“Power grids everywhere are more vulnerable than ever for geomagnetic effects,” says John Kappenman in IEEE Spectrum, about the upcoming maximum in solar storms.

“Solar activity tends to occur in cycles that peak in frequency and intensity every 11 years, and the next peak is expected later this year or early the next,” says John Kappenman. “To be sure, not every peak — also known as a solar maximum — brings a killer storm; the last notable one occurred in March 1989. It took down Quebec’s entire grid within seconds, leaving 6 million customers without power for 9 hours. A later surge in the storm destroyed a large transformer at a New Jersey nuclear plant and nearly took down US power grids from the mid-Atlantic through the Pacific Northwest. But that geomagnetic storm was not so bad, it turns out.”

Kappenman, a leading US expert in geomagnetic storms, knows how to sell his story. But TU expert on electrical power systems, Professor Lou van der Sluis, is a bit sceptical about the article. He agrees that solar storms present a real challenge for the power grid, but he disagrees with both Kappenman’s physics and his proposed solution. “For every difficult problem there is always a simple answer and most of them are wrong,” he cites from a book of Clayton R. Paul. Continued…