Experts Warn Solar Storms Could Harm Power Grids

(June 8) -- The newest looming threat for doomsday forecasters doesn't involve plagues, death beams or killer asteroids, but rather the natural energy of the sun, which in one alarming scenario could take down modern power grids.

The concern is that bursts of radiation from the sun's surface could cripple satellites in orbit and fry electronics on Earth, creating infrastructure damage that some have compared to Hurricane Katrina. And with a period of especially high solar activity, "solar maximum," just a few years away, this potential threat is grabbing attention.

The idea of solar storms pulling the plug on electronics worldwide makes for riveting headlines, but how great is the actual risk?

This illustration shows a CME blasting off the Sun’s surface in the direction of Earth

SOHO / ESA / NASA

Scientists worry that bursts of radiation from the sun could knock out satellites in space and destroy electronics on Earth. Here, an illustration shows such a burst blasting off the sun's surface and moving toward the Earth.

"Will massive solar storm cause blackouts on Earth?" screamed a headline on the German news site Bild.com. It also claimed NASA had issued an alert, which turns out to be not quite accurate.

What NASA did do was hold a Space Weather Enterprise Forum on Tuesday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., where scientists discussed the very real danger of solar storms. "The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity," said Richard Fisher, head of NASA's Heliophysics Division.

Hype aside, there is indeed reason to be concerned about solar storms, according to the experts. A 2008 NASA report called "Severe Space Weather Events: Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts" warns of "dramatic impact that extreme space weather can have on a technology upon which modern society ... critically depends."

There's also historical precedent for such events. In 1989, millions in Canada were left without power for several hours after a solar storm wreaked havoc on northeastern Canada's Hydro-Quebec power grid.

Solar storms' power to threaten modern infrastructure is real -- and it's on its way, according to Yousaf Butt, a physicist in the High-Energy Astrophysics Division at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "[I]t is virtually guaranteed that a powerful geomagnetic storm, capable of knocking out a significant section of the U.S. electrical grid, will occur within the next few decades," Butt wrote in The Space Review. "In fact, this may well happen even within next few years as we approach the next period of elevated solar activity, ... which is forecast to peak in 2013."

Coincidentally, part of the solution to protect against such solar storms -- "hardening" electronics and satellites to shield them from the solar flares' energetic particles -- also helps solve another favorite doomsday scenario: the threat of an electromagnetic pulse weapon.