Solar Storms Affirmative – 4 Week Lab [1/3]
Solar Storms Preparedness Declining
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Solar Storms Preparedness DecliningGlobal preparedness is low for the next major solar storm Cooper and Sovacool 11 – * LLM Global Research Fellow at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School Environmental Law Center AND ** assistant professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore (May 2011, The Electricity Journal, volume 24, issue 4, “Not Your Father's Y2K: Preparing the North American Power Grid for the Perfect Solar Storm,” http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040619011000972) EB I. Introduction For1 two days in February 2010, senior government officials and a handful of representatives from select public–private entities from the United States, Sweden, and the European Union quietly gathered at the David Skaggs Research Center in Boulder, Colo. They had been called together by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to simulate what would happen if, as they were meeting, the North American bulk power system were struck by a severe solar storm. The results were sobering. Within the first hour, the simulated storm would cause cascading power outages throughout the eastern and mid-Atlantic U.S. and eastern Canada. Power stations across the northern hemisphere would report numerous step-up and transmission transformer failures. Lacking back-up transformers and with virtually no domestic manufacturing capability, repairs and replacements would take several weeks, with full grid recovery taking at least six months. Within the first few days, emergency response personnel would face critical infrastructure failure as water distribution, sewage, medical care, phone service, and fuel supply systems collapsed. Service disruption of satellite and GPS communications would severely hamper emergency response and recovery. Utility workers in affected populated areas soon would abandon their posts to be with their families as civil society crumbled around them.2 It might be easy to dismiss this scenario as more the synopsis of a Hollywood big-budget disaster flick than the realistic assessment of the world's best emergency management experts. But the group's findings were enough to compel Britain's chief science advisor to warn that a severe solar storm could lead to a “global Katrina” costing the world's economies as much as $2 trillion.3 Solar storms in the form of coronal mass ejections (CME)—superheated gas and charged particles discharged from the sun—have the potential to inflict massive damage on electricity infrastructure. As the FEMA and DHS simulation revealed, currents induced by a CME can impair the security and performance of high-voltage transmission lines, communication satellites, GPS navigation systems, data centers, and air traffic control facilities.4 They can cause large voltage differences between grounding points in power lines and force a huge amount of DC power through system components incapable of handling it. Some of the world's best solar researchers have concluded that the planet is overdue for a severe solar storm. They warn that the chance for a major geomagnetic disturbance is increasing as the sun is entering its next solar maximum.5 Recently, NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center has observed signs of significant activity, alerting the start of the new solar cycle (cycle #24). Some scientists are predicting storm intensities similar to the most powerful CME events since they were first recognized in 1859. Adding to this concern is the surprise discovery in 2007 of a breach in the earth's protective magnetosphere that has contributed to predictions that cycle #24 could be far more destructive than any recorded in human history.6The group's findings were enough to compel Britain's chief science advisor to warn that a severe solar storm could lead to a “global Katrina.” Indeed, in June 2010, the Space Weather Enterprise Forum (SWEF), a coalition of federal agency and private-sector space officials engaged in monitoring space weather and its effects on critical civil and national security infrastructure, issued a report stating that the potential impacts of space weather are not widely known or poorly understood. As a result, the study cautioned that the nation is not ready for an extreme weather event, nor is it prepared to cope with the nationwide impacts that would result from even a solar storm of modest size.7 One SWEF participant, FEMA Administrator W. Craig Fumate, gave his own agency poor grades for its preparedness for catastrophic solar storms and declared that the nation was in dire need of better forecasting, preparation and coordination.8 This article begins by explaining briefly how CMEs are formed before discussing the impact of space weather on transmission lines, transformers, grid stability, and the entire electricity system. It then proposes a set of eight recommendations that policymakers and utility planners in the United States (and elsewhere) can take to minimize system-wide vulnerabilities to solar storms. These suggestions include augmenting NERC reliability standards and requiring better solar storm forecasting, as well as establishing an early warning and alert system and improving situational awareness at utilities through faster data acquisition and more complex analysis communicated to operators. We also recommend faster control of system components through automated voltage control and power flow management at both the transmission and distribution levels, and adaptive adjustment of protective mechanisms through embedded intelligent devices capable of providing dynamic selective load shedding and intentional islanding.9 Finally, we call on the federal government to invest in local manufacturing of system components and to provide adequate funding to coordinate government efforts at responding to solar storms. Electricity Grid is VulnerableThe power grid and updated technology is more vulnerable than ever and an extreme storm could have up to a 10 year recovery time and $2 trillion cost. Kerr, senior write at Science, 2009 (Richard A, Science, “Are We Ready for the Next Solar Maximum? No Way, Say Scientists” 26 June 2009:Vol. 324 no. 5935 pp. 1640-1641, DOI: 10.1126/science.324_1640, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/32 4/5935/1640.full , accessed 7-20-11, ASR) While researchers have been working to improve their forecasting skills, the world has, if anything, become more susceptible to space weather. “The general trend would be increasing vulnerability to the effects of space storms,” says Baker, who chaired a December 2008 workshop report on the subject by the Space Studies Board of the U.S. National Academies. “In general, the systems are becoming softer.” The power grid operates more efficiently, he says, but that gives it less margin