Geomagnetic storms and the limits of human experience.
Bruce W. Radford is publisher of Public Utilities Fortnightly.
On April 30, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) held a technical conference to review scientific claims and policy arguments about geomagnetic disturbances, known as GMD—how some say that a once-in-a-century solar storm could induce a power surge on the interstate grid so destructive as to cook and fry as many 300 extra-high-voltage transformers, plunging much of the nation into a blackout lasting months or even years. Some researchers even harbor fears that GMDs could end life as we know it.
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This doomsday scenario came from the National Academy of Scientists, in a study completed in 2008. As noted by Scott Pugh of U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS), that study included a worst-case estimate that roughly one-third of the country could lose power for several years if a solar storm should strike Earth with the intensity of a famous event that occurred in 1921, a storm more severe than any since then, and which ranks second in severity in modern human history, behind the so-called Carrington Event of 1859.
Another study, issued in 2010 under the joint sponsorship of FERC, DOE, and Homeland Security, raised similar alarms in 2010. That project included a six-part report by California’s Metatech Corp. (Meta-R-319, through Meta-R-324), prepared for the Oak Ridge National Lab, under the direction of Ben McConnell of ORNL’s Power and Energy Systems Group.