"Fierce solar magnetic storm barely missed Earth in 2012" - What if it did NOT miss?

I'm remembering every time a retail store had its 'system' down when I went to pay. In one case th clerks found the old written receipt pads and were still operating. In other cases it effectively closed the establishment for the hour or day. My landlord does systems repair for businesses. The level of panic of the managers when their payment/inventory tracking systems go down is usually in the red zone.

The up front cash & credit intake can be dealt with in a few days. The serious problems are in inventory and ordering. Outside the retail sector theres so many similar communications dependent items. There are some legacy features that can be used as a start for patching communications but its going to take a lot of time. Severe economic damage would likely occur as alternate old school systems are established. So, maybe the question is how fast can the electronic transaction/communication systems be retired to the point economic damage is not severe.

A couple decades ago one of the US Marine Divisions was spinning up for a large exercise. The command inserted a surprise feature. The base telephone system was disrupted. IIRC that included the local cell phone access. Since the units tactical radios and phone equipment were packed and loaded it took a bit of time to set the internal tactical comm up. On another exercise I was on in 1996 participants noticed their GPS devices were not functioning correctly. The officers of the signals intel detachment took a smug interest in the effect of this event.
 
Think about medical equipment, amusement park rides, electronic media etc. Am I correct in assuming that this would seriously eff up life on Earth for a considerable time period?
 
We no longer have the big ol govt. warehouses full of govt. cheese. We don't have civilian warehouses full of food, waiting on orders to be distributed to grocery stores as we used to. We have a three day supply (approximately) of food in the stores. Cell service is at least disrupted, if not completely destroyed. Not many folks have landlines anymore. Water and sewage are dependent upon electricity. If the electrical system proves even half as vulnerable as what happened in the Carrington Event, the world is in a world of shit. Oddly, less "developed" nations are less vulnerable, as they don't depend so utterly on these systems. So, what do you think happens when everything is gone in three days?
 
One of those CMEs knocked out the Quebec Hydro grid about 20 years ago. Running almost due North to South from James Bay down to Montreal their location at the higher latitudes of Northern Ontario and Quebec made the transmission lines vulnerable to the DC Earth currents that powerful geomagnetic storms will induce. These DC currents can burnout the step up and step down transformers at each end of a transmission line.

If there is a more powerful and wider spread geomagnetic storm caused by a Carrington Event level CME I would think that all transmission line transformers North or South of the Tropics may be in danger of being overloaded with DC current and being damaged or destroyed.

If would take a lot of fortitude for any countries government to order a preemptive blackout (ala PG&E) by shutting down the power grid and physically disconnecting the large, expensive and hard to replace transformers from the lines. Shutting down the transmissions line for a few days even with warning would cause deaths and enormous economic losses. But it could prove to be the best move if the alternative is large parts of the world without power for weeks or months.

Alternatively all power companies could follow the steps taken by Hydro Quebec to protect the transformers with electrical devices, namely capacitors, which will prevent geomagnetic induced DC current from flowing through and overheating the transformers.
 
One other not mentioned problem is the increasing trend to interconnect all grids into larger ones. Smaller independent power companies may not be as efficient, but not being connected to each other mean sthey are also isolated in case of some other disaster, so they can't all be knocked out at once by a random kamikaze squirrel on a line. IIRC, having delved into this subject some years ago, there are some transformers of quite large size, that are very, very rare, and no longer made in the US. The source for them now is either France or the Russian Republic. If these fry, for whatever reason, bad, bad juju.....
 
The closer the power station is to the customers the shorter the transmission lines. And the shorter lines are less vulnerable to piggy backing Telluric DC current. Those smaller local grids are less vulnerable to disruption. But as @Oldbill points out most power is now carried on large grids.

Still, with some warning time of a day or two I think the grid system could be temporarily subdivided though no doubt there will be power disruptions and blackouts caused by doing that.

But it's the old story. Doing dangerous and highly disruptive things based on predictions. Similar to Hurricane or volcano evacuation warnings. You had better be correct about the path of the Coronal Mass Ejection. But because of uncertainty if the warning is ignored and we get slammed by something like the Carrington Event? Well, that's why NASA and others are studying the Sun.
 
In South East England the power went for about 3 hours on 9th August 2019 National Grid data showed two generators dropped from the grid at around the same time. The twin outages caused a sudden loss of frequency of the electricity grid, to below 49Hz, which would have caused certain parts of the network to disconnect automatically, causing the power cuts. It caused chaos you dont need a bomb to shut a big city down just stop the traffic lights working.
 
Top