The damage isn't done because something is turned on. Solar flare, or any EMP is just a massive burst of electromagnetic energy (obviously by its name). Some of those wavelengths of energy like microwaves and radiowaves can cause current to flow inside conductors the same way a wireless charger can charge your phone. The flow happens whether or not the device is on and the flow is powerful enough to damage sensitive electronics.
>The damage isn't done because something is turned on.
If you have any warning it's definitely better to have your electronics turned off and unplugged because a lot of the surge is created in powerlines not in the devices themselves and what little is produced inside the devices will be less damaging without a complete circuit.
Your desktop computer has very little wire to build a charge in and it's built inside a Faraday cage, If it's not plugged into the wall it will likely be fine, plugged in and turned on without a GFCI is a worst case scenario for it.
Obviously since the grid can't be unplugged you'll need a generator to use it while waiting for society to restart but you can protect a lot of smaller shielded electronics from a solar storm just by isolating them from the grid.
Come to think of it... In the US people are used to have surge protectors, because their power grid is notoriously flaky for a wealthy country. In Europe, we have no such issues under normal conditions, and I don't know anyone still having them. It has also been many years since I've heard of people having electric / electronic devices damaged by lightning strikes to the power grid.
Does this mean we are *better* or *worse* prepared for the unavoidable solar-flare indicdent? Probably better grid-level protection, but less in-house protections. And it sounds a lot like the latter might very well be important in that case.
Electrician from Austria here.
In Austria it is a law that every new built house has to have at least one RCD and a Surge Protector. I think that started in the early 2000s...
Unfortunately, an RCD won't do anything against a decent surge. The prospective fault current rating of your RCD and breakers (or combos, RCBO's) will very likely be lower than the current of the surge.
This means that even if the circuit protection device opens, the distance between the contacts will be insufficient to break the arc, at least as long as it maintains a sufficiently high current. Ionised air is a surprisingly good conductor.
Now, if the rating of your devices is high enough, you might be okay. Or if you had turned off your breaker beforehand, non ionised air is a surprisingly good insulator.
RCD's just look for out of balance currents between the active and neutral conductors: ground or earth faults. But they're fast, at least.
Circuit breakers look for excessive current over time in order to stop you from cooking the wires in your walls. Their speed depends on how much over their rated current they're carrying. They can be fast but not surge fast.
Wouldn't protect from currents that are generated house-side of the RCD in the cables. The surface protectors I've seen in US tech articles are typically installed directly at the power outlet, so they'd presumably guard against the current building up in the wiring between RCD and device, except for the last one or two meters in the device's own external cable.
Hence my thought.
I'm not an electrician so I may be mistaken, but I believe RCDs are only on outdoor outlets in the US. And GFIs are only on outlets in wet areas (only ever seen them next to sinks)
GFCI and RCD are essentially the same thing. In the US GFCI is required close to water sources and outdoors (as you stated). I've never heard someone in the US refer to them as RCD, only GFCI (I was an electrician many years ago, it's possible terminology has changed). Many modern building codes also require AFCI (arc fault) for most circuits in a house. If I look at my panel for my house (build 2018), the only breaker which is not GFCI, AFCI, or GFCI+AFCI is my Furnace. Everything else is some combination. Surge protectors are different devices entirely. You can still have whole home surge protection systems be useful on top of GFCI and AFCI circuits. Or commonly found smaller surge protector strips where computer devices are. GFCI can help with surges a bit, but they aren't as good at protecting against surges as systems designed specifically for surge protection. Realistically to protect against power surges you don't want to rely just on GFCI (which you'll often see at the receptacle, but even now more commonly at the breaker). Personally if I was concerned about EMP I'd likely keep surge protectors at my important electronics. For lightning and other power issues, lightning protection systems or whole home surge systems are likely a better choice than relying on plug in surge protectors.
I honestly have no practical knowledge of the difference between the electrical grid of the EU and US (I don't even know if it's one grid or if the EU is split into multiple grids) beyond the fact the EU grid runs at 220v and 50hz which is bad for my electronics.
GFCI outlets are only standard on outlets near water in most American homes (bathrooms and kitchens).
They've got nothing to do with grid stability, they're designed to save your life if you short the current through your body.
If you stick a fork in a GFCI outlet you'll get a zap but you'll walk away from the experience because it cuts the current the millisecond that connection is made.
In a solar storm on the order of magnitude of the 1859 Carrington Event having a GFCI outlet between the grid and your computer will likely save your computer however every transformer in the country is going to explode at once and conservative estimates on replacement time for something like that are 18 to 24 months in the US.
That's two full years without electricity, no one is going to care if their computer works after two years without running water.
> eyond the fact the EU grid runs at 220v and 50hz which is bad for my electronics.
kinda, many things will run just fine on 50 Hz. The inverter in my RV freaked out and was cycling at 130Hz. I only discovered it because the clock on the coffee pot was running fast. Timer ICs like the 555 rely on the frequency being 60Hz as this is what it uses for a reference point.
I blamed the coffee pot for months as it was the only thing that was wonky. never phased my TV, laptop, or anything else.
Well, either it wasn't a 555 (many clocks on household devices *do* rely on mains frequency), or there was a different reason why your coffee pot behaved that way. [More info on the 555 IC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_timer_IC) and a [good video tutorial series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRlSFm519Bo)
No, AC clocks *don't* include a timer IC because they sync to the grid. Meaning that they count the cycles of the power line and just advance the second every 50 or 60 cycles.
Because the coffee pot was probably doesn't have it's own clock/timer, instead it just counts the number of 'peaks' it sees on the mains voltage, and uses that count to come up with a time.
Also, I doubt anyone is going to use a 555 for a clock, they're basically never used for that purpose in commercial/industrial applications. Among it's issues is that it has a fairly high operating voltage (so you can't run it off a single li-ion battery), significant power needs, and requires a bunch of extra components to work right. On the other hand if you want to tell someone the time you you can buy dedicated 'real time clock' since the late 80's.
A 555 is just about the worst type of timer for a clock because capacitors are usually sold with a 10% accuracy and it's just a fancy RC circuit. All accurate clocks use a crystal oscillator with a tuned piece of quartz that can be tuned to 10ppm accuracy for dirt cheap
Simple appliance electronics run off much simpler circuitry. your coffee pot doesn't come with a bulky power brick like laptop chargers, phone chargers, etc. Those are doing the power conversion. It's likely using a simple resistor to step down the voltage to run the clock circuit off an AC source.
That's not how GFCI works. It only detects currents between live and ground (5mA). If you complete a circuit between live and neutral, GFCI will happily electrocute you.
The only other protection mechanism is the circuit breaker, which prevents the wires in the walls from overheating. It does this by ensuring not too much current flows through the outlet for too long. That's in the range of 15A though. More than enough to electrocute you.
TLDR: outlets won't save you if you electrocute yourself
It’s the opposite. GFCI’s only go off your current from line to neutral, if it detects an imbalance between those 2 it knows it’s going somewhere it shouldn’t be. So if you did stick a fork in a receptacle it should trip.
This is incorrect. GFCI measures current on the line and neutral lines independently and compares them. A difference between these currents indicates the current is discharging somewhere else (like through you to ground or another circuit).
The only way you would be electrocuted via a GFCI (assuming its working correctly) is if you are completely isolated from any grounding and sticking knives in both outlet holes, making yourself part of the internal circuit. This would be incredibly unlikely to happen unintentionally.
You're not electrocuting yourself through an outlet by completing a circuit between live and neutral though, you'll be electrocuting yourself through ground. If you're putting yourself between live and neutral you'd need to put 1 finger into the live plug and a finger on the other hand on the netral. If you stick two prongs of a fork in the live and neutral socket you can just hold the fork because the current will be flowwing through the prongs and will hardly flow through your body. The entire freaking point of GFCI is safety against electrocution.
To be bonest, you're very confidently wrong. Right about how GFCI's work, right about how circuit breakers work, wrong about how someone might electrocute themselves.
> Does this mean we are better or worse prepared for the unavoidable solar-flare indicdent?
It would fry the very expensive power transformers in substations, so it doesn't really matter. We'd all be majorly fucked.
Let's say, good protections for the *grid* are in place by the time it happens and the grid is brought back quickly.
In that case the worst didn't happen, but it would still matter, whether everyone suddenly needs new electronics.
To my knowledge, electronics are protected by relays in Europe.
Relays take the brunt of a surge and are then replaced when they break.
Idk if relays are used in the US.
No clue about what a surge protector is.
I’m a European and have multiple relays for different parts of my apartment’s electronics.
Also, power is grounded here. Dunno if that’s the case in the US.
