r/askscience • u/ejoch • May 14 '19

Astronomy Could solar flares realistically disable all electronics on earth?

So I’ve read about solar flares and how they could be especially damaging to today’s world, since everyday services depend on the technology we use and it has the potential to disrupt all kinds of electronics. How can a solar flare disrupt electronic appliances? Is it potentially dangerous to humans (eg. cancer)? And could one potentially wipe out all electronics on earth? And if so, what kind of damage would it cause (would all electronics need to be scrapped or would they be salvageable?) Thanks in advance

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u/zebediah49 May 14 '19

i have to say, I'm with NASA on this one. The example case seems to assume that a CME event magically breaks everything... it doesn't. Not even close.

Sure, it'd be inconvenient and messy for the duration, but pretty much everything that's important is also basically immune.

All it does is induce currents in transmission lines (and pipelines, or other long metal objects). There is a very real possibility that the transmission lines in question would thus be unable to function, because circuit breakers would trip. In fact, I would expect operators to carefully monitor the state of their systems, and preemptively load shed as necessary. So... we turn off the electrical grid for a couple days.

That doesn't mean that all communications are down and the world turns to anarchy though. Most communication lines are fiber. Those are fine. Datacenters, hospitals, banks, and some stores all have backup generator systems. They drop off the grid, but continue functioning. The US NFPA spec for critical infrastructure requires 96 hours of backup fuel; I expect most critical facilities have significantly more than that.

The only real threat is from operators not disconnecting vulnerable transformers, and them actually getting damaged.

E: Satellites would also likely have a bad time. I'll admit that those are pretty important, but again -- critical infrastructure has contingency plans for lack of satellite.

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u/oberon May 15 '19

This "doesn't magically break everything" point is crucial. I saw people saying the same thing prior to Y2K. People would just list everything that has electronics in it and say it's all going to break, and because it's broken everything built on it will also magically fail.

For example, bank vault doors have electronics in them, therefore they WILL fail. The failure of vault doors WILL bring our banking system to its knees. Never mind that there's no reason to believe these electronics track the date or have the Y2K bug in them, or to believe that being unable to open a vault would halt all banking activity.

This kind of thinking, by the way, is what "begging the question" actually means. They want to believe that the world as we know it will end; this is the answer they have arrived at. So in order to justify their conclusion they come up with all sorts of "questions" which point toward the conclusion they already settled on.

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u/calite May 15 '19

Do not overlook the incredible effort that was put into assuring that Y2K was a non-event.

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u/MJMurcott May 15 '19

The longer a wire is the more that it will be harmed by a CME so transmission lines and transformers are going to be the most vulnerable part of the system. Ordinary electronic devices are unlikely to be harmed by a CME, though without power they won't be that useful - https://youtu.be/A3VsqOl2Vqk

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u/skxch May 15 '19

At this point, the amount of physical cash (M1) versus total cash circulating in the economy (M2) is minuscule. Gotta love fractional reserve banking. Even if all banks vaults were emptied, that’s a small amount of total money in the economy. Though, news of that kind would surely spark nationwide bank runs.

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u/ACCount82 May 15 '19

You are on point about that. There are too many people who want to believe in burning land and end of all, and that skews many threat predictions: solar flares, climate change, ozone depletion, and so it goes.

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u/StetsonTuba8 May 15 '19

There's a guy I overheard on the train the other day complaining about everybody on their phones, and he predicted that when the solar glare hits and every electronic thing is fried, people are going to be more concerned that they don't have phones anymore rather than there's no food

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u/[deleted] May 14 '19

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u/zebediah49 May 14 '19

That was a demonstration of monumental negligence and stupidity. Also, large portions of the affected area were back within eight hours, with most of it was back within two days. The stuff that took longer to fix was due to actual failure due to overload.

Had operators had working monitoring, routed around and if necessary disconnected overloaded lines before failure, that wouldn't have happened, or -- at worst -- it would have involved rolling regional blackouts if they had to force load-shedding.

The number one threat isn't GMS effects -- it's idiots not disconnecting their hardware before it breaks.

In addition, 2003 was interesting in that the majority cascade failure occurred over approximately fifteen seconds. The whole mess, from the straw that triggered it all to final result took less than five minutes, and it threw many generation stations into emergency shutdown to protect themselves. In a circumstance when operators know that they're going to be facing incoming transmission line disconnections, generation stations can be more gracefully wound down, and load can be balanced on either side of the lines that are cut ahead of time.

