Speaker 1: Imagine looking up at the night sky and you see
the northern lights, that beautiful shimmering curtain of green and red.
But you're not in Alaska or Norway. You're on a
beach in Cuba, or maybe you're standing on a street
in New Orleans and the sky is so bright you
can read a newspaper by its light.
Speaker 2: I mean, it sounds like science fiction, doesn't.
Speaker 1: It, as it really does.
Speaker 2: But that's exactly what happened in September eighteen fifty nine
during what we now call the Carrington Event. It was
the largest base weather storm ever documented.
Speaker 1: While that sky looked beautiful, what was happening on the
ground that was something else entirely.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely. The technology of the day was the telegraph
network state of the art, and it just completely broke down.
Speaker 1: Broke down, how like just static on the lines, no.
Speaker 2: Much more dramatic. Operators were reporting sparks, little sparks flying
from their equipment. Some of them got electric shocks.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And you know, some operators even figured out they could
disconnect their batteries the power source and the teps would
just keep running.
Speaker 1: We're running on what on.
Speaker 2: The storm itself? The electrical currents induced in the wires
by the sun were that powerful.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's pause on that for a second. Let's
take that level of electromagnetic energy and hit our world
with it today, right where everything, and I mean everything
from banking and finance to the pumps that bring you
clean water, to your phone, your internet, it all runs
on electricity on these massive, interconnected and frankly very delicate grids.
Speaker 2: The outcome isn't just a flicker. The consensus among risk
assessors is well, it's grid collapse, a continental scale blackout
that could last for months or maybe even years.
Speaker 1: And that's not an exaggeration.
Speaker 2: No, that is the catastrophic premise, and it is modeled.
This isn't just the theory. It's a scenario that organizations
from NASA to the big insurance companies have analyzed and
they're all clear. A modern Carrington scale event, a Carrington
event two point zero, would be a catastrophe unlike anything
we've ever faced.
Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling Threads today. Ay, we're doing a critical
deep dive into the science of extreme space weather, and
our mission here is to cut through the hype and
focus purely on the measured vulnerability. The terrifying reality that's
laid out in our source material.
Speaker 2: We're primarily analyzing the Helio's solar storm scenario from the
Cambridge Center for Risk Studies. It's an incredibly detailed global
stress test.
Speaker 3: It quantifies the damage, and we're pairing that with vulnerability
reports from US security studies like the work compiled by Freeley,
and of course data from NASA's Monitoring Workshop reports to
really understand the threat to our assets, things like the
DSCOVR satellite and the eh V grid.
Speaker 2: So the central question for you, the listener, is this
is the threat of a solar superstorm a real, immediate
danger to modern civilization?
Speaker 1: And given these staggering trillion dollar costs we're seeing in
these worst case models, are we even remotely prepared for
the kind of long term societal collapse that many experts
are quietly and sometimes not so quietly fearing.
Speaker 2: I think to answer that, we have to start with
cosmic mechanics, the three ways the Sun attacks our planet.
To really get a handle on the danger, you have
to look ninety three million miles away to the Sun.
It seems stable, but its magnetic field is this chaotic,
churning thing.
Speaker 1: So the solar storms. They come from that magnetic acta exactly.
Speaker 2: Imagine these massive magnetic field lines twisting and stretching until
they get so energized they.
Speaker 1: Just snap like a huge rubber band breaking.
Speaker 2: It's a perfect analogy. And that release of energy comes
at us in three distinct forms, and each one has
its own unique hazard and its own travel time to Earth.
Speaker 1: And that difference in speed is everything, right, It's the
key to our warning time or really are lack of it?
Speaker 2: It absolutely is. So the first and the fastest thing
to hit us are the solar flares. These are just
intense bursts of electromagnetic radiation think X rays, ultraviolet light.
They travel at the speed of light, so they get
here in about eight minutes eight minutes.
Speaker 1: So what do they do when they arrive.
Speaker 2: Their effect is immediate. They super ionize the layers of
our atmosphere and that causes instantaneous radio blackouts on the
entire sunlit side of the Earth. We call these R class.