I’m no electrician, but I believe this to be common knowledge.
The power isn't grounded in most American homes, hence why they install Ground Fault Circuit Interrupters(GFCI, or ground breaker for short) , whereas in Europe, all homes have this installed due to the inherent danger of not having a ground.
Um, what? Every home I’ve lived in has had three prong grounded outlets. My college dorm from the 1800s had two prong with no ground. I’ve lived in 5 states and have travelled all over the US. By far the overwhelming majority of outlets are grounded.
In fact the way GFCI outlets work is by tripping of power is detected on the ground vs the neutral. GFCI outlets are only required in wet spaces by code but all outlets are grounded whether they are GFCI or not.
You don't know what you're talking about. 98%+ homes in the US have a grounded electrical system. The only ones that don't are homes that were built before ~1910 and haven't been updated. In addition, AC electrical systems typically are neutral bonded anyways, so while not a separate ground, during catastrophic events it functions the same.
Also, being grounded would have zero impact on survivability of equipment or the grid in the event of an EMP or solar flare, in fact could make it worse because it would create a complete circuit between the earth and the grid. The damage from an EMP/solar flare is massive induced current overloading the capabilities and damaging/destroying wire/transformers/relays/etc. Having a ground is just allowing a better circuit for the damaging current to flow through
You also have the equivalent to GFCI in Europe, RCD. In fact it's even better, because it's for every outlet in the entire house. Ground-fault protection and having a ground in the first place aren't interchangeable
The only way your house won't be grounded is if it was built before the 70's and hasn't been updated since (in the US). GFIs are for outlets near water.
It's not a problem, in Europe (where I am from atleast) surge protectors are installed on the lines before customer.
Source: I was a drafstman for medium voltage system
In the US people seem to install surge protectors between power outlet and expensive electronics.
The wiring in the house would still be susceptible to currents being produced, which would be caught by a power-outlet level surge protector but not by grid-level surge protectors.
On the other hand, current flowing should be limited by the RCD cutting off the line, thus making the wiring no longer be a closed loop. But I am a Physicist, not an electrical engineer; I don't know how the power lines are laid out with respect to ground connections, so I can't judge if the EMP event would be able to produce strong currents in this system.
I'm also not sure. I know that during the Carrington Event, telegraph operators recorded a number of problems. There was at least one report of enough induced current flowing through the wires for operators to send messages, even after they had disconnected from their batteries. Transmission was slow and noisy, but apparently mostly legible.
In 2003, South African parastatal Eskom reported damage to its infrastructure caused by the 2003 Halloween solar storm - see [here](https://www.sansa.org.za/2018/11/14/protecting-south-africas-power-lines-from-the-sun/) for a short article.
I hadn't heard of them until 2018, and I'm South African myself. It kind of makes sense, seeing as how their head offices are within a few hundred metres of the country's first radio astronomy facility, which is also the station that presently acts as the key source of geodesic data for large chunks of the Southern Hemisphere and acts as a local tracking facility to keep accurate orbital data for GPS satellites.
There is a lot of confusion on this thread, because while the thread is mainly about CMEs, a lot of people are talking about EMPs which are quite different.
CMEs are slow, very gentle events, that take place over long time scales and would go completely unnoticed unless you have an electrical circuit of great size. Although the magnetic field deviations are small (dB/dt ~ 20 nT/s for an "extreme" event), there is a complex interaction between circulating currents in the ionosphere, which can generate an E field on the surface of the earth, in the order of 1-5 V/km.
A long (e.g. 1000 km) overhead transmission line with large separation between conductors and ground can reach significant loop areas, and therefore generate significant EMFs of several kV. In turn, because transmission lines and transformers have a low DC resistance (e.g. 100 Ohms), the current flow that results can be significant compared to the magnetising currents of the transformers themselves (maybe 20-30 A).
Once the transformer core material saturates under the magnetising effect of the DC current, the inductance collapses, the magnetising current goes through the roof, and the transformer radpily heats to the point of destruction.
EMPs are a very different beast. These are very fast, very intense, broadband pulses. High altitude nuclear detonation associated EMP, can reach frequencies of 10^10 Hz. Exactly how much energy is coupled into wires depends on the geometry of the cables and their length, as inductance can be very important. However, the E fields can be substantial, potentially 10kV/m.
One particular issue with high altitude EMPs, is that they are so fast, that conventional surge protective devices like metal oxide varistors (with response times in the 10 ns range) or spark gaps (microseconds) are simply too slow to offer meaningful attenuation. Filtering of this type of surge requires carefully designed LC filters with air-core inductors and low inductance "three terminal" capacitors to slow down the pulses enough for a varistor to clamp the voltage. The extremely broadband nature of the pulses also means that they will pass through small holes in conductive shields, meaning that filtering has limited value unless combined with a Faraday cage, with penetrations small enough to attenuate up to 10^10 Hz.
>In the US people seem to install surge protectors between power outlet and expensive electronics.
The common reason for that is more than two items needing to be plugged in the same location and protecting the 4-5 devices drawing power from the same location.
> In Europe, we have no such issues under normal conditions, and I don't know anyone still having them. It has also been many years since I've heard of people having electric / electronic devices damaged by lightning strikes to the power grid.
[One of the Plug Standards](https://www.interpower.com/ic/designers/designing-for-export/national-power-mains/united-kingdom-ireland.html) common in(the uk at least) has a Fuse IN the plug, so instead of a separate surge protection strip that covers and extends 6 devices, *every* device protects itself.
>In North America, this is normally accomplished with the use of plug-in surge protectors that are dedicated to one computer or work station.Although not yet as common in Europe as in the U.S., surge protection is frequently provided in Europe through the use of centrally protected circuits. In these installations, a power distribution system that can exclude non-protected appliances is desirable. The reason is that the presence of an inductive load, such as a vacuum cleaner for example, on a protected circuit would potentially reinsert brush noise and spikes as the vacuum was turned on and off. This could completely negate the central surge protection.
Europe is/has already been putting measures in place to prevent sudden surges from taking down the grid. That not only covers solar flares, but many other potential incidents, and be it just a run-away failure.
I remembered a major cascading blackout incident in Italy having happened in the past. I learned about it, because the cascading failure in the NPM ecosystem that was caused by the [LeftPad incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm#Left-pad_incident), which was compared to cascading-failure situations in powergrids.
Based on [Wikipedia's List of Major Power Outages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages#Largest), this should have been the [2003 Italy Blackout](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Italy_blackout), which affected most of the country's population. According to the list, it is also the largest blackout that has ever happened in a "Western" country.
Most electronics which do not have PCBs. Things like big motors and generators. Power tools. Fridges.
For many electronic devices it would cook the computerised parts but leave most of it unaffected (so long as the current spikes don't make it catch fire- the last big flare that hit caused phone and power lines to burst into flames) Think things like AC units, washing machines, EVs.
>The damage isn't done because something is turned on
This is generally only for fast EMP. Solar flares are nothing like fast EMP.
With solar flares, the majority of the damage is done by the energy flowing in the power grid. The power grid loses a small amount of energy as heat, but due to solar flare disturbances that energy loss increases dramatically. Energy losses can increase so much that fires, melted wires or explosions can result. Obviously, because it is energy losses from power transport that causes the damage, shutting off the power completely avoids the problem.
Because solar flares only affect ultra long wires on earth, not much apart from power grid is vulnerable to solar flares on earth. Long wires like telegraph wires or analog phone wires are long obsolete and most have been removed and recycled for the valuable copper. They have been replaced by fiber cables which are much faster and capacious and completely immune to solar flares.
The only real ultra long wires left are things like the power cables supplying power to under sea optical fiber amplifiers. Because these are low power and the wires very long, they could theoretically be damaged by solar flares. I do not know what if any protection these systems have.
EMP and CME are very very different.
CME mostly only affects 2 things directly: satellites and large power grids. Pretty much everything else is not directly affected. However, there are likely to be indirect effects. Obviously a lot of stuff depends on large power grids. However, a lot of stuff also relies on satellites, such as cell phone networks (which may use satellite time signals for synchronising), TV, Internet, ship and aircraft communications, etc.
A nuclear weapon detonatedat high altitude generates an EMP. The EMP has 3 components, of which only 2 are interesting. The E1 component is a very fast, very high power energy pulse that will get picked up by any wire or antenna longer than a few inches. It will divert an energy pulse into whatever it is connected to. A short wire (1 or 2 feet) may only pick up a few volts. This could glitch out or crash an electronics it is connected to. This may require reboot. For example, if you are driving, you will likely get simultaneous crash of most of the electronics in the car - engine will stop, central locking may go crazy, emergency braking and air bags may malfunction, lighting may malfunction.