for error and less capacity to buffer a storm's disruptions. The surging power-line currents induced by a severe solar storm could push the grid into uncharted territory. GPS technology, especially the highest-precision variety, has become commonplace since the last solar maximum—for navigating planes more autonomously, for example—but it comes with new codes and new signals untested by the ionospheric disturbances of a major solar storm. Now-ubiquitous cell phones are no less vulnerable. The academies' report put a huge price tag on a repeat of the 1859 superstorm. Judging by the costs of smaller incidents in recent decades, the panel estimated the economic cost in just the first year after such an extreme storm at $1 trillion to $2 trillion. Full recovery would take 4 to 10 years. Disturbances in the high-altitude ionosphere would disrupt radio communications and GPS for days; surges induced in the power grid could destroy expensive and hard-to-replace transformers. Satellites that survived could cost $100 million apiece to put back into operation. Even a recurrence of the lesser superstorm of May 1921 could lead to blackouts affecting 130 million Americans and half of North America, the panel reported. If you pity the poor weatherman, then your sympathies for the space weather forecaster should be unbounded. In May 1996, Ernest Hildner—then director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Environment Center in Boulder, Colorado—told an audience that when it comes to predicting space weather, “we don't do very well. We're several decades behind weather forecasters.” Electric grid is unprotected and increasingly vulnerable to solar storm impact – blackouts and wide-scale damage will ensue NRC, 2008 [National Research Council, Committee on the Societal and Economic Impacts of Severe Space Weather, “Severe Space Weather Events--Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts Workshop Report”, http://www.nap.edu/catalog/12507.html, BJM] Severe space weather has the potential to pose serious threats to the future North American electric power grid.2 Recently, Metatech Corporation carried out a study under the auspices of the Electromagnetic Pulse Commission and also for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to examine the potential impacts of severe geomagnetic storm events on the U.S. electric power grid. These assessments indicate that severe geomagnetic storms pose a risk for long-term outages to major portions of the North American grid. John Kappenman remarked that the analysis shows “not only the potential for large-scale blackouts but, more troubling, … the potential for permanent damage that could lead to extraordinarily long restoration times.” While a severe storm is a low-frequency-of-occurrence event, it has the potential for long-duration catastrophic impacts to the power grid and its users. Impacts would be felt on interdependent infrastructures, with, for example, potable water distribution affected within several hours; perishable foods and medications lost in about 12-24 hours; and immediate or eventual loss of heating/air conditioning, sewage disposal, phone service, transportation, fuel resupply, and so on. Kappenman stated that the effects on these interdependent infrastructures could persist for multiple years, with a potential for significant societal impacts and with economic costs that could be measurable in the several-trillion-dollars-per-year range. Electric power grids, a national critical infrastructure, continue to become more vulnerable to disruption from geomagnetic storms. For example, the evolution of open access on the transmission system has fostered the transport of large amounts of energy across the power system in order to maximize the economic benefit of delivering the lowest-cost energy to areas of demand. The magnitude of power transfers has grown, and the risk is that the increased level of transfers, coupled with multiple equipment failures, could worsen the impacts of a storm event. Kappenman stated that “many of the things that we have done to increase operational efficiency and haul power long distances have inadvertently and unknowingly escalated the risks from geomagnetic storms.” This trend suggests that even more severe impacts can occur in the future from large storms. Kappenman noted that, at the same time, no design codes have been adopted to reduce geomagnetically induced current (GIC) flows in the power grid during a storm. Operational procedures used now by U.S. power grid operators have been developed largely from experiences with recent storms, including the March 1989 event. These procedures are generally designed to boost operational reserves and do not prevent or reduce GIC flows in the network. For large storms (or increasing dB/dt levels) both observations and simulations indicate that as the intensity of the disturbance increases, the relative levels of GICs and related power system impacts will also increase proportionately. Under these scenarios, the scale and speed of problems that could occur on exposed power grids have the potential to impact power system operators in ways they have not previously experienced. Therefore, as storm environments reach higher intensity levels, it becomes more likely that these events will precipitate widespread blackouts in exposed power grid infrastructures. The possible extent of a power system collapse from a 4800 nT/min geomagnetic storm (centered at 50° geomagnetic latitude) is shown in Figure 7.1. Such dB/dt levels—10 times those experienced during the March 1989 storm—were reached during the great magnetic storm of May 14-15, 1921. The least understood aspect of this threat is the permanent damage to power grid assets and how that will impede the restoration process. Transformer damage is the most likely outcome, although other key assets on the grid are also at risk. In particular, transformers experience excessive levels of internal heating brought on by stray flux when GICs cause a transformer’s magnetic core to saturate and to spill flux outside the normal core steel magnetic circuit. Kappenman stated that previous well-documented cases have involved heating failures that caused melting and burn-through of large-amperage copper windings and leads in these transformers. These multi-ton apparatus generally cannot be repaired in the field, and if damaged in this manner, they need to be replaced with new units, which have manufacture lead times of 12 months or more. In addition, each transformer design can contain numerous subtle design variations that complicate the calculation of how and at what density the stray flux can impinge on internal structures in the transformer. Therefore the ability to assess existing transformer vulnerability or even to design new transformers that can tolerate saturated operation is not readily achievable. 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