Speaker 1: Storms, and that disrupts GPS too.
Speaker 2: Majorly for aviation, for high frequency communications. It's a huge problem.
Speaker 1: But it is temporary, Okay, So that's the first punch.
It's fast, but it fades. Yeah, what's next in the sequence.
Speaker 2: Next up, arriving a little after the flares are the
solar energetic particle events or spessex. Okay, These are streams
of protons and electrons, really high energy stuff, basically a
radiation storm, an s class storm. Their travel time can vary,
but they can be here in minutes to hours.
Speaker 1: And this is the real danger for astronauts, right, for our.
Speaker 2: Satellites, Yes, for anyone outside the main protection of our atmosphere.
It's a very high radiation hazard. That includes crews on
polar flight routes. And you're right, for our orbital assets.
This is what really hurts them in what way? These
particles cause cumulative permanent damage. They degrade solar panels, reducing power,
and they cause what we call single event upsets or
SEUs in the satellite electronics. They can just flip a
bit from a zero to a one and cause total chaos.
They're the slow, insidious killers of our space infrastructure.
Speaker 1: But neither of those is the main event. The thing
that causes the global blackout scenario. That's the slowest component,
isn't it.
Speaker 2: It is that's the coronal mass ejection or CME. This
is the big one, the driver of the geomagnetic.
Speaker 1: Storm, and what is it physically?
Speaker 2: It's a massive and I mean massive expulsion of plasma,
a hot gas cloud of charged particles, and crucially, it
has its own massive magnetic field embedded inside it. It
can travel at speeds of over three thousand kilometers per second.
Speaker 1: How long does that take to get here?
Speaker 2: It varies anywhere from fifteen hours to a few days.
The Carrington events CME was so fast it made the
trip in under eighteen.
Speaker 1: Hours, So we have a little bit of a window.
But you said something earlier that was key. It's not
just the size, it's the angle of the magnetic field
that determines if this is just pretty likes or a catastrophe.
Speaker 2: Precisely, this is the absolute critical point. It's the difference
between a nice aurora and a grid down scenario. For
a truly extreme event, the magnetic field inside that CME
cloud has to be oriented southward.
Speaker 1: Southward relative to Earth's magnetic field, which points north exactly.
Speaker 2: Think of Earth's magnetic field as a shield. If the
CME arrives with a northward field, the two fields basically
repel each other. It glances off. No big deal.
Speaker 1: But if it's pointing south.
Speaker 2: If it's pointing south, the two sets of magnetic field
lines can connect. They merge. It's a process called magnetic reconnection,
and it's like opening a gate, a massive gait that
channels all that energy and all those charged particles directly
into our magnetosphere.
Speaker 1: The helio scenario we're looking at, it specifically models a
storm with that exact orientation, doesn't.
Speaker 2: It It has to. It models a powerful, fast CME
with that crucial, devastating southward orientation.
Speaker 1: So it's not just the punch, it's whether the key
fits the lock to our planet's defenses. It's just a
terrifying element of chance.
Speaker 2: It really is. Now when that connection happens, we see
the consequences. The visible part is the aurora, right, the
pretty lights, But that's just the atmosphere fluorescing as it's
hit with all those particles. The real danger, the hidden threat,
is what's happening on the ground, geomagnetically induced currents GICs.
Speaker 1: Okay, break that down first.
Speaker 2: The massive magnetic field variations from the storm induce a
powerful electrical field across the Earth's surface. That's just basic physics.
Speaker 1: Faraday's law and that electrical field needs to go somewhere.
Speaker 2: It does, and it drives these huge quasi direct currents
the GICs through anything that's a long conductor connected to
the ground.
Speaker 1: And those long conductors are basically the backbone of modern society.
Speaker 2: They are the electrical grid, oil and gas pipelines, communication cables,
even railway lines. But for the power grid, this current
is absolutely lethal. It gets into the system through the ground.
Neutral points of our extra high voltage are EHV transformers.