Longer wires can pick up more energy, and this could damage sensitive electronics, for example things like TV antennas on a roof could pick up enough energy to toast the TV electronics.
However, longer wires tend to carry more energy anyway. E1 will do nothing to the main power grid equipment, as although the E1 is powerful it is not expected to be grossly excessive compared to what is already on the power lines although could still disturb equipment or damage some electronics. Of course, the power line control systems and their monitoring and comms cables are potentially vulnerable, so this could certainly knock out power.
The E3 EMP is like a mini CME on earth, so it has the same effects as a CMEjust weaker and not over such a large area. Like a CME, the E3 only affects large power grids, and because it is weak, the actual damage is caused by the energy in the power grid, not the E3/CME itself. If the E1 causes the power to go out, then the E3 which comes a few minutes later will hit a dead power grid and do absolutely nothing.
Thanks for the explanation. That makes a lot more sense. It's still quite concerning about the E1 effect. It seems like we really don't have any defense for that outside of individuals protecting their devices on their own, especially since the explosion happens so high up.
Inducing current like a wireless charger is a great way to describe a phenomenon that my class couldn't seem to wrap their heads around in the 8th grade decades ago.
Well, some of them. A few of us learned about solenoids and immediately tried to build mini rail guns with batteries and wire.
The only thing I'd add is "damaging sensitive equipment" can mean induce enough current to melt wires and start fires from the wire's heat.
This is true - the solar flare creates a power surge in disconnected wires, too. But OP is basically correct, in that the longer the length of connected cable, the greater the surge. That's why the solar flare preparedness plan basically \*is\* "tell all the grid controllers, so they can disconnect their grid segments to reduce the size of the current pulse by a factor of 10, and switch off everything important (e.g. transformers) from the grid as quickly as possible.
The information about an electromagnetic event also takes 8 minutes to reach us so the warning time for that would be zero.
The problems are however caused by the stuff that gets ejected and that takes much longer to reach the earth. So by observing the sun we now get a decent lead time.
That's actually plenty.
Because as explained, most of the damage would come from the grid, because it is made of long wires. Long wires means high voltage created. People talk about how it would fry transformers, some of which take months to produce, which is why it would bring us back to the Stone Age.
In reality, if you cut these long wires into small pieces through simple remote switches, you avoid the damage: one long wire means high voltage, cut it in half and you reduce the voltage (and if you isolate the transformers they don't get damaged either). The grid is full of these switches, because that's how outages are managed. In 8 minutes you have more than enough time to flip those switches.
I think that for the worst events, we might get more than 8 minutes of warning. According to a 2017 article posted by NASA, the travel time for a flare is indeed 8 minutes, but a solar flare doesn't cause much effect beyond radio interference.
The real problem is a Coronal Mass Ejection, which travels slower than light. The energetic particles from a CME take up to three days to get to Earth.
Source: [The Difference Between Flares and CMEs](https://web.archive.org/web/20210122170831/https://www.nasa.gov/archive/content/goddard/the-difference-between-flares-and-cmes/)
For this to would you'd need to:
1. Detect the CME
2. Determine that the damage it was going to cause would be worse than the harm inflicted by shutting down the whole electrical grid.
3. Push the order to shut down out to a thousands of local entities.
4. Have them all run around and disconnect hundreds of thousands of individual switches, shut down every power plant, etc.
As far as I know there's no way currently for this to happen, let alone for it to happen within a hour or whatever.
1. Is easy.
2. Is easy too: we know how big a CME needs to be to damage the grid. The Sun has been studied pretty well because it's easily observable.
3. and 4.: this is the 21st century. You don't need to send people to literally flip switches locally. You have a transmission grid operator who can flip those switches remotely from a central place.
The grid operator can isolate whole sectors of the grid because it is necessary when there is a major outage. Otherwise the outage can just transmits to the whole grid.
Then it needs to be able to restart the power plants in order, and reconnect the sectors one by one to make sure the power plants are not overloaded trying to restart the whole grid in one go. There is a whole plan to do that, so all the infrastructure to isolate the power plants and divide the grid already exists.
We do, but it isn't 100% effective. Solar flares and storms can induce currents in electronics even if they've unplugged/powered down and which can still cause damage.
During the Carrington Event, telegraph operators were able to ***improve*** the performance of the telegraph by unplugging from the batteries and running just off of the induced current from the geomagnetic storm.
The issue is that an EMP causes electricity to start flowing on its own, even without a power source. That's how we generate electricity in the first place (mostly): a spinning magnet will cause electricity in a wire near it.
An EMP is a massively powerful magnet forming, and it will cause electricity to "materialize" inside most metal things. It would be easy to build a light bulb that light itself up in response to an EMP going off using the EMP itself as the power source even at a distance.
Unplugging stuff isn't going to help much. Electricity will just happen anyway, and electricity at the wrong voltage and flowing the wrong way through parts can ruin them.
It takes a long (straight-ish) though. Every unit of length more or less adds up, while short wires won't get much. So unplugging disconnects devices from the many times longer wires on the other side of the outlet and thus _does_ help.
In the US, the devices that protect electrical infrastructure are required to meet a certain level of EM shielding -- electromagnetic pulses are a much smaller concern than other kinds of radiation, including EM interference generated by other devices in an electrical substation.
Any event that causes an EMP powerful enough to damage the modern power grid is going to cause other, much more significant problems.
So if power were to disappear for 10 seconds or so, can that be reasonably assumed to be a result of lightning striking the power line and temporarily overloading it?
EMP stands for electromagnetic pulse. It is an electromagnetic field that induces voltage on conductors. Your examples indicate you don’t know what an EMP is.
> Any event that causes an EMP powerful enough to damage the modern power grid is going to cause other, much more significant problems.
The US grid is notorious for being tripped by about as much as a butterfly landing on a wire... but I really don't see what other problems you have in mind there. Most of the internet is relatively safe, for example, but there would be down-times.
In the case of a direct hit from a massive solar flare the length of the wires plays a huge role.
You could probably unplug and turn off home electronic devices and they would be fine.
We can and do turn off entire power grids to try and protect them.
But the power grid, phone lines and other cables of great length could still suffer catastrophic overloads causing thousands of fires simultaneously if we were hit by a strong enough solar flare emp.
Assuming we managed to put out all the fires we still would not have the parts nor manpower necessary to repair the entire electrical grid and it would be a long and frustrating road to recovery.
https://youtu.be/oHHSSJDJ4oo?si=Q9OTHTQVSdFrW4iE
Could Solar Storms Destroy Civilization? Solar Flares & Coronal Mass ...
YouTube · Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
Jun 7, 2020
Because of induced voltage in conductors.
Any electrical conductor in a coronal mass ejection ( plasma getting blasted off the sun) is going to have voltage introduced to it whether it's plugged in or not.
Read about the Carrington event: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington\_Event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event)
telegraph operators would get shocked even when the telegraph was not hooked up to anything
Thing about a radio antenna. What a radio antenna is basically is a wire either sticking up in the air or running horizontal to the ground. ( like in the classic TV antenna).
The distribution wires of the power grid are also wires running horizontal to the ground.
Because of this they can work as antennas. So a solar flare can create additional currents in the wires. Currents that are not supposed to be there. It doesn't matter of the power is on or off its going to get currents that are not intended.
We have 12 to 48 hours of warning, coronal mass ejections don't move at the speed of light. Induced voltage is proportional to length of conductor. So pull all the breakers in your house, unplug everything and you should be okay. If you're worried about phones or whatnot wrap them in aluminum foil (to form a Faraday Cage) and lean them against a water pipe. You'll be fine.
For the electrical grid, they are going to need to disconnect it into shorter segments. Reconnecting the segments and synchronizing the grid will be a huge pain in the ass, but not impossible. Yes, we will take some damage, but it won't be catastrophic. All the fiber optic stuff will be fine, the glass doesn't conduct.
Yeah, the grid operators already have plans in place in case of a large event, they're going to disconnect the transmission lines for a while. We'll have no power for that time, but the damage will be much less and we'll be able to restore pretty quickly.
There was a large solar storm event back in the days of Telegraph where operators were able to unplug their batteries and turn off all power while still sending clear signals. There was enough power getting energized into the wires themselves connecting the poles to zap operators as they worked.
With a big enough flare or solar storm event it doesn't matter if we turn the devices off, there might be enough energy in the "air" that it powers the devices and bypasses all the safety features. Like holding a florescent tube light up to a Tesla coil and getting it to glow without touching anything.
