Posts Tagged ‘electrical power grid’

New NBC Series, “Revolution”, Portrays Life After The Blackout

For one of the major main-stream television networks to produce and air a television series about ‘life after electricity’, apparently after some sort of EMP event, is quite interesting. The recently released trailer for the upcoming Fall series, “Revolution”, portrays life 15 years after an event that terminates all electrical power on earth. I’m not quite sure how they rationalize that 15 years later there is still no electricity – although I could hypothesize that since so many will be ‘wiped out’ after the first year that maybe there simply isn’t enough manpower and facility left to do so…

NBC apparently believes there is enough main-stream interest in the topic to pile on production money to produce the show. Given the extreme number of YouTube views of their preview already, I believe they’re on to something… Or, are ‘they’ preparing our mindset for the real possibility?

We’ll have to wait until the Fall premiere to know more. I for one will be watching with interest…

Can you say, “Carrington Event”?

Mammoth Sunspot Threatens Earth

Base image: NASA SDO

This is one of those things that always raises an eyebrow for me… a mammoth sunspot capable of producing X-class flares, one of which could potentially knock us back to the stone age. It’s like watching someone wielding a gun, and the gun is being brought around and trained on you (me). I just hope it doesn’t go boom.

Over the past few years I’ve posted on various sunspot and solar activity that has come and gone, and this one is worthy of another. It’s big. It’s bad. And it’s rotating into direct line-of-sight with us here on earth.

The thing is, we don’t know when one of these is going to fire a kill shot at us. There have been plenty of flares and CME’s that have fired at us over the years, but once in a while, one of them fires off a gargantuan blob of highly charged plasma and radiation – enough to potentially take down our power grids in a semi-permanent fashion. Long enough to affect hundred of millions of us in a very bad way.

Scientists totally agree that the sun WILL do this again. And in fact they admit it could happen at nearly anytime (or it may be another 50 years). The problem is, we are coming up on the 11-year solar cycle maximum which is due to peak later in 2012 and in 2013. The overall odds are not in our favor as we approach this time period, and today (and the rest of this week) looks just as risky, given sunspot 1476.

Base images: NASA SDO

SOLAR ACTIVITY INTENSIFIES: Huge sunspot AR1476 is crackling with M-class solar flares and appears to be on the verge of producing something even stronger. The sunspot’s ‘beta-gamma-delta’ magnetic field harbors energy for X-class flares, the most powerful kind. Earth is entering the line of fire as the sunspot rotates across the face of the sun.

SpaceWeather.com

You may think that it’s silly to consider the entire power grid being blown out (more specifically the transformers within the grid), and even more so you may think that it’s silly to consider that the power could be out for months or a year or more! Because we are so accustomed to our local power company restoring power within hours of a storm (or perhaps days), we think that they will be able to do the same in this case.

The reality is, there is no way in he$$ that they will be able to do so, should such an event occur (similar to the 1859 Carrington event). It will take a potentially very long time to replace thousands upon untold thousands of transformers, the most difficult of which will be the EHV transformers which have manufacturing lead times of 1 to 2 years (that’s when the power is up and running!)

The modern world will descend into violent and desperate chaos and your lives will never be the same again. I highly recommend that you read the book, One Second After, written by someone who did their research on the subject of EMP and in fact has been in front of congressional committees regarding the same. It’s very scary stuff, and it could happen to you and me.

Seeing this huge sunspot 1476 reminds me yet again how we are vulnerable in our high tech world that 100% depends upon electricity as it’s life blood. The sun gives life, but it can also take it away. Are you prepared?

Update, May 10/11
Sunspot 1476 is not only enormous, but is pointing straight us. How ominous is that?

 
Sunspot 1476 Flare History (so far)
sourced from Australian Gov’t IPS Radio and Space Services
M1.4 May-5
M1.1 May-6
M1.3 May-6
M1.4 May-8
M4.7 May-9
M1.8 May-9
M4.1 May-9
M5.7 May-10
M1.7 May-10

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Pitch Black

Most people won’t have a clue until they are plunged into pitch black darkness, when the next ‘Carrington Event’ will wipe much of humanity off the planet.

Think about this…

If we all had just boarded an airplane and the pilot came on the intercom and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I just want you all to know that we have a 1 in 8 chance of crashing during this flight”. How many of us would immediately demand to get off that airplane before it took off? Yes, I believe that most people would be insisting to head back to the gate to get off as soon as possible!