Speaker 1: You mentioned this term half cycle saturation. It sounds super technical,
but it seems to be the core of vulnerability. Is
there a simple way to picture what's happening inside that transformer?
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's try. Think of the transformer core as a
sensitive iron ring. It's designed to handle alternating current AC,
which flows back and forth. Right. It's balanced around zero, okay,
But the GIC acts like a DC current. It's a
constant push in one direction. It pushes the transformer's magnetic
field away from that zero point and holds it there.
Speaker 1: It's like redlining an engine. You're forcing it to operate
way outside its design limits.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it. The core becomes
magnetically saturated during half of the AC cycle, and when
it's saturated, it can't contain the magnetic field anymore. And
what happens then two very bad things. First, the current
becomes really distorted. It creates massive harmonics, which is like
electrical noise, and it causes a huge drain on something
called reactive power.
Speaker 1: And the laws of reactive power is what kills the grid.
Speaker 2: Yes, the grid needs reactive power to maintain stable voltage.
When it's gone, voltage collapses, the system trips offline to
protect itself. You get a blackout. And the second bad thing,
the second thing is happening at the same time, those
stray magnetic fields from the saturated core turned directly into heat.
The transformer starts to rapidly overheat from the inside. We're
talking about melting internal components, boiling the oil, and permanently
destroying the unit.
Speaker 1: And we've seen this happen.
Speaker 2: We have during the much smaller nineteen eighty nine storm,
a huge transformer at the Salem Nuclear Unit in New
Jersey basically cooked itself from the inside out. It had
to be completely replaced.
Speaker 1: So the transformer is trigged to black out the grid
while simultaneously committing suicide by heat.
Speaker 2: A very dramatic but accurate summary.
Speaker 1: So this all happens fast. How much warning do we
actually have when one of these massive clouds is hitted
our way?
Speaker 2: This is maybe the scariest part of the whole thing.
And NAA have a fantastic monitoring network. The main instrument
is the Deep Space Climate Observatory ds GOVR.
Speaker 1: That's the one that says about a million miles out right, that's.
Speaker 2: Right at the l one lagrange point. It's our early
warning system watching the solar wind in real time.
Speaker 1: So a million miles sounds like a lot of warning.
Speaker 2: You'd think so, But the most dangerous CMEs are so
fast that distance only gives us fifteen to sixty minutes
of warning. Wait, that's it, fifteen minutes sometimes, and the
most crucial piece of information whether it has that catastrophic
southward magnetic field. We often can't confirm that until it's
about thirty minutes away from impact.
Speaker 1: Thirty minutes to tell every utility operator across an entire
continent that they need to start taking preventive measures.
Speaker 2: Measures like manually disconnecting billions of dollars of infrastructure.
Speaker 1: Sir, that's not a warning system, that's a countdown timer.
Speaker 2: That's why the focus has to be on preparing for
the impact, because we'll never have enough time to truly
prepare for the event.
Speaker 1: Okay, to really understand the threat today, to look back,
we have two key benchmarks, right, the eighteen fifty nine
Carrington event and the nineteen eighty nine Quebec storm.
Speaker 2: Exactly one is the gold standard for raw power. The
other is the gold standard for modern vulnerability.
Speaker 1: Let's start with Carrington. You mentioned it's magnitude. We measure
storm intensity with something called the dressed index. What is
that and what does Carrington's number really mean? So?
Speaker 2: The DST index is basically a global average of how
much the Earth's magnetic field is being compressed or disturbed.
It's measured in nanotesla's or.
Speaker 1: NT and a normal days what.
Speaker 2: On a calm day, it's hovering around zero. During a storm,
the field gets depressed and the index plunges into negative numbers.
A severe storm is anything below negative two to fifty NT.
Speaker 1: So where did the Quebec storm of eighty nine land?
Speaker 2: That one hit around negative five hundred n T, a
very very strong storm.
Speaker 1: Carrington.
Speaker 2: The estimates for Carrington put it at approximately negative eight
hundred and fifty nt, so.
Speaker 1: Vastly more powerful. What does that extra power translate to
on the ground.