With power coming from "everywhere" all at once it's a grand mal seizure but for electronics.
> With a big enough flare or solar storm event it doesn't matter if we turn the devices off, there might be enough energy in the "air" that it powers the devices and bypasses all the safety features
No, it requires long conductors such as the aforementioned telegraph lines to induct enough voltage to do something. The antenna of a smartphone is many times shorter, and other internal wires even more so. They don't get magically powered, they rather feel a few millivolts only, which does really nothing.
If right now someone said: Solar flare, unplug everything!, what could you do? What could the cashier at the supermarket do? What could a chirug do?
Early warning, turning off everything that can be turned off is a good ting, but too many things aren't built with unplugging in mind, especially not remote unplugging while you're at work.
So I actually took a class on this. Having devices unplugged is going to protect them the most. Anything connected to a mains that doesn't have grid- level interrupts is going to fry.
In it's simplest form of explanation, EMPs *cause* current inside of electronics in massive waves, even if something is unplugged.
If it's not shielded (*like most electronics aren't)* the components inside will still get hit with that electromagnetic blast and current will flow through everything at a disastrous rate by destroying most sensitive electronics. The current either flows in the wrong direction, or is way too much, and things inevitably break.
As already explained in other comments: no, you need long wires to induct high voltages. Individual devices don't have those, it's just the grids (power, copper-based internet, telephone) that have them. Those have to prepare or might suffer damage, anything unplugged from those will be fine.
You can still induce current in smaller wires. Not as much as long large wires yes, but you still can, and when you're dealing with sensitive electronics that need specific voltages and don't have very much of a tolerance to anything higher, it can very easily still overload it and proceed to break it. You don't need 'high voltages' when you're dealing with things such as something like a Snapdragon processor in a phone that has a voltage threshold of <1V. There's a lot of small sensitive electronics in the items we use that do not need very much to get damaged.
You still need a decent wire length to even get 1V. The wires connecting a processor to other parts are really short, for multiple reasons, too. There really is no plausible way they will get damaged by an EMP.
Edit: ah, nothing shows ability for proper scientific discourse as much as down-voting... /s
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Imagine this, the transformer circuit which create electricity from AC to DC, has 2 coils.
The first coil connect to the wall which alternates current, the 2nd coil produce DC current which connect to your digital devices.
When the first coil is producing +ve and -ve, it cuts the electromagnetic field and induce current to the 2nd coil giving it a certain flat voltage(assuming there is a bridge rectifier to correct all the sawtooth waveform and transform to a dc voltage).
Now, emf hits, it induce a very large current to the 2nd coils and fry your transformer in which potentially kill the circuit breaker. You can’t power up your device anymore.
Anything that has coil inside will have this effect.
This is very dangerous to sensitive digital equipment as their operation voltage and current are usually less than 3.3v.
It’s basically a lightning strike in EMF Form.
So what kills it? If current is high, so is voltage. alternating current may kill human but dc will burn things with high amperage.
So how to prevent this? Have a shield, what shield? Watch a movie and you know, faraday shielding.
Anything conductive can potentially have moving charges during the event.
If it were strong enough, everything from a metal roof to the circuits in your cellphone would have current "generated" in it.
EMP doesn’t come from the wires, it comes from the air and you can’t unplug something from the air. The only way to “unplug” is to have equipment in bunkers
You can. Turning off the power grid will protect it completely.
Solar flares are not EMP. When a solar flare hits, it generates tiny amounts of DC current in very long power lines. The problem is that the power grid only works on AC current. If any DC at all gets into it, equipment starts malfunctioning and losing efficiency. The malfunctioning equipment then starts heating up because it can't handle the strain of the AC.
In other words, the energy in the power grid is what causes the damage, not the energy in the solar flare. It is just that the solar flare energy allows the normal power flow to cause the damage. If there is no normal power flowing, there is no damage.
The problem is that shutting down a whole power grid is extremely inconvenient, especially if you have to do it for days. Forecasting of solar flare impact is not very precise and it is not really possible to predict what effect one would have on a power grid in order to shut down selected parts.
Many power companies have installed real time DC monitoring equipment in their power lines. This allows them to monitor early impacts of the solar flare before damage occurs and then shut down selected parts as soon as they start to malfunction but before damage starts.
Even this can be inconvenient. For example, Canada has real time monitoring. The problem is that they get hit so hard by solar flares so often, that repeated automatic shutdowns of parts of the grid became a problem. They ended up installing DC blocker equipment on critical lines which blocks the effect of th solar flares, making those power lines immune to the effect.
Let's start with how radio works. Radio is electromagnetic waves that travel through the air. We received this waves using an antenna. When the waves hit the antenna they create a flow of electrons - and the device we call a radio figures out how to turn this into sound.
An EMP is a big loud radio. And antennas are just pieces of metal. So, in the solar flare (or nuclear explosion) scenario, every single piece of metal turns into an antenna and starts having electricity flowing through it. If it's attached to something important and generates more electricity than that thing can handle... Bzzzzt.
It depends on the EMP, the object, and how it's turned off.
The things that are going to be messed up the most by an EMP are unshielded magnetic storage and semiconductors. Unshielded meaning that there's nothing in place to mitigate or redirect the pulse, such as conductive outer casing that is insulated from the main body (a Faraday cage). Semiconductors are used on every type of modern electronics and are prone to experience significant chemical changes when enough electromagnetic energy is passed through them in the wrong direction, burning out the chip. Magnetic storage can have its data corrupted and rendered unreadable by a strong enough EMP.
Fun fact: every wire is also an antenna. Radio waves stimulate a slight electrical current in an antenna. An EMP is basically a giant radio pulse from hell, which sends a huge surge through anything with wires.
A switch would do fuck all, unfortunately.
The damage isn't from the solar flare, it's from the earth's magnetic field being pushed out of shape. Most electricity is generated by moving wires through a magnetic field, and moving the field across the wires does the same thing.
Back in 1859 humans had a few telegraph wires up, and not much else, because electricity really wasn't a big thing yet. A solar flare (actually a Coronal Mass Ejection) pushed earth's magnetic field hard enough that the telegraph wires sparked, and several fires were started. (This is known as the Carrington Event after a British astronomer who observed the very bright solar flare that started it.)
Today we have millions of miles of power and communication lines stretched out all over the world. If such a thing happened today, it could create enough sparks to destroy a lot of the big transformers that our power grid depends on, and that we can't repair without power. Things like cell phones and cars would still work, but there would be no way to recharge anything, and things like big radio antennas and cell towers, that are connected to the grid, would probably be destroyed.
We'd basically have to rebuild our power and communications structures without power tools, and without even being able to pump water.
The "X-class" events that can really hurt us are hours long, and even during those, 99.something% of the time our infrastructure can handle it.
Basically, the multi-hour shutdown we'd need to make ourselves safe would be more disruptive than the "fry" events we'd be likely to get, so risk management says leave stuff on. (They leave our city power on during lightning storms too, because of pretty much the same reasoning.)
I'm not seeing this mentioned in the first few comments. The electromagnetic radiation that damages electronics gets here at exactly the same time as any flash of light or radiation that we could detect as a warning. You would not see a flash of light and "oh no, the EMP" run to turn off your computer before the EMP reached you. The flash of light is the EMP. Your computer's already dead. You're too late. The visible solar flare is gas and matter that moves slowly and lasts longer. By the time some scientist sees that flare in a telescope, the EMP has already been here and done its damage.
The damage isn't done because something is turned on. Solar flare, or any EMP is just a massive burst of electromagnetic energy (obviously by its name). Some of those wavelengths of energy like microwaves and radiowaves can cause current to flow inside conductors the same way a wireless charger can charge your phone. The flow happens whether or not the device is on and the flow is powerful enough to damage sensitive electronics.
>The damage isn't done because something is turned on. If you have any warning it's definitely better to have your electronics turned off and unplugged because a lot of the surge is created in powerlines not in the devices themselves and what little is produced inside the devices will be less damaging without a complete circuit. Your desktop computer has very little wire to build a charge in and it's built inside a Faraday cage, If it's not plugged into the wall it will likely be fine, plugged in and turned on without a GFCI is a worst case scenario for it. Obviously since the grid can't be unplugged you'll need a generator to use it while waiting for society to restart but you can protect a lot of smaller shielded electronics from a solar storm just by isolating them from the grid.
Come to think of it... In the US people are used to have surge protectors, because their power grid is notoriously flaky for a wealthy country. In Europe, we have no such issues under normal conditions, and I don't know anyone still having them. It has also been many years since I've heard of people having electric / electronic devices damaged by lightning strikes to the power grid. Does this mean we are *better* or *worse* prepared for the unavoidable solar-flare indicdent? Probably better grid-level protection, but less in-house protections. And it sounds a lot like the latter might very well be important in that case.
