As the sun awakens, the power grid stands vulnerable

An uncertain fate

One possible replacement, a satellite called DSCOVR, sits nearly finished in a hangar at Goddard, where it has languished since 2001. The vision of Al Gore, sidelined when congressional Republicans defunded its launch vehicle, DSCOVR would provide longer warning times for solar storms. Its fate is uncertain, although President Obama is expected to ask for funds to launch the probe in his 2012 budget. Bogdan said the earliest it could get off the ground is 2014.

Personal Post

Video

A solar flare has erupted from the sun in an impressive display captured by NASA cameras. NASA says the flare peaked on Tuesday and created a large cloud that appeared to cover almost half the surface of the sun. (June 8)

Graphic

A look at how space weather affects the Earth.

More on this Story

• As the sun awakens, the power grid stands vulnerable
• Book shows humans’ disconnect with natural world; 'Wormhole' tackles big issues
• Young dolphins tied to 'porpicide'
• Can you be green and have a green lawn?

Representatives of the power industry take issue with the worst-case scenarios.

Leaders do acknowledge that huge solar flares are a serious issue, one the industry is addressing. But “the idea of 130 million people out of power for 10 years is an overstatement,” said Gerry Cauley, president of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., or NERC.

In 2007, Congress gave NERC the power to develop regulations — to be approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — for electric utilities to prevent blackouts like the one that left an estimated 50 million people in the Midwest, the Northeast and Ontario without power for up to four days in August 2003. (That outage was caused not by a solar flare but by high demand and a tree that fell on a power line; a cascading failure knocked some 100 power plants offline.) “The potential is there for damage to equipment and possibly even outages,” Cauley added. “But the grid itself is very resilient.”

The grid’s weak spots

In 1989, the grid got its most severe solar test, and sections did not fare well. A solar storm one-tenth the strength of the 1859 event triggered a cascade of failures in Quebec in just 90 seconds. Several million people went without power for nine to 12 hours, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. In South Africa, the storm destroyed huge transformers.

Each the size of a house and costing several million dollars, transformers are the grid’s weak spots. They boost the voltage of electricity for transmission along high-voltage lines, but they also absorb extra loads coming down those lines. During the 1989 event, two of South Africa’s transformers overheated and fried during the storm, while nine more failed within a year, said Mark Lauby, a vice president at NERC.

Legislation under consideration in the House would force utility companies to protect 350 critical transformers from a massive solar storm. Under the bill, called the SHIELD Act, the one-time cost of $100 million to $300 million would be passed on to customers. Last year the bill passed in the House unanimously, only to stall in the Senate.

But the SHIELD Act is not dead. In May, the subcommittee on energy and power held a hearing on the bill, where military officials and government regulators warned of the dangers of space weather. Advocates expect the legislation to be reintroduced.

In the meantime, Bogdan will be losing sleep over losing ACE, the sun storm sentinel.

“It’s the extreme solar events I’m worried about,” he said. “It might not happen this solar cycle. But sometime in my lifetime or my children’s, that storm will be here. The question is ‘Will we be prepared for it?’ ”