Where Power is Likely to Go Out in a Solar Storm

[lazarus]

Substation x formers are AC. There are DC systems out there like mass transit trains, construction cranes, power shovels etc. but are fed from an AC source and not generally associated with a distribution system in that they are not used to express feed they are considered line loss for power quality.

There are a number of high voltage DC used for inter grid connections as well as transmitting power from some large generating projects like wind farms to a regional grid. High voltage DC is significantly more efficient than high voltage AC over long distances.

 

[lazarus]

A Navy nuke ship/sub could do the job for Calvert and Surrey 1&2 on the James River.

I don't much care about anything other than to keep the coolant pumps running to prevent radiation contamination in the air and the Bay. Not sure what could be done about the Peach Bottom, 3MI, and Susquehanna reactors that are cooled by the Susquehanna river.

Absolutely will not. They don’t have the ability to do ship to shore power on that scale. I doubt you could rewire in sufficient time to power such a site.

Nuclear ships are direct drive, not nuclear electric driven. Their electrical generating ability is not substantial. I mean, not like they can drive a few dozen kilowatts or generating ability, but it’s in the scale of a couple of megawatts out of the 60-70mw heat production of the reactors (translating in to about 30-40mw of propulsive power per reactor).

You’d just truck in diesel fuel for the generators. Eventually you wouldn’t be able to, but it would be a priority. Just like the fuel for all of the other emergency, priority sites. You’d tap airport JP8/A-1 fuel if needed (it’ll run a diesel generator just fine).

 

[lazarus]

90+% of Solar installations are Grid tie type and when the lights go out are useless while the grid is down. This surprises some folks.

The Solar City and similar installations that include inverters and "Tesla Power walls" will provide backup power for normal power out situations. An EMP event will most likely fry the solar panel charge controllers and misc electronic boards and batteries in these systems. Your car and backup generator will also be fried and won't work unless you park same in a Faraday cage.

If Tesla ever offers a "solution" that would permit integrating one of their car battery packs as a secondary energy store to the 6kv Power walls, they would sell a lot more solar roofs and cars. Just imagine how long you could power critical electrical loads on a battery pack designed to power a car 300-500+. For non-EMP outages, this would be a great system.

Just a reminder in an emergency, a microwave is a Faraday cage. Just don’t accidentally turn it on after you’ve thrown your delicate electronics in to one. Mine can fit my radios, solar charger, some lights and a bunch of batteries in it.

Not that I’d know.

 

[hobiecat590]

Absolutely will not. They don’t have the ability to do ship to shore power on that scale. I doubt you could rewire in sufficient time to power such a site.

Nuclear ships are direct drive, not nuclear electric driven. Their electrical generating ability is not substantial. I mean, not like they can drive a few dozen kilowatts or generating ability, but it’s in the scale of a couple of megawatts out of the 60-70mw heat production of the reactors (translating in to about 30-40mw of propulsive power per reactor).

You’d just truck in diesel fuel for the generators. Eventually you wouldn’t be able to, but it would be a priority. Just like the fuel for all of the other emergency, priority sites. You’d tap airport JP8/A-1 fuel if needed (it’ll run a diesel generator just fine).

Thanks. I should have figured that the Navy would use direct steam propulsion. With 194 and 150+MW (carrier/sub) generation capacity each, even 10% of that could power pumps provided a long enough extension cable. :-) In any event, probably not feasible.

Different topic but I wonder where they will get all the extra juice for electric catapults, rail guns, lasers etc. Even w/ ginormous capacitors, the ships will need some serious capacity to recharge these power hungry gizmos.

 

[hobiecat590]

Just a reminder in an emergency, a microwave is a Faraday cage. Just don’t accidentally turn it on after you’ve thrown your delicate electronics in to one. Mine can fit my radios, solar charger, some lights and a bunch of batteries in it.

Not that I’d know.

What a great idea! Does the MW need to be plugged in for grounding or does that defeat the purpose of shielding it from EMP?

Can i make a cage from 1/4" hardware cloth or is this too large of a grid? What would you recommend as the cage material that would be grounded to a loli column in a basement in concrete, say. Thanks.

 

[lazarus]

Thanks. I should have figured that the Navy would use direct steam propulsion. With 194 and 150+MW (carrier/sub) generation capacity each, even 10% of that could power pumps provided a long enough extension cable. :-) In any event, probably not feasible.

Different topic but I wonder where they will get all the extra juice for electric catapults, rail guns, lasers etc. Even w/ ginormous capacitors, the ships will need some serious capacity to recharge these power hungry gizmos.

The George Washington’s have significantly higher generating power compared to the Nimitz. Same thing with the Zumwalts. Designed from the ground up for things like directed energy weapons.

 

[lazarus]

What a great idea! Does the MW need to be plugged in for grounding or does that defeat the purpose of shielding it from EMP?