Now, what if… a flight attendant came on the intercom right after the pilot’s announcement and said, “Relax everyone, we all have a 88-percent chance of a successful flight, so don’t worry, everything will be fine”. Would you still demand to get off that plane?

I think that most people would, but on the other hand I believe that many people could be misguided by how the facts are presented.

When facing the odds of death, most sane people would like those odds stacked very favorably towards life!

The example just given is 100-percent analogous to a real world scenario that could play out in our lifetimes, an event that would surely end the lives of countless humans on this planet. In fact, A recent paper (published in February in the journal Space Weather) tried to estimate the chance of having a repeat of 1859 (the Carrington Event) and came up with a value of a 12% chance of it happening in the next 10 years.

So according to this space physicist (Peter Riley) and many others who have reported on the subject, we should not be sticking our heads in the sand ignoring this very real possibility. A hundred years ago it would have been fairly unlikely for an event like this to cause tremendous wide spread catastrophe. Today however, the modern world relies and depends upon electricity for survival. Nearly everyone depends on a fully functional infrastructure to bring their food, goods, and services.

By the way, long story short… the 1859 Carrington Event was a massive solar storm which if it were to occur today would in all probability cause most of the electrical power grid to fail – burning out countless thousands of transformers, which would take up to several years to replace in entirety. In the mean time, some say that up to 90% of ‘modern’ civilization would die. Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a joke. It is a sobering possibility, and one that should not be taken lightly.

In fact, it is one of the doomsday scenarios that this author takes seriously, while knowing the inter-dependencies of today’s systems of supply and distribution – all leading back towards one thing, electricity. The deeper that one digs on the subject, the more one realizes how horrific things would become if we were to lose our electricity for any significant period of time.

Not only would the grid-down situation be enough to ‘finish’ many of us, but to make matters worse (or to speed up the process), factor in the possibility of hundreds of nuclear power plants running out of backup generator fuel and power before the plants have time to completely undergo a cold shutdown. Surely, many of them will succeed, but I have to think that many also will not.

According to a recent article in the LA Times titled Space Weather Expert Has Ominous Forecast, Mike Hapgood (a space weather scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England) says that massive solar storms have happened before and another one is likely to occur soon. “The world is still not prepared for a truly damaging solar storm”.

In the modern world, we use electricity for so many things. We require electrical power to pump water into people’s houses and to pump the sewage away. [You can imagine] what could happen if the sewage systems aren’t pumping stuff away.

If you don’t have power, you can’t pump fuel into vehicles. If you don’t have any fuel, traffic could come to a standstill.

Most of the time you’re using credit cards, debit cards or you’ll be getting money out of an ATM. If you’ve lost the power, the computers in the bank that keep track of our money will have back-up power, but not the ATMs or the machines in the shops. So if you had a big power outage, it wouldn’t be long before we’d be trying to find cash.

LA Times

Although a solar storm disaster is not imminent, the apparent odds do exist, even though arguably not fully understood. It’s something that I prefer to err on the side of caution and preparedness rather than to go willingly into the night and accept the consequences of possible death if it were to come to pass.

What can we do about it?

Simply bringing more awareness to the issue will cause more people to think about it, some of whom will actually take some action on their own. Be aware that all things ‘electronic’, while often making our lives more efficient or entertaining, are also adding to our Achilles heel. Challenge yourself with growing a small backyard garden and then learning how to preserve that food through methods like canning or dehydration. Start thinking about your self-sufficiency capabilities as well as your current vulnerabilities and dependencies on external systems. At a bare minimum, perhaps you should save up a few months of extra food? Do you have a water source? There are lots of questions… all in due time…

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Geomagnetic Storm Power System Transformer EMP Threat

North America’s electricity infrastructure is clearly one of our society’s most important assets. As reliance on digital technology and ‘just in time delivery’ distribution systems has increased, many North Americans have come to depend on the reliable delivery of electricity to their homes and businesses to power nearly every aspect of their lives.

The bulk power system is one of North America’s most critical infrastructures, underpinning the continent’s governments, economy and society. As reliance on electricity-dependent technology has increased, the reliability of the power grid has become a necessity to keep most of us alive.

