Power Companies Brace For Solar Storms

I always thought that the 1989 Quebec Solar Storm was a good example of what might occur:

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/sun_darkness.html [nasa.gov]

In space, some satellites actually tumbled out of control for several hours. NASA's TDRS-1 communication satellite recorded over 250 anomalies as high-energy particles invaded the satellite's sensitive electronics. Even the Space Shuttle Discovery was having its own mysterious problems. A sensor on one of the tanks supplying hydrogen to a fuel cell was showing unusually high pressure readings on March 13. The problem went away just as mysteriously after the solar storm subsided.

http://www.ips.gov.au/Educational/1/3/12 [ips.gov.au]

Service restoration took more than nine hours. This can be explained by the fact that some of the essential equipment, particularly on the James Bay transmission network, was made unavailable by the blackout. Generation from isolated stations normally intended for export was repatriated to meet Quebec's needs and the utility purchased electricity from Ontario, New Brunswick and the Alcan and McLaren Systems.

By noon, the entire generating and transmission system was back in service, although 17 percent of Quebec customers were still without electricity. In fact, several distribution-system failures occurred because of the high demand typical of Monday mornings, combined with the jump in heating load after several hours without power.

So... It caused a cascading effect, just like the most recent New York blackout, scary stuff if it occured across even a marginal size of the USA.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/h8lX5ArCcvw/Power-Companies-Brace-For-Solar-Storms

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