Speaker 2: It translates directly to the strength of the indued electrical field.
So a storm that's say, twice as strong in DS
might induce GICs that are four or five times stronger
in certain areas. It's not a linear relationship.
Speaker 1: And an eighteen fifty nine that mint telegraphs on fire.
Speaker 2: In some places. Yes, the induced currents were so strong
they literally set the paper tapes and the telegraph machines
on fire. But because society was still mostly powered by
steam and muscle, the damage was contained. It didn't bring
civilization to a halt.
Speaker 1: Okay, Now, let's fast forward to nineteen eighty nine, a
storm that was significantly weaker than Carrington, but it still
managed to cause a complete systemic failure.
Speaker 2: Yes, the nineteen eighty nine Quebec storm is our modern
dress rehearsal in Neck, a five hundred NT storm, and
it completely took down the hydro Quebec grid.
Speaker 1: Walk us through that failure. What was the chain of events?
Speaker 2: So the GICs from that storm flowed into their EHV
transmission system that caused the half cycle saturation in their
big transformers that we just talked.
Speaker 1: About, draining all that reactive power instantly.
Speaker 2: The system tried to compensate. It had seven big static
var compensators, which are like the grid's voltage stabilizers. They
all tripped offline automatically within seconds. And then without those
stabilizers and with the transformers sucking up all the reactive power,
the system voltage just plummeted. The whole thing cascaded into
a total shutdown in less than ninety seconds.
Speaker 1: Ninety seconds, six.
Speaker 2: Million people were without power for about nine hours.
Speaker 1: That's just a textbook cascading failure. You mentioned the.
Speaker 2: Cost relatively small by today's standards, about six point five
million dollars in equipment damage and a total economic cost
of around thirteen point two million dollars. But it was
a massive wake up call.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't just in Quebec right that sandstorm hit
the US grid.
Speaker 2: It did, and that's where we get the Salem, New
Jersey data point. That nuclear unit transformer that overheated and
destroyed itself. That proves the physical vulnerability of the assets
even when the grid itself doesn't collapse.
Speaker 1: So that one destroyed unit is the key. It takes
this from a Canadian problem to a continental catastrophe waiting
to happen.
Speaker 2: It does because the core issue and the helio scenario
hammers this home is our incredible dependency on EHV transmission.
Our entire just in time globally connected economy is built
on one single.
Speaker 1: Assumption that the power will always be.
Speaker 2: On always, and that dependency amplifies the risk. It turns
what was a curiosity in eighteen fifty nine into a
potential civilizational threat today. Our complexity is our Achilles heel.
Speaker 1: Okay, So when the risk modelers at places like the
Cambridge Center for Risk Studies look at this, they don't
focus on the power lines. They focus on the bottlenecks.
Speaker 2: The big EHV transformers.
Speaker 1: Right, because losing one of these isn't like blowing a
fuse in your house. It's the difference between a bad
day and a multi year recovery.
Speaker 2: The scale of the vulnerability is, while it's sobering, across
the entire US, there are roughly two thy three hundred
and thirty nine of these grid connected EHV transformers.
Speaker 1: And how many spears do we have?
Speaker 2: Two one hundred and twenty two stored around the country.
Speaker 1: Two hundred and twenty two spares for over two thousand
critical units. That seems low.
Speaker 2: It's extremely low, especially when you consider the real bottleneck,
which is manufacturing.
Speaker 1: These aren't things you can just buy off the shelf
at home depot, not at all.
Speaker 2: They are custom built, massive pieces of equipment. They can
weigh hundreds of tons. The Department of Energy says the
average lead time to build a new one is five
to twelve months.
Speaker 1: That's if it's built domestically, right.
Speaker 2: If you have to source it internationally, you're looking at
six to sixteen months. And if a big storm hits
and everyone is trying to order new transformers at the
same time, that lead time could easily stretch to eighteen
to twenty four.
Speaker 1: Months two years to get one replacement.
Speaker 2: Part, to get it built, shipped, and installed. So the
supply chain for these specific items becomes the single point
of failure for the entire recovery.