I would expect that it would probably take around 24-48 hours to bring power generation back online after complete disconnection. This sort of problem has happened and been thought about, so we do have black start capacity distributed around the US (and presumably the rest of the industrialized world has done the same).

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u/dacoobob May 14 '19

are there fewer idiots now than there were then?

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u/2manyredditstalkers May 15 '19

I feel like you're under selling the disruption having to black start the entire electric grid would cause.

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u/whats-ittoya May 15 '19

I generally agree with what you are saying, but the longer the power is out the longer it will take to turn on for the simple reasons of climate control and refrigeration. If the power goes out to a large area and is off for 2 days when it is restored everyone's air conditioner/furnace will all kick on at once along with their refrigerators and freezers. This sudden surge requires power to be restored in stages rather than restoring power all at once to everyone.

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u/Zebulen15 May 14 '19

Yeah but just think. The one that barely missed us was class X1.4. It’s classified into ABCM and X, with X being the largest. Every number after X is a multiple of the power of X. For example X2 is twice as powerful as an X, and X3 is three times as powerful. There have been several recorded X20-X40 emissions in the past century, with possibly an X65. We couldn’t tell because it saturated our satellite systems. The carrington event was X2 for scale.

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u/zebediah49 May 14 '19

Sure, but again -- effect is basically proportional to length. If we use the example numbers I randomly found of 100A induced in a high voltage transmission line (enough to cause some major problems to a transformer), that's an induced voltage on the order of 30V/km. Circuit breakers on long-distance transmission lines are designed to interrupt circuits carrying hundreds of kV. The "little" ones on medium voltage local transmission are designed to handle 10s of kV's, and the ones on your house are (IIRC) 600V rated.

Even if we multiply by X100, and get an astonishing 3kV/km = 3 V/m, that's not very much. Sure, it'll easily fry anything connected to long wires, but it's nowhere near enough to overpower the air gaps in circuit interrupters.

Additionally, this is a large-scale magnetic effect, which means it will have little to no effect on things that don't contain loops. You can run plenty of km of coax cable, as long as the circuitry attached to that is ground-isolated at one or both ends.

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u/Doc_Chaste May 15 '19

At the end of the day the biggest glaring issue is the weakest aspect of the grid: LPTs. The US is importing the vast majority of it's large power transformers. Globally these LPTs are "spoken for" such that every one produced is already bought and production is just keeping up for the demand for expanding economies and replacement of existing aged equipment.

If several were to be damaged or destroyed in a single event... There aren't any just sitting somewhere ready to replace them. Unless the US has stepped up it's disaster prep secretly and began building a bunch to stockpile. Should LPTs in several countries go up in smoke during a solar flare, CME, cyber attack or conventional terrorism/sabotage then your talking many months to years to replace assuming the places that produce them have power...

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u/Zebulen15 May 14 '19

Yes but this would completely shred our magnetosphere, leaving us vulnerable to radiation. C’s can cause over radiation to people in planes. It would go beyond electrical issues.

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u/eythian May 14 '19

Most communication lines are fiber. Those are fine.

They still require electricity to work over longer distances for the repeaters. In under sea ones, this is carried in the cable. This said, the sea itself will probably insulate them from the effects.

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u/zebediah49 May 14 '19

Hmm, that's fair. Depending on the configuration of the power feed equipment on either end, that could cause issues for said power feed. I was thinking short-range cables, and those with purely optical re-generators... but that's not what's used on long-distance undersea cables.

(Note: if the power feed is galvanically isolated to a sufficient voltage rating, this is still okay.)

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u/eythian May 14 '19

Yep, I don't know enough to know how much of a problem it'd be, but more facts is more good :)

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u/NotObviouslyARobot May 15 '19

Saltwater is an enormous middle finger to electromagnetic waves so the undersea lines are safe

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u/SkyWulf May 15 '19

What would happen to things like rebar in concrete or wires in drywall? Would this not be a significant fire risk in many buildings, if sparks are indeed possible?

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u/zebediah49 May 15 '19

Not much. Structural members are short. GMS type effects are what I would call "large scale". That means, e.g. a few dozen volts per kilometer. A really messy situation might end up in the hundreds.