The North American bulk power system is made up of more than 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, thousands of power generation plants, and millions of digital controls. More than 1,800 entities own and operate parts of the system across North America. These entities range in size from large investor-owned utilities with over 20,000 employees to small cooperatives with only ten. To say the least, because of the numbers involved, there are many various differing methods, configurations, and designs employed within the overall system which add layers of complexity when considering vulnerabilities and solutions to hypothetical problems.

Geomagnetic disturbances, the earthly effects of solar weather, are not a new threat to the electric sector. Recent analysis suggests that the potential extremes of the geomagnetic threat environment may be much greater than previously anticipated. Geomagnetically-induced currents on system infrastructure have the potential to result in widespread tripping of key transmission lines and irreversible physical damage to large transformers. The 1989 event that caused a blackout of the Hydro Québec system proved beyond a doubt of the geomagnetic vulnerabilities and their potential consequences.

The high-altitude detonation of a large nuclear device or other electromagnetic weapon could have devastating effects on the electric sector, interrupting system operation and potentially damaging many devices simultaneously. A coordinated attack involving intentional electromagnetic interference could result in more localized and targeted impacts that may also cause significant impacts to the sector.

The physical damage of certain system components (e.g. extra-high-voltage transformers) on a large scale, could result in prolonged outages as procurement cycles for these components range from months to years. Many of these components are manufactured overseas, with little manufacturing capability remaining in North America.

Threat
Intense solar activity, particularly large solar flares and associated coronal mass ejections can create disturbances when this activity is directed towards the Earth. The coronal mass ejection’s solar wind plasma can connect with the Earth’s magnetosphere causing rapid changes in the configuration of Earth’s magnetic field, a form of space weather called a geomagnetic storm. Geomagnetic storms produce impulsive disturbance of the geomagnetic field over wide geographic regions which, in turn, induce currents (called geomagnetically-induced currents or GIC) in the complex topology of the North American bulk power system and other high-voltage power systems across the globe.

Recently, a number of investigations have been carried out (EMP Commission, FEMA under Executive Order 13407, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission , the Departments of Energy, Homeland Security, and Defense). These investigations have been undertaken to examine the potential impacts on the U.S. electric power grid for severe geomagnetic storm events and EMP threats. These assessments indicate that severe geomagnetic storms have the potential to cause long-duration outages to widespread areas of the North American grid.

Most well-known in North America is the March 13-14, 1989 geomagnetic storm. This storm led to the collapse of the Hydro Québec system in the early morning hours of March 13, 1989. Starting at 2:44 AM (EST), operations on the Hydro Québec power grid were normal. At that time a large impulse in the Earth’s geomagnetic field erupted along the U.S./Canada border (Figure 4). This started a chain of power system disturbance events that only 92 seconds later resulted in a collapse of the Québec Interconnection.

Technically speaking…

Telluric currents induced by the storm created harmonic voltages and currents of considerable intensity on the La Grande network. Voltage asymmetry onthe 735-kV network reached 15%. Within less than a minute, the seven La Grande network static var compensators on line tripped one after the other… With the loss of the last static var compensator, voltage dropped so drastically on the La Grande network (0.2 p.u.) that all five lines to Montréal tripped through loss of synchronism (virtual fault), and the entire network separated. The loss of 9,450 MW of generation provoked a very rapid drop in frequency at load-centre substations. Automatic underfrequency load-shedding controls functioned properly, but they are not designed for recovery from a generation loss equivalent to about half system load. The rest of the grid collapsed piece by piece in 25 seconds.

March 13, 1989 blackout – These images depict the ground level geomagnetic intensification over four minutes.

Using the traditional NOAA geomagnetic storm indices, the March 1989 storm was ranked as the third largest storm of all time (since rankings started in 1932). Until recently, many in the electric sector and scientific community therefore believed this storm was representative of the worst case threat that could be posed by geomagnetic storms to North America.