Speaker 1: It's like losing all the major airport hubs in the
country at once, and each one takes two years to rebuild.
Speaker 2: That's a perfect analogy, and this catastrophic potent is why
you see such wide disagreement in the risk assessments.
Speaker 1: Right, you mentioned the Kapaman report versus the Jason Report.
Why do they disagree so much on how many transformers
are at risk?
Speaker 2: It's a crucial debate. The early Mettech report by John
Kappenman in twenty ten was hugely influential. It modeled a
very intense storm and estimated that three hundred and sixty
five US transformers were at risk of permanent damage.
Speaker 1: Three hundred and sixty five. If that happens, we're talking
about a national multi year blackout exactly.
Speaker 2: But then subsequent reports like the Jason Report for the
US government and a Royal Academy of Engineering study in
the UK, they pushed back. They suggested that worst case
scenario was not plausible on what grounds. They argued that
newer transformers might be more resilient and that the GIC
intensity might be more localized, creating hot spots rather than
a continental wide wave of destruction. So the UK study,
for example, estimated maybe thirteen of their six hundred transformers
were at risk.
Speaker 1: So we have experts arguing over whether we lose thirteen
assets or three sixty five. That's a massive range for
devastating to completely apocalyptic, and.
Speaker 2: That's where a stress test like the Helio scenario comes in.
It doesn't try to resolve the debate. It just models
the outcomes. It asks, what if the worst case is true.
We're focusing on their most extreme model, the X one scenario.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what does the X one scenario assume in
terms of physical damage to that US fleet of transformers.
Speaker 2: It applies a high damage profile. It assumes that thirty
three percent of all transformers are tripped offline, another fourteen
percent sustained minor damage, three percent get major damage, and
zero point two percent are completely destroyed.
Speaker 1: Okay, point two percent doesn't sound like a lot, But
if twenty three hundred units, that's still five or six
critical hubs just gone.
Speaker 2: Gon, plus another seventy or so with major damage, and
the immediate result of that asset loss is a massive
blackout affecting one hundred and forty five million US citizens
right off the bat.
Speaker 1: Nearly half the country goes dark instantly. And the real
horror of the X one scenario isn't the initial blackout.
It's the restoration timeline. Isn't it that?
Speaker 2: It is the core The X one scenario models the
worst case recovery assuming maximum supply chain delays, So for
the transformers that just tripped offline, it's about ten days
to get them back manageable.
Speaker 1: But for the damage ones, that's.
Speaker 2: Where the numbers get terrifying. For a unit with minor damage,
the model assumes one hundred and fifty two days five
months to repair it if you don't have a spare
five much and for the very few that are completely
destroyed the point two percent, the model uses that maximum
lead time three hundred and sixty five days a full year.
Speaker 1: So the entire duration of the crisis for a whole
section of the country is dictated by the manufacturing time
of a handful of assets.
Speaker 2: Yes the vulnerability of specialization, and because of this, the
X one scenario projects that fifteen percent of the total
US population remains without power for more than three days,
and for many of them the lights won't be coming
back on for months or even a.
Speaker 1: Full year, and the economic modeling points to specific states
getting hit the hardest.
Speaker 2: Absolutely places like Illinois and New York. They combine that
high risk geographic latitude with incredibly dense, high value infrastructure.
The model projects direct economic losses for them of around
one hundred and seventy billion dollars and one hundred and
fifty billion dollars respectively.
Speaker 1: And that's just the direct loss which brings us to
the financial shockwave.
Speaker 2: The physical damage is one thing, but the economic fallout
is where you see how electricity is the absolute bedrock
of modern society. It's a global shockwave.
Speaker 1: So let's put a number on it using the global
economic model. In that Helios report, what's the total five
year damage assessment for the extreme X one scenario.
Speaker 2: The metric they use is GDP at risk And for
the X one scenario, the five year global economic loss
is up to one point one.
Speaker 1: Trillion dollars trillion dollars, and.
Speaker 2: The US share of that is estimated at six hundred
and ten billion dollars.
