SOLAR STORM COULD SHUT DOWN WORLD POWER GRID IN 2012

There’s been a lot of talk lately about an impending solar storm that could have serious consequences for life as we know it. And by “a lot of talk” I mean I saw it on FOX News this morning.

According to a recently released report from NASA and the National Research Council, an extreme space weather event could wipe out the world’s electrical power grid in 2012.

Basically, think the Northeast blackout of 2003, only for the entire world and for months, not hours.

It is midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event – a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn’t create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet [the report] claims it could do just that. [...]

There are two problems to face. The first is the modern electricity grid, which is designed to operate at ever higher voltages over ever larger areas. Though this provides a more efficient way to run the electricity networks, minimising power losses and wastage through overproduction, it has made them much more vulnerable to space weather. The high-power grids act as particularly efficient antennas, channelling enormous direct currents into the power transformers.

The second problem is the grid’s interdependence with the systems that support our lives: water and sewage treatment, supermarket delivery infrastructures, power station controls, financial markets and many others all rely on electricity. Put the two together, and it is clear that a repeat of the Carrington event could produce a catastrophe the likes of which the world has never seen. “It’s just the opposite of how we usually think of natural disasters,” says John Kappenman, a power industry analyst with the Metatech Corporation of Goleta, California, and an advisor to the NAS committee that produced the report. “Usually the less developed regions of the world are most vulnerable, not the highly sophisticated technological regions.” [New Scientist]

Of course, I’m sure third world countries will be rejoicing when this news of this report reaches them next year, because something like this might propel them straight out of third world status.

Hopefully they’ll be kind enough to teach us how to kill a gazelle with a spear so we can survive.

I, meanwhile, am off to build an impenetrable, self-sufficient bunker and to find a solar-powered wheelchair so I can be ready.

Coincidentally, didn’t both Nostradamus and the ancient Mayans predict that the world would end in 2012?

Maybe I need to find a wormhole rather than a new wheelchair.