Can i make a cage from 1/4" hardware cloth or is this too large of a grid? What would you recommend as the cage material that would be grounded to a loli column in a basement in concrete, say. Thanks.

Ideally you’d break off the hot and neutral and just leave the ground connected.

It would improve the effect.

You’d still get shielding. Yes, regular hardware cloth can work. Just don’t leave openings in the weave. Ground it if you can. The lower the impedance of the ground the better.

1/4” would block 1GHz and longer wave lengths. Rule of thumb is 1/10th the wave length.

EMP is very wide band. Likely you’d still suffer some issues there. If you look at a microwave the hole size is about a millimeter or so.

The higher the frequency, the more will leak through. That said, when you are talking something like 1/4” hole size it’ll effectively block 1GHz, and severely attenuate 1-11GHz of course less attenuation as the frequency gets higher. Then again, simple framed 2x4 walls are going to start severely attenuating 10GHz+

Grounding will help.

 

[FrankOceanXray]

Spare transformers are generally in abundance and for the most part store room stock and inventory. As long as other infrastructure does not become damaged like the supervisory controls like I mentioned up thread. Even then they can be overridden should the need occur.

Diesel electric locomotives are all over the place and mobile at that for an extent or extreme circumstances.
We paralleled a diesel locomotive with a three phase 1000kva padmount one time to power a small town. All you need is a rectifier or mobile substation that can be brought in by road tractor 5th wheel. In this case the help of some local farmers and CN who were able to derail, crib up and then drag the locomotive into a position for cable termination/ acces to the dynamo. this was during the Ice storm that affected a large part of the NE and canadian (HYDRO) ops prolly before some here were born.
Spare substation transformers are also in place already at most substations not to mention mobile subs that can be easily towed inside a gate somewhere and then put to use.
People need to be worried about a ice storm or cuzzin joe doing a car pole or shooting insulators off a transmission tower somewhere.
Anything that's that damaged cut and run could be used to isolate then back-feed as necessary whether it be from a temporary outside source such as a portable generator or other external source.

That's rad.

 

[Doco Overboard]

There are a number of high voltage DC used for inter grid connections as well as transmitting power from some large generating projects like wind farms to a regional grid. High voltage DC is significantly more efficient than high voltage AC over long distances.

Yes but the end user is still AC. So the addition of a large rectifier to accommodate the phase converters doing the work takes up as much room as the amount of space needed to offset the difference in construction cost and room that could have been used for additional solar panels or windmills.
At least the last Solar job I built was like that. It's the 239/241 dual circuit out of Pepper sub just west of Georgetown DE that goes south to Taylor and provides an alternate into the back side of Millsboro minus the solar farm which gets bypassed when you have to tie the subs together anyhow.

There's also too much line loss during the conversion process. Plus you need to do a phase conversion at the other end of the job which equals more room and cost. Transmission corridors are already filled up with the AC circuits without extra ROW to accommodate a large scale endeavor.

Any solar farm around here is just enough to cover the additional costs placed onto the consumer that the operating companies feel they can get away with and is only large enough to keep the Bloom energy and Paris Agreement libtards off their ass anyhow. It's just a money racket invented by corrupt politicians and investors who want to take advantage of deregulation. Sort of like legalized extortion or protection.

Long and short of it is if your thinking that a DC transmission line paralleled with a wind or solar farm somewhere is going to power up your needs you are sadly mistaken and its going to be a long cold dark winter. They don't transmit anything because of the lack of being able to store the energy. They add cost and complexity to an already very well out system until solar farms in space and superconductor technology unfolds.

 

[Alan3413]

Just a reminder in an emergency, a microwave is a Faraday cage. Just don’t accidentally turn it on after you’ve thrown your delicate electronics in to one. Mine can fit my radios, solar charger, some lights and a bunch of batteries in it.

Not that I’d know.

That's a great idea. I have an unused, unplugged microwave in the basement. It'd be great to store the Baofeng radios I got.

 

[lazarus]

Yes but the end user is still AC. So the addition of a large rectifier to accommodate the phase converters doing the work takes up as much room as the amount of space needed to offset the difference in construction cost and room that could have been used for additional solar panels or windmills.
At least the last Solar job I built was like that. It's the 239/241 dual circuit out of Pepper sub just west of Georgetown DE that goes south to Taylor and provides an alternate into the back side of Millsboro minus the solar farm which gets bypassed when you have to tie the subs together anyhow.

There's also too much line loss during the conversion process. Plus you need to do a phase conversion at the other end of the job which equals more room and cost. Transmission corridors are already filled up with the AC circuits without extra ROW to accommodate a large scale endeavor.