Speaker 1: How does that compare to other disasters who we're familiar with.
What does it mean for the insurance industry?
Speaker 2: It's on a completely different scale. The report estimates the
US insurance industry would face losses of up to three
hundred and thirty three point seven billion dollars. To put
that in perspective, Hurricane Katrina was about forty five billion
dollars in insured losses. Superstorm Sandy with thirty five billion dollars.
Speaker 1: So this is an order of magnitude worse than our
biggest natural.
Speaker 2: Disasters easily, And here is the most critical insight from
that number. The vast majority of that three hundred and
thirty three billion dollars is not from paying to replace
the broken transformer.
Speaker 1: It's from business interruption.
Speaker 2: Exactly less than one percent is for direct physical damage.
Over ninety percent of the loss comes from service interruption clauses.
It's every factory, every company, every data center that can't
operate for months because they don't have power.
Speaker 1: That just perfectly frames the vulnerability, doesn't it. Our economy
doesn't fail because the parts are expensive. It fails because
it cannot tolerate the duration of the outage.
Speaker 2: And that outage immediately triggers these cascading failures through the
entire economy. The Freely Security reports are really clear on this.
Loss of electricity means you lose water, sanitation, communication, transportation, healthcare, finance,
everything within hours or day.
Speaker 1: Can you quantify that domino effect, the difference between the
first hit and the ripple effect.
Speaker 2: The models do that the direct shock the businesses that
immediately shut down is estimated at one point two to
three to two trillion dollars in the X one scenario.
But then the indirect shock, the ripple effect that travels
down the supply chain to their customers and suppliers, that's
another one point one four seven trillion dollars. Domestically, the
two are almost equal in size.
Speaker 1: So a power outage shuts down a specialized chemical plant,
and that then shuts down the pharmaceutical companies that need
those chemicals, which then creates a healthcare crisis.
Speaker 2: That's the chain reaction, and it hits certain sectors harder
than others. The most affected are the ones that are
high labor and can't just work from home. So we're
talking about healthcare, educational services, and government. Their direct shock
value is over sixty percent of their total value. They're
just completely dependent on functioning physical infrastructure.
Speaker 1: And all of this is happening while a simultaneous attack
is happening on our infrastructure in space.
Speaker 2: Yes, we can't forget the digital fallout. A Carrington two
point zero would also devastate our satellite and GPS network.
Speaker 1: We're not just talking about losing your TV signal here.
Speaker 2: Not even close. We're talking about losing the precise positioning,
navigation and timing P and T signals that our entire
modern world runs on the model's estimate, between ten and
one hundred satellites could be permanently lost, costing anywhere from
four billion dollars to two hundred billion dollars.
Speaker 1: How are they being damaged? Specifically?
Speaker 2: Three main ways. First, for satellites in low earth orbit
like starlink, the store heats up the atmosphere and makes
it expand This increases atmospheric drag, slows them down and
operators can actually lose track of them they can deorbit.
Speaker 1: Okay, what's the second way?
Speaker 2: That's the direct radiation damage from the SAPs we talked
about earlier, Those high energy particles. They cause those single
event upsets like what happened to the Skytara I satellite
in twenty twelve, a solar storm hit it and forced
a complete, high risk, three week system reboot.
Speaker 1: And they also just degrade the hardware over time.
Speaker 2: They do they damage the solar panels and can cause
electrostatic discharges that just fry the electronics permanently. The studies
are clear we need way more shielding on our satellites
than we typically use and.
Speaker 1: The third thread is to the GPS signal itself.
Speaker 2: Right, the storm pumps up the electron content in the ionosphere,
the GPS signal has to travel through that and all
those extra electrons slow the signal down. That corrupts the
timing calculation.
Speaker 1: Which leads to positioning errors.
Speaker 2: Yes, but more importantly timing errors. Our financial networks are
power grid, even our traffic light systems, they all rely
on microsecond synchronization from GPS. If that timing is off,
you get chaos. We saw this during the two thousand
and three Halloween storms. It disrupted aircraft navigation all over
the world.