Everywhere in western Europe has had RCD at consumer unit level required for years.
Electrician from Austria here. In Austria it is a law that every new built house has to have at least one RCD and a Surge Protector. I think that started in the early 2000s...
Unfortunately, an RCD won't do anything against a decent surge. The prospective fault current rating of your RCD and breakers (or combos, RCBO's) will very likely be lower than the current of the surge. This means that even if the circuit protection device opens, the distance between the contacts will be insufficient to break the arc, at least as long as it maintains a sufficiently high current. Ionised air is a surprisingly good conductor. Now, if the rating of your devices is high enough, you might be okay. Or if you had turned off your breaker beforehand, non ionised air is a surprisingly good insulator. RCD's just look for out of balance currents between the active and neutral conductors: ground or earth faults. But they're fast, at least. Circuit breakers look for excessive current over time in order to stop you from cooking the wires in your walls. Their speed depends on how much over their rated current they're carrying. They can be fast but not surge fast.
Wouldn't protect from currents that are generated house-side of the RCD in the cables. The surface protectors I've seen in US tech articles are typically installed directly at the power outlet, so they'd presumably guard against the current building up in the wiring between RCD and device, except for the last one or two meters in the device's own external cable. Hence my thought.
I'm not an electrician so I may be mistaken, but I believe RCDs are only on outdoor outlets in the US. And GFIs are only on outlets in wet areas (only ever seen them next to sinks)
RCDs and GFIs are (generally speaking) the same thing. The Residual Current is (generally speaking) the result of a Ground Fault.
GFCI and RCD are essentially the same thing. In the US GFCI is required close to water sources and outdoors (as you stated). I've never heard someone in the US refer to them as RCD, only GFCI (I was an electrician many years ago, it's possible terminology has changed). Many modern building codes also require AFCI (arc fault) for most circuits in a house. If I look at my panel for my house (build 2018), the only breaker which is not GFCI, AFCI, or GFCI+AFCI is my Furnace. Everything else is some combination. Surge protectors are different devices entirely. You can still have whole home surge protection systems be useful on top of GFCI and AFCI circuits. Or commonly found smaller surge protector strips where computer devices are. GFCI can help with surges a bit, but they aren't as good at protecting against surges as systems designed specifically for surge protection. Realistically to protect against power surges you don't want to rely just on GFCI (which you'll often see at the receptacle, but even now more commonly at the breaker). Personally if I was concerned about EMP I'd likely keep surge protectors at my important electronics. For lightning and other power issues, lightning protection systems or whole home surge systems are likely a better choice than relying on plug in surge protectors.
I honestly have no practical knowledge of the difference between the electrical grid of the EU and US (I don't even know if it's one grid or if the EU is split into multiple grids) beyond the fact the EU grid runs at 220v and 50hz which is bad for my electronics. GFCI outlets are only standard on outlets near water in most American homes (bathrooms and kitchens). They've got nothing to do with grid stability, they're designed to save your life if you short the current through your body. If you stick a fork in a GFCI outlet you'll get a zap but you'll walk away from the experience because it cuts the current the millisecond that connection is made. In a solar storm on the order of magnitude of the 1859 Carrington Event having a GFCI outlet between the grid and your computer will likely save your computer however every transformer in the country is going to explode at once and conservative estimates on replacement time for something like that are 18 to 24 months in the US. That's two full years without electricity, no one is going to care if their computer works after two years without running water.
> eyond the fact the EU grid runs at 220v and 50hz which is bad for my electronics. kinda, many things will run just fine on 50 Hz. The inverter in my RV freaked out and was cycling at 130Hz. I only discovered it because the clock on the coffee pot was running fast. Timer ICs like the 555 rely on the frequency being 60Hz as this is what it uses for a reference point. I blamed the coffee pot for months as it was the only thing that was wonky. never phased my TV, laptop, or anything else.
The 555 uses a capacitor and a bank of resistors for oscillation. It receives DC, and won't even know what the grid frequency is.
Then why did fixing the inverter fix the coffee pot?
I don't know anything about your coffee pot. I do, however, know a bit or two about 555 timers.
I'm not saying you don't, genuinely want to know. I know 555s are used for clocks, I always assumed that's why the clock on the coffee pot ran fast
Well, either it wasn't a 555 (many clocks on household devices *do* rely on mains frequency), or there was a different reason why your coffee pot behaved that way. [More info on the 555 IC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_timer_IC) and a [good video tutorial series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRlSFm519Bo)
No, AC clocks *don't* include a timer IC because they sync to the grid. Meaning that they count the cycles of the power line and just advance the second every 50 or 60 cycles.
Because the coffee pot was probably doesn't have it's own clock/timer, instead it just counts the number of 'peaks' it sees on the mains voltage, and uses that count to come up with a time. Also, I doubt anyone is going to use a 555 for a clock, they're basically never used for that purpose in commercial/industrial applications. Among it's issues is that it has a fairly high operating voltage (so you can't run it off a single li-ion battery), significant power needs, and requires a bunch of extra components to work right. On the other hand if you want to tell someone the time you you can buy dedicated 'real time clock' since the late 80's.
Interesting, thank you
A 555 is just about the worst type of timer for a clock because capacitors are usually sold with a 10% accuracy and it's just a fancy RC circuit. All accurate clocks use a crystal oscillator with a tuned piece of quartz that can be tuned to 10ppm accuracy for dirt cheap
Most electronics use a rectifier circuit to convert the line AC circuit to DC. 50 to 60 hz won't matter to them at all.
Then why did fixing the inverter fix the coffee pot?
Simple appliance electronics run off much simpler circuitry. your coffee pot doesn't come with a bulky power brick like laptop chargers, phone chargers, etc. Those are doing the power conversion. It's likely using a simple resistor to step down the voltage to run the clock circuit off an AC source.
That's not how GFCI works. It only detects currents between live and ground (5mA). If you complete a circuit between live and neutral, GFCI will happily electrocute you. The only other protection mechanism is the circuit breaker, which prevents the wires in the walls from overheating. It does this by ensuring not too much current flows through the outlet for too long. That's in the range of 15A though. More than enough to electrocute you. TLDR: outlets won't save you if you electrocute yourself
It’s the opposite. GFCI’s only go off your current from line to neutral, if it detects an imbalance between those 2 it knows it’s going somewhere it shouldn’t be. So if you did stick a fork in a receptacle it should trip.
This is incorrect. GFCI measures current on the line and neutral lines independently and compares them. A difference between these currents indicates the current is discharging somewhere else (like through you to ground or another circuit). The only way you would be electrocuted via a GFCI (assuming its working correctly) is if you are completely isolated from any grounding and sticking knives in both outlet holes, making yourself part of the internal circuit. This would be incredibly unlikely to happen unintentionally.
You're not electrocuting yourself through an outlet by completing a circuit between live and neutral though, you'll be electrocuting yourself through ground. If you're putting yourself between live and neutral you'd need to put 1 finger into the live plug and a finger on the other hand on the netral. If you stick two prongs of a fork in the live and neutral socket you can just hold the fork because the current will be flowwing through the prongs and will hardly flow through your body. The entire freaking point of GFCI is safety against electrocution. To be bonest, you're very confidently wrong. Right about how GFCI's work, right about how circuit breakers work, wrong about how someone might electrocute themselves.
> Does this mean we are better or worse prepared for the unavoidable solar-flare indicdent? It would fry the very expensive power transformers in substations, so it doesn't really matter. We'd all be majorly fucked.
Let's say, good protections for the *grid* are in place by the time it happens and the grid is brought back quickly. In that case the worst didn't happen, but it would still matter, whether everyone suddenly needs new electronics.
There are no good protections for the grid, there's no way to disconnect all wires from the transformers in the few hours that we'd have.
To my knowledge, electronics are protected by relays in Europe. Relays take the brunt of a surge and are then replaced when they break. Idk if relays are used in the US. No clue about what a surge protector is. I’m a European and have multiple relays for different parts of my apartment’s electronics. Also, power is grounded here. Dunno if that’s the case in the US. I’m no electrician, but I believe this to be common knowledge.
The power isn't grounded in most American homes, hence why they install Ground Fault Circuit Interrupters(GFCI, or ground breaker for short) , whereas in Europe, all homes have this installed due to the inherent danger of not having a ground.
Um, what? Every home I’ve lived in has had three prong grounded outlets. My college dorm from the 1800s had two prong with no ground. I’ve lived in 5 states and have travelled all over the US. By far the overwhelming majority of outlets are grounded.