Any solar farm around here is just enough to cover the additional costs placed onto the consumer that the operating companies feel they can get away with and is only large enough to keep the Bloom energy and Paris Agreement libtards off their ass anyhow. It's just a money racket invented by corrupt politicians and investors who want to take advantage of deregulation. Sort of like legalized extortion or protection.

Long and short of it is if your thinking that a DC transmission line paralleled with a wind or solar farm somewhere is going to power up your needs you are sadly mistaken and its going to be a long cold dark winter. They don't transmit anything because of the lack of being able to store the energy. They add cost and complexity to an already very well out system until solar farms in space and superconductor technology unfolds.

I don't mean the little 1-2mw solar farms. I mean the hundreds of MW wind farms in Texas and grid interties.

Here is a list of current HVDC projects. Notice they are all VERY high power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects

On solar, LCEO costs without subsidies in most of the US is lower than most coal. Still not as cheap as natural gas. But its a lot easier to justify investing a few million to slap in a few MW of solar than it is to build a natural gas plant that costs half a billion when you need more peak capacity when solar can produce.

LCEO with battery storage is cheaper in the US south west than coal is...

So it isn't just Bloomtards. The advantage of building a lot of it is the costs go down. Building a lot of coal or natural gas doesn't really make those cheaper. Solar panels and wind turbines, even batteries, DO have economies of scale with them that drives the cost lower and lower.

 

[Doco Overboard]

I don't mean the little 1-2mw solar farms. I mean the hundreds of MW wind farms in Texas and grid interties.

Here is a list of current HVDC projects. Notice they are all VERY high power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects

On solar, LCEO costs without subsidies in most of the US is lower than most coal. Still not as cheap as natural gas. But its a lot easier to justify investing a few million to slap in a few MW of solar than it is to build a natural gas plant that costs half a billion when you need more peak capacity when solar can produce.

LCEO with battery storage is cheaper in the US south west than coal is...

So it isn't just Bloomtards. The advantage of building a lot of it is the costs go down. Building a lot of coal or natural gas doesn't really make those cheaper. Solar panels and wind turbines, even batteries, DO have economies of scale with them that drives the cost lower and lower.

There's enough coal in the Wadesville pit right outside of St, Clair PA to power the nations needs for 200 years. Solar will be a best option when it gets transmitted back from space and superconductor technology comes along not thousands of acres of 20MW to power 1200 homes
Let me know if you get any green power today if your lights happen to go out. Were gettning ready to hot some people up right now so gotta go.

 

[hobiecat590]

Ideally you’d break off the hot and neutral and just leave the ground connected.

It would improve the effect.

You’d still get shielding. Yes, regular hardware cloth can work. Just don’t leave openings in the weave. Ground it if you can. The lower the impedance of the ground the better.

1/4” would block 1GHz and longer wave lengths. Rule of thumb is 1/10th the wave length.

EMP is very wide band. Likely you’d still suffer some issues there. If you look at a microwave the hole size is about a millimeter or so.

The higher the frequency, the more will leak through. That said, when you are talking something like 1/4” hole size it’ll effectively block 1GHz, and severely attenuate 1-11GHz of course less attenuation as the frequency gets higher. Then again, simple framed 2x4 walls are going to start severely attenuating 10GHz+

Grounding will help.

Thanks for the info. This will be great for the SHTF radios, backup drives, etc.

 

[ED302]

I think you guys are mixing up the effects from a solar storm and what happens with an EMP. The EMP that can fry electronics is generated by a nuclear blast, of which I assume you would have no advance notice. Monitoring space weather won't help you here. The solar storm due to a CME or coronal hole would produce a DC field which could damage transformers by saturating the core, or cause errant protection trips on transmission lines. The first is unlikely due to the common transformer designs in use today. The latter would be a short-term effect, and the grid operators can begin restoration after a few hours. The PJM engineers that have studied this have said it would have to be an especially strong G5 storm to cause any problems

 

[brucaru]

My to do list includes a building a gasifier. With some minimal welding skill this contraption can easily be constructed. It will convert the burning of wood into a gas that will run a generator that has a converter for natural gas. All you need is a supply of wood and you can run the genny for a long time. Plans are on the net, I even remember seeing older plans from the USGovt

 

[lazarus]

I think you guys are mixing up the effects from a solar storm and what happens with an EMP. The EMP that can fry electronics is generated by a nuclear blast, of which I assume you would have no advance notice. Monitoring space weather won't help you here. The solar storm due to a CME or coronal hole would produce a DC field which could damage transformers by saturating the core, or cause errant protection trips on transmission lines. The first is unlikely due to the common transformer designs in use today. The latter would be a short-term effect, and the grid operators can begin restoration after a few hours. The PJM engineers that have studied this have said it would have to be an especially strong G5 storm to cause any problems

A Carrington event is above a G5 storm.