Speaker 1: So this all brings us back to that really scary
headline concept, the idea that society hits a tipping point
within about two weeks of a prolonged blackout. Where does
that two week number come from?
Speaker 2: It comes from the battery life of our backup systems
when the power goes out. The Internet and phones don't
die instantly, but the local distribution nodes for fiber and
cable they run on battery backups. Those fail in eight
to forty hours on cell towers. Cell towers last about
eight to twenty four hours on their.
Speaker 1: Backups, so within two days, you've lost most modern communication, most.
Speaker 2: Of it, yes, and even the old robust landline phone
network the PSTN that starts to fail within three to
seven days as its support systems run out of fuel.
Speaker 1: And the two week mark is when the whole system
just breaks.
Speaker 2: That's the tipping point because once you've lost communication, finance,
and logistics, the ability for government to coordinate any kind
of response, to distribute food, medicine, fuel, to maintain order,
it just evaporates.
Speaker 1: And we have data from previous blackouts that shows the
human cost spikes immediately.
Speaker 2: It's very sobering. After the two thousand and three blackout
in New York City saw one hundred and twenty two
percent increase in accidental deaths. Disease related deaths went up
twenty five percent, and that was for an outage that
lasted a couple of days.
Speaker 1: So if you extend that to months or a year,
like the X one scenario models.
Speaker 2: The freely analysis is blunt. Societal institutions themselves, law enforcement,
local government could become ineffective. You're looking at a fundamental
breakdown and reorganization of society itself.
Speaker 1: Okay, we've laid out the threat the mechanism, the vulnerability.
But the huge question that's hanging over all of this
is are we do What does the science of probability
actually tell us?
Speaker 2: That is one of the most difficult and contentious questions
in the whole field. We know these storms are tied
to the Sun's eleven year cycle, but predicting the truly
extreme events is incredibly complex.
Speaker 1: Why so hard?
Speaker 2: The main reason is our data set is tiny. We've
only been systematically collecting the hourly dressty index data since
nineteen fifty seven. That's a little over sixty years of data,
and we're.
Speaker 1: Trying to predict an event that might happen once every
hundred or two hundred or five hundred years exactly.
Speaker 2: We're trying to predict a true black Swan event from
a very short historical record. So you have to use
statistical extrapolis. You have to take the data you have
and extend it out to thresholds we've never actually seen
in the modern era, like Carrington's negat eight fifty nt, and.
Speaker 1: Standard probability models don't work well for.
Speaker 2: That not really. A simple model like a Poisson process
assumes events are random and independent, but extreme events often
follow us called a fat tail distribution, where the really
big ones are more likely than you'd expect.
Speaker 1: So what kind of models do they use.
Speaker 2: They tend to prefer more sophisticated models, like a wible
renewal process. It's used a lot for extreme events like
large earthquakes and solar flares because it does a better
job of capturing the likelihood of those rare, high magnitude events.
Speaker 1: But at the end of the day, it's still a
statistical guess. We can't physically model the sun well enough
to predict when the next big one is coming.
Speaker 2: We can't, and that uncertainty about when it will happen
is exactly why the conversation has to shift to resilience.
We have to weigh the uncertainty of the timing against
the certainty of the catastrophic impact.
Speaker 1: So what is the current state of our resilience? What
do we actually doing to prepare?
Speaker 2: It breaks down into three areas, warning, hardening, and redundancy.
For warning, as we've said, we have dsg VR. Those
few minutes of warning are absolutely.
Speaker 1: Critical because it lets operators do what It allows.
Speaker 2: Them to start emergency procedures. They can shift power loads
around the glid bring backup generational online and in a
last dish effort, manually disconnect the most vulnerable transformers to
save them from being destroyed.
Speaker 1: But the core vulnerability is still the replacement time for
those transformers. Are we making any progress on that specific bottleneck?
Speaker 2: Actually? Yes, this is a real point of hope in
the story.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The US government funded a project called the Recovery Transformer
or RECKX.
Speaker 1: And what's special about these.