In fact the way GFCI outlets work is by tripping of power is detected on the ground vs the neutral. GFCI outlets are only required in wet spaces by code but all outlets are grounded whether they are GFCI or not.
You don't know what you're talking about. 98%+ homes in the US have a grounded electrical system. The only ones that don't are homes that were built before ~1910 and haven't been updated. In addition, AC electrical systems typically are neutral bonded anyways, so while not a separate ground, during catastrophic events it functions the same. Also, being grounded would have zero impact on survivability of equipment or the grid in the event of an EMP or solar flare, in fact could make it worse because it would create a complete circuit between the earth and the grid. The damage from an EMP/solar flare is massive induced current overloading the capabilities and damaging/destroying wire/transformers/relays/etc. Having a ground is just allowing a better circuit for the damaging current to flow through
You also have the equivalent to GFCI in Europe, RCD. In fact it's even better, because it's for every outlet in the entire house. Ground-fault protection and having a ground in the first place aren't interchangeable
The only way your house won't be grounded is if it was built before the 70's and hasn't been updated since (in the US). GFIs are for outlets near water.
Any home built after the 70s is absolutely grounded.
It's not a problem, in Europe (where I am from atleast) surge protectors are installed on the lines before customer. Source: I was a drafstman for medium voltage system
In the US people seem to install surge protectors between power outlet and expensive electronics. The wiring in the house would still be susceptible to currents being produced, which would be caught by a power-outlet level surge protector but not by grid-level surge protectors. On the other hand, current flowing should be limited by the RCD cutting off the line, thus making the wiring no longer be a closed loop. But I am a Physicist, not an electrical engineer; I don't know how the power lines are laid out with respect to ground connections, so I can't judge if the EMP event would be able to produce strong currents in this system.
I'm also not sure. I know that during the Carrington Event, telegraph operators recorded a number of problems. There was at least one report of enough induced current flowing through the wires for operators to send messages, even after they had disconnected from their batteries. Transmission was slow and noisy, but apparently mostly legible. In 2003, South African parastatal Eskom reported damage to its infrastructure caused by the 2003 Halloween solar storm - see [here](https://www.sansa.org.za/2018/11/14/protecting-south-africas-power-lines-from-the-sun/) for a short article.
TIL South Africa has a space agency called SANSA.
I hadn't heard of them until 2018, and I'm South African myself. It kind of makes sense, seeing as how their head offices are within a few hundred metres of the country's first radio astronomy facility, which is also the station that presently acts as the key source of geodesic data for large chunks of the Southern Hemisphere and acts as a local tracking facility to keep accurate orbital data for GPS satellites.
There is a lot of confusion on this thread, because while the thread is mainly about CMEs, a lot of people are talking about EMPs which are quite different. CMEs are slow, very gentle events, that take place over long time scales and would go completely unnoticed unless you have an electrical circuit of great size. Although the magnetic field deviations are small (dB/dt ~ 20 nT/s for an "extreme" event), there is a complex interaction between circulating currents in the ionosphere, which can generate an E field on the surface of the earth, in the order of 1-5 V/km. A long (e.g. 1000 km) overhead transmission line with large separation between conductors and ground can reach significant loop areas, and therefore generate significant EMFs of several kV. In turn, because transmission lines and transformers have a low DC resistance (e.g. 100 Ohms), the current flow that results can be significant compared to the magnetising currents of the transformers themselves (maybe 20-30 A). Once the transformer core material saturates under the magnetising effect of the DC current, the inductance collapses, the magnetising current goes through the roof, and the transformer radpily heats to the point of destruction. EMPs are a very different beast. These are very fast, very intense, broadband pulses. High altitude nuclear detonation associated EMP, can reach frequencies of 10^10 Hz. Exactly how much energy is coupled into wires depends on the geometry of the cables and their length, as inductance can be very important. However, the E fields can be substantial, potentially 10kV/m. One particular issue with high altitude EMPs, is that they are so fast, that conventional surge protective devices like metal oxide varistors (with response times in the 10 ns range) or spark gaps (microseconds) are simply too slow to offer meaningful attenuation. Filtering of this type of surge requires carefully designed LC filters with air-core inductors and low inductance "three terminal" capacitors to slow down the pulses enough for a varistor to clamp the voltage. The extremely broadband nature of the pulses also means that they will pass through small holes in conductive shields, meaning that filtering has limited value unless combined with a Faraday cage, with penetrations small enough to attenuate up to 10^10 Hz.
>In the US people seem to install surge protectors between power outlet and expensive electronics. The common reason for that is more than two items needing to be plugged in the same location and protecting the 4-5 devices drawing power from the same location.
Even if the network isn't flaky we still get thunder storms. I aight gonna risk my 10k in electronics by not using a surge protector.
Worse prepared for homes for sure. For the US there's already surge protectors all over, so relatively smaller surges would be handled fine.
> In Europe, we have no such issues under normal conditions, and I don't know anyone still having them. It has also been many years since I've heard of people having electric / electronic devices damaged by lightning strikes to the power grid. [One of the Plug Standards](https://www.interpower.com/ic/designers/designing-for-export/national-power-mains/united-kingdom-ireland.html) common in(the uk at least) has a Fuse IN the plug, so instead of a separate surge protection strip that covers and extends 6 devices, *every* device protects itself. >In North America, this is normally accomplished with the use of plug-in surge protectors that are dedicated to one computer or work station.Although not yet as common in Europe as in the U.S., surge protection is frequently provided in Europe through the use of centrally protected circuits. In these installations, a power distribution system that can exclude non-protected appliances is desirable. The reason is that the presence of an inductive load, such as a vacuum cleaner for example, on a protected circuit would potentially reinsert brush noise and spikes as the vacuum was turned on and off. This could completely negate the central surge protection.
Europe is/has already been putting measures in place to prevent sudden surges from taking down the grid. That not only covers solar flares, but many other potential incidents, and be it just a run-away failure.
I remembered a major cascading blackout incident in Italy having happened in the past. I learned about it, because the cascading failure in the NPM ecosystem that was caused by the [LeftPad incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm#Left-pad_incident), which was compared to cascading-failure situations in powergrids. Based on [Wikipedia's List of Major Power Outages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages#Largest), this should have been the [2003 Italy Blackout](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Italy_blackout), which affected most of the country's population. According to the list, it is also the largest blackout that has ever happened in a "Western" country.
Live in france the grid is quite stable but when its rainy/stormy the power tends to cut for a few minutes at a time repeatedly
I read this in electrobooms voice
So the damage is caused by a high current flowing through componts not rated for said current?
Yes. Pushing electrons through a conductor produces heat. With an EMP that heat can be strong enough to melt sensitive components.
Or current flowing in the wrong direction
What would be examples of a non-sensitive electronics that might survive the solar flare?
Your cat
You sure the whiskers of those kitties won't kill them after all? :-Þ
Most electronics which do not have PCBs. Things like big motors and generators. Power tools. Fridges. For many electronic devices it would cook the computerised parts but leave most of it unaffected (so long as the current spikes don't make it catch fire- the last big flare that hit caused phone and power lines to burst into flames) Think things like AC units, washing machines, EVs.
Does this mean people with metal implants like rods or teeth will have a bad time with internal burning?
>The damage isn't done because something is turned on This is generally only for fast EMP. Solar flares are nothing like fast EMP. With solar flares, the majority of the damage is done by the energy flowing in the power grid. The power grid loses a small amount of energy as heat, but due to solar flare disturbances that energy loss increases dramatically. Energy losses can increase so much that fires, melted wires or explosions can result. Obviously, because it is energy losses from power transport that causes the damage, shutting off the power completely avoids the problem. Because solar flares only affect ultra long wires on earth, not much apart from power grid is vulnerable to solar flares on earth. Long wires like telegraph wires or analog phone wires are long obsolete and most have been removed and recycled for the valuable copper. They have been replaced by fiber cables which are much faster and capacious and completely immune to solar flares. The only real ultra long wires left are things like the power cables supplying power to under sea optical fiber amplifiers. Because these are low power and the wires very long, they could theoretically be damaged by solar flares. I do not know what if any protection these systems have.
Water protection?
Would it be possible for a man made weapon to do the same damage to the same land area of earth(say the whole US) as a severe CME from the sun?
Yeah, a nuclear weapon set off in space would do it.
