I wonder if any country has a disaster recovery plan for this kind on event.
These are specialized machines that require specialized labor and specialized materials from a specialized international supply chain to construct. I'd make the bet that total recovery would be decades.
This has resulted in incredibly high performance designs and incredibly high requirements.
Transformers are the sort of think that are not rocket science to build, but every single detail is very very important. It requires a team of people to design, construct, and validate and all these people need to have the skills from doing it many times before. These people and facilities simply don't exist in large enough numbers because they are very expensive.
There are also supply chain issues to consider - the steel used in transformer magnetic circuits for example is a very specific metallurgy and construction. During COVID it was quite difficult to find. Poor steel means poor efficiency which at the scale of these machines can mean millions of wasted mwh of power over time.
Perhaps the liquid piece is also making things more difficult; I'm sure a dry object is a lot easier to warehouse until needed.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pGH1B863oI&ab_channel=Engin...
He did say damaged HV transformers would be a big deal and repairs would take weeks, but maybe that was an optimistic take. Talking about solar storms and grid damage, the range of possibilities is very large, depending on the storm's intensity and where it hits.
The flare itself is fairly fast. But the issue is charged particles that take longer to get us. And they are spread out in time.
As https://www.livescience.com/carrington-event describes, the Carrington Event was a solar flare lasting only 5 minutes. But the magnetic disturbances kept arriving over a week.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Outer_Limits_(1995...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/solar-storms-can-...
That's not the disaster recovery plan itself, it's FEMA instructing a bunch of agencies and departments to make their own. Ordered by Executive Order 13744 signed by President Obama in 2016.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
"telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases giving their operators electric shocks. Telegraph pylons threw sparks"
No doubt this historical one is much more significant, but even another 1859 Carrington would be a huge disaster - the lead time and transportation logistics for things like power station transformers can be months especially if now you need 100 of them
The real life precursor of exploding starship screens/consoles
https://www.ecoshock.org/2017/03/emp-instant-blackout.html
The guy's journalistic style is certainly on the alarmist side but the scholarship is pretty solid and unusually expansive.
From the text:
"Because most utilities have not protected their giant transformers, and there are no replacements, the grid would stay down for at least a year, or a decade, or forever. There are ways to protect the system, but a captured Washington regulation system has not pushed for these simple steps.
A hostile power aside, our expert guest tells us an EMP hit is “inevitable” within the time of those living now, because the Sun can also crash our electrical systems world-wide.
A large solar storm, big enough to do it, was seen in 1859. It’s called the Carrington Event. If part of the Sun blows our way, all satellites are knocked out. The wires of our electric system act like antennae, receiving the deadly pulse."
I doubt the doomsayer timetable but the industrial capacity and delivery concern is absolutely valid.
If this actually happened, I think community solar would be choked as it gets ramped up everywhere at once and some neighborhoods would have power centers to go charge lithium ion portable power packs as the overall grids become decentralized. Shelf-stable, non-refrigerated food would become the norm and people would just make do with less electricity. We'd go back to a cash economy and things like night time entertainment that relied on sound systems and electric lights would become almost non-existent. Without street lights, nighttime in general would be dramatically quieter
The real problem would be people who have to use battery powered medical devices who don't have convenient ways to charge.
But yes, huge problem regardless
Seriously though. It wouldn’t be hard to make a dynamo and some incandescent (or carbon arc!) lights with material already available in most metropolises. The bars would get prioritized, hah.
[0] https://www.theblackoutreport.co.uk/2023/06/13/black-start/
Sometimes the objective rational choice is to do nothing for the mega-disasters and instead just prepare/harden for once-a-century or once-a-millennium event.
The Carrington event in 1859 caused serious damage to telegraphs, for instance.
It's a risk that is more once a century than once a millenium... so we may very possibly see one this century.
Considering how reliant we are on electricity, if everything goes down for more than a couple of days at most there is bound to be extremely serious civil unrest on a global scale: just imagine no access to money and thus not being able to buy food, fuel, etc. and then supply chains shutting down anyway.
