could take months or even years to repair should a large solar storm collide with the Earth without any precautions being taken.

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More at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/...id-2296748.html

Are severe solar flares and coronal mass ejections really a big threat to the grid?

The power went out last night at my house. Maybe it was a solar storm.

Outages in the summer? I don't think so. Our schedule for construction dries to nothing in the summertime, we can't get clearances to do anything. Everything's in service, all the time.

I don't see taking a summertime outage for something that "might" happen. At least not in Texas. They'll kill more people in this 100+ degree weather with a "planned outage" than they will if there's an actual outage.

They cite a case in 1989. Electric Utility monitoring and protective relaying has improved a LOT since 1989. We were barely tapping basic microprocessor relays back then (think ABB MCO relays). The Schweitzer relays we use today are much more sophisticated and offer much more capability.

cableguy said:

They cite a case in 1989. Electric Utility monitoring and protective relaying has improved a LOT since 1989. We were barely tapping basic microprocessor relays back then (think ABB MCO relays). The Schweitzer relays we use today are much more sophisticated and offer much more capability.

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That's kinda the point. The old, big, dumb relays didn't use microprocessors, so they weren't susceptible to solar flares. Now that everything depends on a microprocessor, solar flares can easily kick our asses.

There's been a lot in the news lately and bandied around on the net, so I was just wondering if it was hype or not. latest issue of Popular Science had an article on this very subject.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/gallery/2...global-blackout

There's been a lot in the news lately and bandied around on the net, so I was just wondering if it was hype or not. latest issue of Popular Science had an article on this very subject.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/gallery/2...global-blackout