Speaker 2: They're designed for rapid deployment. They are smaller, modular, and
can be moved and installed much more quickly than a
traditional EHV transformer.
Speaker 1: How much more quickly the.
Speaker 2: Prototype was transported over a twenty five hour road trip
and was made fully operational in less than six days, six.
Speaker 1: Days compared to the eight weeks you'd normally estimate just
for transport and installation.
Speaker 2: It's a massive breakthrough, a complete game changer for reducing
that long term outage scenario.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what's the catch?
Speaker 2: The catch is scale. The technology is proven, but it
will take years to build up a large enough fleet
of these RECX units to respond to a disaster that
affects the entire country at once. If you have three
hundred damaged transformers and only a dozen rapid replacement units.
You still have a very long crisis.
Speaker 1: Right, and what it for our satellites? What's the plan
there for space?
Speaker 2: It's all about hardening and redundancy, building satellites with more radiation,
hardened electronics, more shielding, and also shifting towards smaller, keuper
redundant satellite constellations that can be replaced more quickly if
some are lost.
Speaker 1: So the technology to mitigate this exists. The ultimate roadblock
seems to be policy and investment. The sources all point
to this lack of consensus on how bad the threat
really is.
Speaker 2: That is the enduring policy gap. Have utility companies, government agencies,
and academic researchers, and they all agree the risk is real,
but there's no single, unified consensus on the precise impact,
and that paralysis prevents the kind of huge, continent wide
investment that's truly needed.
Speaker 1: The experts in these reports are basically calling for a
unified body, right, an institute to actually quantify the risk properly.
Speaker 2: They are they want an organization, a society and Space
Weather Institute or something similar to finally do a definitive
cost benefit analysis.
Speaker 1: It seems obvious. If the disaster costs a trillion dollars,
spending a few billion to prevent it seems like a
pretty good investment.
Speaker 2: It is the core argument. The cost of a Carrington
level event vastly, overwhelmingly outweighs the cost of preparation. But
to get that investment, you have to overcome the fractured
policy landscape. Until we do that, our greatest vulnerability isn't
the sun. It's the complexity and fragility of the interconnected
world we've built hashtag tag tag outro ARCore.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's just try to summarize the sheer gravity of
wa we've unpacked here on thrilling threads. We've established that
a Carrington event two point zero would be at least
one and a half times stronger than the nineteen eighty
nine storm that took down Kobec's entire grid.
Speaker 2: And our most extreme models, like the Helios X one scenario,
put a number on that risk, a one point one
trillion dollar global economic loss, driven almost entirely by the
length of the service interruption.
Speaker 1: We confirm the physical week point is our fleet of
massive EHV transformers. If enough of them are damaged, it
could take up to a year to replace them, leaving
millions of people in a multi month or even multi
year recovery.
Speaker 2: And our best early warning system DSCOVR, gives us minutes
of warning, not the days or weeks you'd need to
properly prepare for something on this scale.
Speaker 1: I think the biggest takeaway here is that the danger
isn't just the Sun's raw power. It's what one of
the sources called our creeping dependency on these hyper interconnected systems.
Speaker 2: Exactly. We plan for hurricanes, we plan for earthquakes, but
those are localized. A solar superstorm has a footprint that
is massive and simultaneous. There is no outside help coming
when the entire continent is dark.
Speaker 1: Because electric power isn't just another utility, it's the fundamental
system that enables all other systems. Without it, everything else, communication, finance, logistics,
law and order begins to crumble within days.
Speaker 2: The recovery is then defined not by our will to rebuild,
but by the slow physical pace of manufacturing highly specialized
heavy equipment, which.
Speaker 1: Leaves us with a final and I think a really
provocative thought for you to consider, given that the sign
says we are exposed to a catastrophic event that could
require a multi year recovery for our electrical grid, taking
out water, sanitation, and almost all forms of electronic communication.
What essential non electric system would you rely on most
for that first year of recovery.
Speaker 2: What's the one thing you couldn't live without. We'd love
to hear your thoughts.