Geomagnetic storms: How Space Weather hits Electricity infra
Photo Credit: NASA Do you know how it impacts Technologies deployed by humans, including electrical infrastructure, on Earth and out in space due to geomagnetic storms generated on Earth by solar storms? NOAA explains it all in brief here.
Photo Credit: NASA Eruptions on the Sun lead to disturbances on Earth’s magnetic field, known as geomagnetic storms.
Photo Credit: NASA These geomagnetic storms can create electrical currents that can result in significant impacts on our electric power grid.
Photo Credit: NASA Impacts can include damage to critical grid assets and even blackout.
Photo Credit: NASA NOAA says that space weather impacts technologies in various ways. NOAA tracks the changing conditions, and puts out alerts and warnings to its customers so that they can take evasive action to save their technological infrastructure dedicated to power.
Photo Credit: NASA The Space Weather Prediction Center has had a long-standing relationship with the power industry.
Photo Credit: NASA NOAA space weather forecasters provide critical early warning of these geomagnetic storms, allowing grid operators to take measures to ensure no disruption of the power supply.
Photo Credit: NASA Warnings are sent by NOAA about solar storms caused by our Sun- the geomagnetic storms that can affect the operation of their electricty systems.
Photo Credit: NASA The geomagnetic storm induces extra currents and loads on those systems that can either trip those systems offline or in the worst cases cause serious damage. Entire power grids across big regions cam suffer a blackout.
Photo Credit: NOAA Experts at NOAA mention that a big incident in 1989 where part of Quebec power grid was tripped offline and affected something like six million customers for about nine hours.
Photo Credit: NASA This incident raised awareness in the power industry about geomagnetic storms and they started keeping a constant watch on the grid.
Photo Credit: NASA The experts suggest that in the long term they would be needing an advanced model which could fully understand this phenomenon and understand how it would impact specific systems.
Photo Credit: NASA They further suggest that they could simulate storms in our software and see what the impact is, rather than actually experiencing it in the physical world.
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