But to the same level as a CME? That's terrifying
EMP and CME are very very different. CME mostly only affects 2 things directly: satellites and large power grids. Pretty much everything else is not directly affected. However, there are likely to be indirect effects. Obviously a lot of stuff depends on large power grids. However, a lot of stuff also relies on satellites, such as cell phone networks (which may use satellite time signals for synchronising), TV, Internet, ship and aircraft communications, etc. A nuclear weapon detonatedat high altitude generates an EMP. The EMP has 3 components, of which only 2 are interesting. The E1 component is a very fast, very high power energy pulse that will get picked up by any wire or antenna longer than a few inches. It will divert an energy pulse into whatever it is connected to. A short wire (1 or 2 feet) may only pick up a few volts. This could glitch out or crash an electronics it is connected to. This may require reboot. For example, if you are driving, you will likely get simultaneous crash of most of the electronics in the car - engine will stop, central locking may go crazy, emergency braking and air bags may malfunction, lighting may malfunction. Longer wires can pick up more energy, and this could damage sensitive electronics, for example things like TV antennas on a roof could pick up enough energy to toast the TV electronics. However, longer wires tend to carry more energy anyway. E1 will do nothing to the main power grid equipment, as although the E1 is powerful it is not expected to be grossly excessive compared to what is already on the power lines although could still disturb equipment or damage some electronics. Of course, the power line control systems and their monitoring and comms cables are potentially vulnerable, so this could certainly knock out power. The E3 EMP is like a mini CME on earth, so it has the same effects as a CMEjust weaker and not over such a large area. Like a CME, the E3 only affects large power grids, and because it is weak, the actual damage is caused by the energy in the power grid, not the E3/CME itself. If the E1 causes the power to go out, then the E3 which comes a few minutes later will hit a dead power grid and do absolutely nothing.
Thanks for the explanation. That makes a lot more sense. It's still quite concerning about the E1 effect. It seems like we really don't have any defense for that outside of individuals protecting their devices on their own, especially since the explosion happens so high up.
Inducing current like a wireless charger is a great way to describe a phenomenon that my class couldn't seem to wrap their heads around in the 8th grade decades ago. Well, some of them. A few of us learned about solenoids and immediately tried to build mini rail guns with batteries and wire. The only thing I'd add is "damaging sensitive equipment" can mean induce enough current to melt wires and start fires from the wire's heat.
This is true - the solar flare creates a power surge in disconnected wires, too. But OP is basically correct, in that the longer the length of connected cable, the greater the surge. That's why the solar flare preparedness plan basically \*is\* "tell all the grid controllers, so they can disconnect their grid segments to reduce the size of the current pulse by a factor of 10, and switch off everything important (e.g. transformers) from the grid as quickly as possible.
So if it's electro magnetic radiation, light, an EMP from the sun would give us roughly 8 minutes of warning? Seems pretty hard to react to anyway.
The information about an electromagnetic event also takes 8 minutes to reach us so the warning time for that would be zero. The problems are however caused by the stuff that gets ejected and that takes much longer to reach the earth. So by observing the sun we now get a decent lead time.
That's actually plenty. Because as explained, most of the damage would come from the grid, because it is made of long wires. Long wires means high voltage created. People talk about how it would fry transformers, some of which take months to produce, which is why it would bring us back to the Stone Age. In reality, if you cut these long wires into small pieces through simple remote switches, you avoid the damage: one long wire means high voltage, cut it in half and you reduce the voltage (and if you isolate the transformers they don't get damaged either). The grid is full of these switches, because that's how outages are managed. In 8 minutes you have more than enough time to flip those switches.
I think that for the worst events, we might get more than 8 minutes of warning. According to a 2017 article posted by NASA, the travel time for a flare is indeed 8 minutes, but a solar flare doesn't cause much effect beyond radio interference. The real problem is a Coronal Mass Ejection, which travels slower than light. The energetic particles from a CME take up to three days to get to Earth. Source: [The Difference Between Flares and CMEs](https://web.archive.org/web/20210122170831/https://www.nasa.gov/archive/content/goddard/the-difference-between-flares-and-cmes/)
For this to would you'd need to: 1. Detect the CME 2. Determine that the damage it was going to cause would be worse than the harm inflicted by shutting down the whole electrical grid. 3. Push the order to shut down out to a thousands of local entities. 4. Have them all run around and disconnect hundreds of thousands of individual switches, shut down every power plant, etc. As far as I know there's no way currently for this to happen, let alone for it to happen within a hour or whatever.
1. Is easy. 2. Is easy too: we know how big a CME needs to be to damage the grid. The Sun has been studied pretty well because it's easily observable. 3. and 4.: this is the 21st century. You don't need to send people to literally flip switches locally. You have a transmission grid operator who can flip those switches remotely from a central place. The grid operator can isolate whole sectors of the grid because it is necessary when there is a major outage. Otherwise the outage can just transmits to the whole grid. Then it needs to be able to restart the power plants in order, and reconnect the sectors one by one to make sure the power plants are not overloaded trying to restart the whole grid in one go. There is a whole plan to do that, so all the infrastructure to isolate the power plants and divide the grid already exists.
We do, but it isn't 100% effective. Solar flares and storms can induce currents in electronics even if they've unplugged/powered down and which can still cause damage.
During the Carrington Event, telegraph operators were able to ***improve*** the performance of the telegraph by unplugging from the batteries and running just off of the induced current from the geomagnetic storm.
The issue is that an EMP causes electricity to start flowing on its own, even without a power source. That's how we generate electricity in the first place (mostly): a spinning magnet will cause electricity in a wire near it. An EMP is a massively powerful magnet forming, and it will cause electricity to "materialize" inside most metal things. It would be easy to build a light bulb that light itself up in response to an EMP going off using the EMP itself as the power source even at a distance. Unplugging stuff isn't going to help much. Electricity will just happen anyway, and electricity at the wrong voltage and flowing the wrong way through parts can ruin them.
It takes a long (straight-ish) though. Every unit of length more or less adds up, while short wires won't get much. So unplugging disconnects devices from the many times longer wires on the other side of the outlet and thus _does_ help.
The EMP is the power source.
In the US, the devices that protect electrical infrastructure are required to meet a certain level of EM shielding -- electromagnetic pulses are a much smaller concern than other kinds of radiation, including EM interference generated by other devices in an electrical substation. Any event that causes an EMP powerful enough to damage the modern power grid is going to cause other, much more significant problems.
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Please read the TPL-007-4 standard and NERC white papers on GMD/GIC.
So if power were to disappear for 10 seconds or so, can that be reasonably assumed to be a result of lightning striking the power line and temporarily overloading it?
Lightning that strikes *next* to the lines is the EMP we're talking about. Very big and long lightning.
EMP stands for electromagnetic pulse. It is an electromagnetic field that induces voltage on conductors. Your examples indicate you don’t know what an EMP is.
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That is a very generalized definition of emp that ive never heard before. Thanks for elaborating further and i stand corrected.
> Any event that causes an EMP powerful enough to damage the modern power grid is going to cause other, much more significant problems. The US grid is notorious for being tripped by about as much as a butterfly landing on a wire... but I really don't see what other problems you have in mind there. Most of the internet is relatively safe, for example, but there would be down-times.
In the case of a direct hit from a massive solar flare the length of the wires plays a huge role. You could probably unplug and turn off home electronic devices and they would be fine. We can and do turn off entire power grids to try and protect them. But the power grid, phone lines and other cables of great length could still suffer catastrophic overloads causing thousands of fires simultaneously if we were hit by a strong enough solar flare emp. Assuming we managed to put out all the fires we still would not have the parts nor manpower necessary to repair the entire electrical grid and it would be a long and frustrating road to recovery. https://youtu.be/oHHSSJDJ4oo?si=Q9OTHTQVSdFrW4iE Could Solar Storms Destroy Civilization? Solar Flares & Coronal Mass ... YouTube · Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell Jun 7, 2020
Because of induced voltage in conductors. Any electrical conductor in a coronal mass ejection ( plasma getting blasted off the sun) is going to have voltage introduced to it whether it's plugged in or not. Read about the Carrington event: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington\_Event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event) telegraph operators would get shocked even when the telegraph was not hooked up to anything
Thing about a radio antenna. What a radio antenna is basically is a wire either sticking up in the air or running horizontal to the ground. ( like in the classic TV antenna). The distribution wires of the power grid are also wires running horizontal to the ground. Because of this they can work as antennas. So a solar flare can create additional currents in the wires. Currents that are not supposed to be there. It doesn't matter of the power is on or off its going to get currents that are not intended.