However, recent and more systematic analysis of impulsive disturbances that cause large Geomagnetic-Induced-Current flows has allowed re-examination of the March 1989 storm and other historical storms. This analysis of both contemporary and historic storm data and records indicates dB/dt impulsive disturbances larger than 2000 nT/min have been observed on at least three occasions since 1972 at latitudes of concern for the North American bulk power system. This is an intensity roughly four times larger than the levels experienced in March 1989. In extreme scenarios, available data suggests that disturbance levels as high as 5000 nT/min may have occurred during the geomagnetic storm of May 1921, an intensity roughly 10 times larger than the disturbance levels observed in 1989. Were a storm to occur with these intensity levels, it is reasonable to expect that the bulk power system would experience major impacts. (That’s putting it nicely…)

The demand for electricity in North America has grown dramatically over the past 50 years. To support these energy demands, the EHV (extra high voltage transformers) infrastructure has grown as well. The high-voltage transmission grid presents a complex network topology that couples almost like an antenna through multiple ground points to the geo-electric field produced by disturbances in the geomagnetic field.

The U.S. has 80,000 miles of extra-high voltage (EHV) transmission lines making up the backbone transmission grid that enables the long-haul transport of electricity for our nation. EHV transformers are critical pieces of equipment on the transmission grid. 90% of consumed power passes through a high voltage transformer at some point. If these transformers fail especially in large numbers, therein lies a very big problem. EHV transformers are huge, weighing hundreds of tons, making them difficult to transport – in some cases specialized rail cars must be used (and there is a limited supply of these). Many of the EHV transformers installed in the U.S. are approaching or exceeding the end of their design lifetimes (approx 30-40 years), increasing their vulnerability to failure.

technical…

The operating levels of high-voltage networks have increased from the 100-200 kV design thresholds of the 1950’s to the 345 to 765 kV extra-high-voltage levels of today’s networks. As a result, the ratio of resistances varies significantly with voltage class, as the resistance is approximately 10 times lower for the 765 kV than for the 115 kV lines. In general, the higher the voltage rating, the lower the resistive impedance per unit distance (in ohms per km), which will in turn produce ~10 times larger Geomagnetic Induced Current flows in the 765kV elements for the same geomagnetic disturbance environments.

The design of transformers also acts to further compound the impacts of GIC flows in the highvoltage portion of the power grid. While proportionately larger GIC flows occur in these large high-voltage transformers, saturation of EHV transformers occurs at the same level of GIC current as those of lower-voltage transformers. Transformers experience excessive levels of internal heating brought on by stray flux when GICs cause the transformer’s magnetic core to saturate and spill flux outside the normal core steel magnetic circuit.

Well-documented cases have noted heating failures that caused melting and burn-through of large-amperage copper windings and leads in these transformers (Figure 9). These transformers generally cannot be repaired in the field, and if damaged in this manner, need to be replaced with new units, which have manufacture lead times of 12–24 months or more in the world market.

The intention of this somewhat lengthy article is to speak more technically towards the technical aspect of this very real high-impact risk that we face. It is especially concerning as we approach to the peak of the current solar cycle (although not a necessary requirement to receive such a devastating blow from the sun). If you are honest with yourself and really think about the major and absolute dependence that we have on the flow of electricity for our very survival, then this should scare you. Don’t be ‘sheeple’. Think for yourself and do what you can to become more independent of the system.

Without electricity, a high percentage of today’s modern civilization would die within a month, two at the most. It would be unimaginable horror.

Read the book, One Second After, for a reality check.

(Some information sourced from a report of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2009 Workshop titled, High-Impact, Low-Frequency Event Risk to the North American Bulk Power System)

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Stunning USA Lights At Night Video Shows Vulnerability

As the International Space Station zooms across the planet at 17,227 miles per hour at an altitude of 200 miles, it captures amazing images of our planet from a perspective rarely comprehended by most people living on the surface.

The imagery shown in the video below was stitched together from photos taken at one-second intervals as the space station on an extraordinary clear night traveled northeast from the Gulf of Mexico across the eastern United States during the end of January, 2012.

The geographical area seen throughout the 60-second video covers land from just west of the Mississippi river all the way across to the east coast, which populates approximately 200 Million People!

It is interesting to see the display of electricity and lines of distribution from city to city, the lifeblood which keeps the system functioning. Can you imagine all of this flickering off if a ‘Carrington-event’ solar eruption were to happen, affecting hundreds of millions of people?

The glow and sheets of the aurora borealis can be clearly seen to the north, as the earth battles with solar radiation from the sun, the very same phenomenon which would explode into brilliance and encompass much of the earth should a major solar event occur.

As you watch the video, marvel at what you are seeing, but also think about the dependance and reliance that we all have on our electrical grid.

Are you prepared?

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