... but the specific strength does come into play when discussing the costs of hardening and mitigation.
This event is twice as powerful as the previously known largest event.
This should not surprise us, by the way. I'd expect major solar storms to follow a Zipf's law distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
That means that the power is inversely proportional to the frequency. This is common. You see it in word frequency, river length, population sizes of cities, etc.
So over a 15,000 year period, the biggest solar flare should be about 2x as big as the next biggest. And random Miyake events, which we've had 9 of over roughly 50,000 years, should be about 10x as big as a once every 160 year event like the Carrington event probably was.
All very rough, of course. But it may help give some intuition.
Forget about civil unrest. Chain of command in the military goes down and every unit is on it for themselves. Imagine generals not knowing if the President is still alive.
Or less dividends. This solar storm is a very extreme example, but we've all witnessed how greed got us very unprepared for a pandemic, climate changed induced weather events, new wars, etc.
Now, there's plenty to be said about the funding side of the equation to improve wealth inequality and/or increase budgets, but that's orthogonal to the spending-side necessary tradeoffs to harden against extremely rare disasters.
In other words, supposing you had the political pull to get more money entirely from the richest 0.01%, 1%, or 5% (and putting aside that not everyone agrees that would be good), that extra money would probably still be better spent on more infrastructure and social programs, not on hardening against extremely rare events.
Planetary GDP is around $85tn annually.
The US military budget on its own is around $1tn.
One-off mitigation costs followed by annual maintenance would barely be a rounding error on that.
They'd have the added benefit of hardening systems against hostile EMP, which is a more likely threat.
If I read you correctly, you're making an argument regarding the marginal effort to increase the budget by Y.
My argument is about the millions of things we could do with Y that would be more beneficial to human flourishing. Even if it's trivial to increase the budget by Y, that doesn't imply that it's trivial to increase the budget by Y enough times to run out of more important things to do.
Q: Are governments prepared to handle a solar storm 10 times as big as the Carrington Event?
A: Probably not, and that's not something we should fault them for or worry about.
Original (longer) argument:
It's possible that hardening against a Carrington-level event is a good use of money, but that's not the original question. The original question is about an event 10 times as big, twice as big as the previously known largest event.
If I understand your assertion, you're asserting that the money could easily be raised with little downside. Maybe it can be. For the sake of argument, I'll grant you that.
But my assertion is that it's not a question of if the money could be raised to harden against a 15k-year solar storm. My assertion is that even if the money were already in hand, hardening against such an extreme event is probably not worth the cost.
Whatever the budget is, it will be finite. Given present technology, whatever that budget is, it won't be sufficient to give all people worldwide a utopian lifestyle while fully funding all promising medical research, etc. Tradeoffs will need to be made. Hardening against a 15k-year event an order of magnitude more powerful than the Carrington event is probably not the best use of finite budget.
If I could start a side gig in a polka band and sell plasma to raise enough money to make my Florida home polar bear proof, that wouldn't have any bearing on the wisdom of polar-bear-proofing a home in Florida. Even assume that cost were the only downside to polar-bear-proofing a home, the availability of the money wouldn't be the problem with the plan. The problem is that the other things I could do with my limited resources would be much more beneficial. Yes, all else being equal, a polar-bear-proof house in Florida is better than a non-bear-proof house in Florida. In the real world, all else is not equal.
There is almost always a trade-off. Some risks aren't worth mitigating, and we're better off accepting them than either worrying ourselves over them or wasting limited resources on unwise mitigations.
My point is that a lack of political will to come up with the funding isn't the biggest obstacle to such extreme measures.
Perfect safety is a bad goal, and worrying that we aren't perfectly safe is unwise.
Edit: if I've missed something and you're talking about some hypothetical world where we've already solved cancer, heart disease, poverty, wealth inequality, climate change, polio, dementia, put basements / tornado shelters in all of the houses and trailer parks in Tornado Alley, figured out why the laundry always contains an odd number of socks, etc. Sure, then if we could scrounge up enough money to harden against a solar storm 10 times as powerful as the Carrington event, then go for it.