It isn't a regular geomagnetic storm that is the concern. Long distance transmission wires end up having an induced voltage from the alternating magnetic field produced by really strong geomagnetic storms. It isn't core saturation concerns, it is over voltage and melting the transformers that is the concern (or damaging/destroying the transmission lines themselves).

And EMP you might have at least very short advantage notice. Maybe. Of course lightning produces EMP, but it is only a concern over very short distances (dozens of yards). I am not as worried about lightning induced EMP destroying my electronics, which could then be replaced (granted, I am out a bunch of money, but home owner's insurance should still cover some of it).

A G5 storm occurs roughly 4 times per 11 year solar cycle on average. It can cause temporary blackouts and disruption to satellites and radio.

A Carrington event is an order of magnitude more powerful (or more). Those occur on average once per 500 years that one hits the Earth based on ice core samples. We had one miss the earth by 9 days off our orbit a few years ago (they happen with reasonable frequency, just that they don't pass through where the Earth is actually located in our orbit more often than about once per 500 years. On average).

 

[Mark75H]

A Carrington event is above a G5 storm.

It isn't a regular geomagnetic storm that is the concern. Long distance transmission wires end up having an induced voltage from the alternating magnetic field produced by really strong geomagnetic storms. It isn't core saturation concerns, it is over voltage and melting the transformers that is the concern (or damaging/destroying the transmission lines themselves).

And EMP you might have at least very short advantage notice. Maybe. Of course lightning produces EMP, but it is only a concern over very short distances (dozens of yards). I am not as worried about lightning induced EMP destroying my electronics, which could then be replaced (granted, I am out a bunch of money, but home owner's insurance should still cover some of it).

A G5 storm occurs roughly 4 times per 11 year solar cycle on average. It can cause temporary blackouts and disruption to satellites and radio.

A Carrington event is an order of magnitude more powerful (or more). Those occur on average once per 500 years that one hits the Earth based on ice core samples. We had one miss the earth by 9 days off our orbit a few years ago (they happen with reasonable frequency, just that they don't pass through where the Earth is actually located in our orbit more often than about once per 500 years. On average).

Yes, its the lack of understand of most of the public that the danger is mostly to those very long stetches of wire between stations and the equipment directly attached to those specific wires. The longer the wire is, the higher the power is going to be when that magnetic field collapses into it.

Am I wrong or isn't the voltage dependent on the field strength of the magnetic field (and rate of collapse) and the amperage by the length of the wire?

Transmission lines for gigawatts will instantaeously have petawatts or above on them in a Carrington event.

 

[lazarus]

Yes, its the lack of understand of most of the public that the danger is mostly to those very long stetches of wire between stations and the equipment directly attached to those specific wires. The longer the wire is, the higher the power is going to be when that magnetic field collapses into it.

Am I wrong or isn't the voltage dependent on the field strength of the magnetic field (and rate of collapse) and the amperage by the length of the wire?

Transmission lines for gigawatts will instantaeously have petawatts or above on them in a Carrington event.

Probably not petawatts, but a huge amount higher voltage. During the Quebec geomagnetic storm in 1989 peak induced voltage was measured at a little over 1000v in some of the longer lines. That isn’t a stupendous amount taking in to account these are 20-500kv lines. But it’s quasi DC which increase generating loading needed to overcome it and as pointed out can saturate the core of the transformers. Both happened in 1989 and caused a 9hr blackout over eastern Canada and most of the NE US.

A carrington event storm can easily be 10x as strong if not significantly stronger than that.

If a 20KV like suddenly has 30KV on it, you’ve got more than twice the carried power.

A typical storm produces 1-5V/km of induced voltage. Most powerful recorded was 20v/km (storm of 1921).

When the core of the transformer overloads it leaks current to ground through the body of the transformer. It can be hundreds of amps. Temporary saturation is not ideal, but it just means it stops working. But it can damage the windings, body and boil off the cooling oil.

A Carrington level event is estimated at 10x more powerful than the 1989 or 1921 storms. It’s estimated it would destroy most HV and all EHV transformers connected on the grid in the part of the hemisphere it hits.

 

[Alan3413]

I'm obviously no electrical engineer, but if the voltage and current suddenly go up to twice rated capacity, isn't there an overcurrent/overvoltage device that will trip to protect the transformers?

 

[Mark75H]

I'm obviously no electrical engineer, but if the voltage and current suddenly go up to twice rated capacity, isn't there an overcurrent/overvoltage device that will trip to protect the transformers?

For normal conditions and rate of change yes, but not for the once in 500 year event changes. That stuff protects the equipment in thunderstorms and when other equipment or lines fail. In a Carrington-like even it could happen too fast to trip or have sufficient voltage to arc over the breaker gap as it trips or even after; or both.

ETA: there are some cool videos of safetys working correctly - and others of them failing if you search on YT