On the bright side; if such an event occured, it would give the industry a good chance at upgrading the grid overall. That alone might be worth going without for a couple years.

I think that if electricity were truly out for a couple of years that you might want to rethink that statement. ;-) I'd much rather that we plan ahead and harden the infrastructure (with backups in storage) than have to live through it as a lesson learned.

For most people (including myself, a fairly prepared guy/family) this would be an unspeakable loss. The collateral damage would be so significant, it would make all other previous natural and unnatural disasters look like a walk in the park in comparison. Think about power/heat outages on the east coast of the US. Now multiply that to most of western civilization, and for good measure extend it from 1-2 weeks to 5-10 years. Wow. Massive civil unrest and crime, starvation, exposure - truly it would be TEOTWAWKI. Fun stuff I'm sure.

Anyway. I digress. :-) Shouldn't this whole thread be in the LongTerm/Natural Disaster forum?

That depends on where the Earth is in its orbit. In northern hemisphere summer the southern hemisphere is a little less vulnerable but in northern hemisphere winter the opposite is true.

And in any case if the major effect is the CME dropping The-Mother-Of-All-Charges on the ionosphere (think of it as a Cosmic Taser) then both day and night sides get it, in both hemispheres, possibly over a day or two.

I think the wording of the report leaves something to be desired. They don't put it in terms people are likely to understand.

The terminology is worded so that it is easy to jump to extreme conclusions. The phrase disruptions for several years might be interpreted as no power for years but the more logical conclusion is cycling brownouts with regular short-term disruptions during several years as power supply resources are juggled. The multi-trillion dollar loss figure seems to assume nobody does anything to compensate or correct. Most automated systems can be run manually but it takes more hands.

The wording about loss of fuel and medications seems needlessly alarmist because most of those systems have backup generation on hand. Reallocation of surviving power, portable generation and transfer of resources requiring power out of affected zones should minimize losses.

The transformers they are talking about are not the sort you see hanging on a power pole. The units they are talking about are quite large and quite expensive. Which tells you why there aren't many spares on hand. Until you need one they are very expensive paperweights. Most power companies, POCOs, are reluctant about keeping on hand a capital investment they may not need for two hundred years. And when you need it, seeing as that it has been sitting there for so long, there is a good chance it won't work or be compatible with the present days systems.

Last comparable even was " the great magnetic storm of May 14-15, 1921" roughly 88 years ago. Compare transformers from back then to present and you can see that laying in spares cannot be a complete solution. It may be possible to bulk-up the supply on hand if the POCOs were to cooperate and invest in a few but complete replacement isn't in the cards.

Also you have to read on page 79:
"With respect to the entire grid, remedial measures to reduce GIC levels are needed and are cost-effective. The installation of supplemental transformer neutral ground resistors to reduce GIC flows is relatively inexpensive, has low engineering trade-offs, and can produce 60-70 percent reductions of GIC levels for storms of all sizes."

I'm not sure why they chose to use the wording they did. A certain amount of flamboyance is justified to get attention but this seems a little too provocative. It might be interesting to find out who pushed for the report and who funded it. The 'push political agenda and control people by scaring the pants off them folks' are still out there.

While agree with what you are saying, let me give a counter point.

I don't think a worst case scenario is likely. BUT, if it should occur, we'll be pretty much pooched in the 1st and 2nd world. Saying we shouldn't worry and that the report is sensational and should be ignored is like saying that pandemic flu concerns are sensational and should be ignored. Instead, maybe we should look at what is needed to (a) prevent as much effect as possible (which we are doing) and (b) what will be needed to recover.

Although electricity is needed in the factories that produce transformers, this need not be grid power.
I would expect such facilities to receive a very high priority in the allocation of either generators or rationed grid power.
I believe that some factories have large generators, employed normally for testing purposes, these could of course be used to power the factories.

It would appear prudent for the government to subsidise the manufacture of a few spares, not throughout the nation but at a few key locations.
Since such large transformers are not easily or quickly transported, the spares should be held on site at the most important substations.
(some spares already exist, since although long lasting, they do sometimes fail in normal use)

Limited grid power can be supplied by much smaller transformers than the originalls, rolling blackouts being used to avoid overloading the smaller ones.
Smaller transformers can be made more quickly, and may be available from stock, unlike the largest which are built to order.

You can build transformers without power, you just need to wind some wire around a core. if every transformer in the world were dead, you could make a simple one by hand to get power to the tools to make better ones by machine.

Well, it's not like the transformers are just going to disintegrate. They might blow a winding or crack the core, or on some occasions they'll catch fire, but I suspect in most cases the overvoltage circuits will blow open and shut the circuit down entirely. With no load on the transformer output, the spike might not cause any problems (no load = no current). It might still arc internally if the voltage spike is big enough (similar to what an artificial emp or near lightning strike does to some sites). If that happens then you could just disassemble the transformer, find and repair any problems, and put it back together. Power tools make the work go faster, but they aren't necessary.

Now if the transformer catches fire, then that will go to the recycle bin. I got to see that happen a few times in Baghdad when the grid surged and overvoltaged some of the transformers (one in particular blew up near our office and had us heading for the bunker before we realized it wasn't another stinking mortar barrage. Funny thing, when the surge hit, you could see the power lines up on the poles dancing around some too.

I was referring to the notion that we needed working transformers to make more.

Yes, I understand. Whittling up a new core by hand would definitely be a pain.