So, that's effectively nothing when you're talking human-scale objects. Your phone, house, and car, are all small. What you really need is a long metal object.

Take, for example, a hundred mile long overhead transmission wire. That potential is just going to add up along its whole length, and actually be a reasonably large amount come the end.

Also, in the case of an AC transmission wire, it's basically a loop. It's designed to carry AC, so when you put a DC voltage across it, it just runs right through, causing a lot of current, which is bad for the transformers on either end.

Now, if you have a structure as long as a bridge.... that could be a different story. It still probably wouldn't be high enough voltage to spark or arc, but there are other possible problems, such as galvanic corrosion. Shouldn't destroy it, but might require maintenance sooner than expected.

E: Think of it this way: in a very very bad case, every 10' long metal bar is now a AAA battery. One's not doing much, but thousands of them in a row could get exciting. For safety, you're going to want to break up long wires into shorter segments that aren't connected.

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u/occams_eggwhisk May 15 '19

So you're right about the transmission lines inducing current. This is called GIC (geomagnetically induced current). However, it's the transformers in power networks that get messed up by big Solar storms like CMEs. These storms can wipe out transformers at power stations cutting power to the grid. The problem then becomes: what if multiple transformers are wiped out? These things are made-to-order for each particular power station and a new one ain't cheap and takes a while to build. We shouldn't underestimate the potential severity of these storms, if multiple transformers get taken out then it will take longer than the back-up 96 hours to get things up and running again. This has happened on the past, the 1989 geomagnetic storm took out power in pretty much all of Quebec for several hours and that storm was orders of magnitude smaller than the Carrington event which we believe is around a 1 in 200 year event

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u/el_matt May 15 '19

You might be surprised just how reliant modern economies are on GNSS. pdf warning

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u/rndmtim Aug 09 '19

I've specified generators for many power facilities, many on the BES, and I've never specified 96 hours of fuel. That's entirely a facility decision. We are not required to do that; we are required to do a battery analysis of DC loads on the protection and control system for 8 hours, and we are encourage to do backup e-gens.

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u/hashtagsugary May 15 '19

I agree with you, it’s about taking a risk based approach.

There are certain large components of a transmission power infrastructure that could be at risk based on a lack of diversity in the electricity network.

Absolutely, apply a monitoring system to those larger components but don’t underestimate the way the majority of the network is designed and how contingency and operations can feed into that if an event occurs.

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u/Unbarbierediqualita May 14 '19

Lol you're optimistic. Fiber cables will be fine? When all the electronics on each side are going insane? OK

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u/zebediah49 May 14 '19

My point is that the electronics on either side won't go insane.

Geomagnetic effects aren't noticeable at anything shorter than km-class scales. Flip off your mains breaker, kick on the generators, and you can carry on without interruption. The transformers/etc. on either end of power transmission lines are in for a bad time if they aren't disconnected, of course... which is why the point of GMS mitigation is "so disconnect them you idiots".

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u/Gods_call May 14 '19

How are you so knowledgeable about this, every one of your replies have been remarkably articulate

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u/drmike0099 May 14 '19

pretty much everything that's important is also basically immune

The electrical grid is much more impacted than this. The current induced by this particular part of the EMP effect is proportional to the length of the line, the longer the line the worse it is. The transformers at either end of these lines need to be hardened specifically to shunt off the extra current in events like this, and for the most part that has not been done because it's expensive and requires replacing all the transformers. In a large event, the electrical grid will go down, and it will be down for years. That's a pretty substantial event (to put it mildly).

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u/thereddaikon May 14 '19

I think you may be overly confident in the robustness of the power grid. Don't forget that the 2003 northeast outage that left tens of millions without power happened because some lines drooped into foliage. Their monitoring software failed to catch it long enough for it to cascade into a surge that couldn't be stopped. That was simply a surge at the wrong place at the wrong time. Seems a large CME would make that more likely as a lot of lines would experience induced current.

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u/jkmhawk May 15 '19

The US NFPA spec for critical infrastructure requires 96 hours of backup fuel; I expect most critical facilities have significantly more than that.

This sounds like a point where the people responsible would save by not having the backup and the inspectors ignore it. Deepwater horizon?