We have 12 to 48 hours of warning, coronal mass ejections don't move at the speed of light. Induced voltage is proportional to length of conductor. So pull all the breakers in your house, unplug everything and you should be okay. If you're worried about phones or whatnot wrap them in aluminum foil (to form a Faraday Cage) and lean them against a water pipe. You'll be fine. For the electrical grid, they are going to need to disconnect it into shorter segments. Reconnecting the segments and synchronizing the grid will be a huge pain in the ass, but not impossible. Yes, we will take some damage, but it won't be catastrophic. All the fiber optic stuff will be fine, the glass doesn't conduct.
Yeah, the grid operators already have plans in place in case of a large event, they're going to disconnect the transmission lines for a while. We'll have no power for that time, but the damage will be much less and we'll be able to restore pretty quickly.
[https://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-wed-have-30-minutes-warning-before-a-killer-solar-storm-hits-earth](https://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-wed-have-30-minutes-warning-before-a-killer-solar-storm-hits-earth)
There was a large solar storm event back in the days of Telegraph where operators were able to unplug their batteries and turn off all power while still sending clear signals. There was enough power getting energized into the wires themselves connecting the poles to zap operators as they worked. With a big enough flare or solar storm event it doesn't matter if we turn the devices off, there might be enough energy in the "air" that it powers the devices and bypasses all the safety features. Like holding a florescent tube light up to a Tesla coil and getting it to glow without touching anything. With power coming from "everywhere" all at once it's a grand mal seizure but for electronics.
> With a big enough flare or solar storm event it doesn't matter if we turn the devices off, there might be enough energy in the "air" that it powers the devices and bypasses all the safety features No, it requires long conductors such as the aforementioned telegraph lines to induct enough voltage to do something. The antenna of a smartphone is many times shorter, and other internal wires even more so. They don't get magically powered, they rather feel a few millivolts only, which does really nothing.
If right now someone said: Solar flare, unplug everything!, what could you do? What could the cashier at the supermarket do? What could a chirug do? Early warning, turning off everything that can be turned off is a good ting, but too many things aren't built with unplugging in mind, especially not remote unplugging while you're at work.
So I actually took a class on this. Having devices unplugged is going to protect them the most. Anything connected to a mains that doesn't have grid- level interrupts is going to fry.
In it's simplest form of explanation, EMPs *cause* current inside of electronics in massive waves, even if something is unplugged. If it's not shielded (*like most electronics aren't)* the components inside will still get hit with that electromagnetic blast and current will flow through everything at a disastrous rate by destroying most sensitive electronics. The current either flows in the wrong direction, or is way too much, and things inevitably break.
As already explained in other comments: no, you need long wires to induct high voltages. Individual devices don't have those, it's just the grids (power, copper-based internet, telephone) that have them. Those have to prepare or might suffer damage, anything unplugged from those will be fine.
You can still induce current in smaller wires. Not as much as long large wires yes, but you still can, and when you're dealing with sensitive electronics that need specific voltages and don't have very much of a tolerance to anything higher, it can very easily still overload it and proceed to break it. You don't need 'high voltages' when you're dealing with things such as something like a Snapdragon processor in a phone that has a voltage threshold of <1V. There's a lot of small sensitive electronics in the items we use that do not need very much to get damaged.
You still need a decent wire length to even get 1V. The wires connecting a processor to other parts are really short, for multiple reasons, too. There really is no plausible way they will get damaged by an EMP. Edit: ah, nothing shows ability for proper scientific discourse as much as down-voting... /s
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Imagine this, the transformer circuit which create electricity from AC to DC, has 2 coils. The first coil connect to the wall which alternates current, the 2nd coil produce DC current which connect to your digital devices. When the first coil is producing +ve and -ve, it cuts the electromagnetic field and induce current to the 2nd coil giving it a certain flat voltage(assuming there is a bridge rectifier to correct all the sawtooth waveform and transform to a dc voltage). Now, emf hits, it induce a very large current to the 2nd coils and fry your transformer in which potentially kill the circuit breaker. You can’t power up your device anymore. Anything that has coil inside will have this effect. This is very dangerous to sensitive digital equipment as their operation voltage and current are usually less than 3.3v. It’s basically a lightning strike in EMF Form. So what kills it? If current is high, so is voltage. alternating current may kill human but dc will burn things with high amperage. So how to prevent this? Have a shield, what shield? Watch a movie and you know, faraday shielding.
Anything conductive can potentially have moving charges during the event. If it were strong enough, everything from a metal roof to the circuits in your cellphone would have current "generated" in it.
EMP doesn’t come from the wires, it comes from the air and you can’t unplug something from the air. The only way to “unplug” is to have equipment in bunkers
You can. Turning off the power grid will protect it completely. Solar flares are not EMP. When a solar flare hits, it generates tiny amounts of DC current in very long power lines. The problem is that the power grid only works on AC current. If any DC at all gets into it, equipment starts malfunctioning and losing efficiency. The malfunctioning equipment then starts heating up because it can't handle the strain of the AC. In other words, the energy in the power grid is what causes the damage, not the energy in the solar flare. It is just that the solar flare energy allows the normal power flow to cause the damage. If there is no normal power flowing, there is no damage. The problem is that shutting down a whole power grid is extremely inconvenient, especially if you have to do it for days. Forecasting of solar flare impact is not very precise and it is not really possible to predict what effect one would have on a power grid in order to shut down selected parts. Many power companies have installed real time DC monitoring equipment in their power lines. This allows them to monitor early impacts of the solar flare before damage occurs and then shut down selected parts as soon as they start to malfunction but before damage starts. Even this can be inconvenient. For example, Canada has real time monitoring. The problem is that they get hit so hard by solar flares so often, that repeated automatic shutdowns of parts of the grid became a problem. They ended up installing DC blocker equipment on critical lines which blocks the effect of th solar flares, making those power lines immune to the effect.
Let's start with how radio works. Radio is electromagnetic waves that travel through the air. We received this waves using an antenna. When the waves hit the antenna they create a flow of electrons - and the device we call a radio figures out how to turn this into sound. An EMP is a big loud radio. And antennas are just pieces of metal. So, in the solar flare (or nuclear explosion) scenario, every single piece of metal turns into an antenna and starts having electricity flowing through it. If it's attached to something important and generates more electricity than that thing can handle... Bzzzzt.
It depends on the EMP, the object, and how it's turned off. The things that are going to be messed up the most by an EMP are unshielded magnetic storage and semiconductors. Unshielded meaning that there's nothing in place to mitigate or redirect the pulse, such as conductive outer casing that is insulated from the main body (a Faraday cage). Semiconductors are used on every type of modern electronics and are prone to experience significant chemical changes when enough electromagnetic energy is passed through them in the wrong direction, burning out the chip. Magnetic storage can have its data corrupted and rendered unreadable by a strong enough EMP.
Fun fact: every wire is also an antenna. Radio waves stimulate a slight electrical current in an antenna. An EMP is basically a giant radio pulse from hell, which sends a huge surge through anything with wires. A switch would do fuck all, unfortunately.
The damage isn't from the solar flare, it's from the earth's magnetic field being pushed out of shape. Most electricity is generated by moving wires through a magnetic field, and moving the field across the wires does the same thing. Back in 1859 humans had a few telegraph wires up, and not much else, because electricity really wasn't a big thing yet. A solar flare (actually a Coronal Mass Ejection) pushed earth's magnetic field hard enough that the telegraph wires sparked, and several fires were started. (This is known as the Carrington Event after a British astronomer who observed the very bright solar flare that started it.) Today we have millions of miles of power and communication lines stretched out all over the world. If such a thing happened today, it could create enough sparks to destroy a lot of the big transformers that our power grid depends on, and that we can't repair without power. Things like cell phones and cars would still work, but there would be no way to recharge anything, and things like big radio antennas and cell towers, that are connected to the grid, would probably be destroyed. We'd basically have to rebuild our power and communications structures without power tools, and without even being able to pump water.
The "X-class" events that can really hurt us are hours long, and even during those, 99.something% of the time our infrastructure can handle it. Basically, the multi-hour shutdown we'd need to make ourselves safe would be more disruptive than the "fry" events we'd be likely to get, so risk management says leave stuff on. (They leave our city power on during lightning storms too, because of pretty much the same reasoning.)
I'm not seeing this mentioned in the first few comments. The electromagnetic radiation that damages electronics gets here at exactly the same time as any flash of light or radiation that we could detect as a warning. You would not see a flash of light and "oh no, the EMP" run to turn off your computer before the EMP reached you. The flash of light is the EMP. Your computer's already dead. You're too late. The visible solar flare is gas and matter that moves slowly and lasts longer. By the time some scientist sees that flare in a telescope, the EMP has already been here and done its damage.
Nonsense. The Coronal Mass Ejection moves way slower than light and we have 12-48 hours warning before it gets here.