It would have wiped out the power grid, no power to anyone for months. (Unless you had a generator and fuel.)
Although we would fix it. Assuming current levels of production it would take years to fully repair, but I assume after a disaster we would massively increase the rate of production and it wouldn't be as bad as some make out.
Poorer counties, and those without a manufacturing base, would be in much much worse shape though.
>>I assume after a disaster we would massively increase the rate of production
There is a chicken-egg problem here. You can't massively increase production because, you don't have enough energy to do that. And that is because your existing infrastructure is fried.
For a few months/years at least you will have to bootstrap a lot of transformers to increase supply to produce more transformers. And only when you break even on a good enough energy you will go back to the normal.
However note, in order to increase production you also need to mine quickly for you don't really have energy. So there are a lot of sub dependencies.
But by any measure lack of energy for a such a long time, would have already set back world economy to way back in the past.
No power grid = lots of difficulty getting fuel into vehicles = much less transport availability = very, very serious problems for modern societies. Reduced transport capacity isn't just reduced ability for people to get to work - it's also reduced ability to distribute food.
You'd also have people panic-buying at supermarkets and hardware stores - but without the ability to electronically transfer money... you've got a lot of public panic to contend with. Food riots, crime skyrocketing. Lots of ugly stuff would happen before you would be able to do much manufacturing to recover (and most manufacturing these days needs a lot of power...)
It would also mean that many people with chronic diseases--people you all likely know, yes?--would die because supplies of medicines would dry up rapidly, existing stocks of some drugs would spoil (insulin requires refrigeration), and further production would be offline for months or years. So yes, I'm concerned.
To the naysayers here, don't your jobs require access to electricity? How's your Node startup going to survive months or years without power? (No elevator pitches if the elevators aren't working!)
The article suggests that we'd get up to a day of warning. Would it be practical to physically disconnect transformers and other equipment from the grid to protect against damage? Also, how exposed are subterranean power wires?
I must admit that I have a pretty high degree of confidence that if the director of NASA briefs the president that this is happening (which he will know with a very high degree of certainty), such a shutdown would be effected - and similar for pretty much every other civilized country on the planet.
Any deaths that would happen from shutting down the power grid would happen anyway, but this would allow for mitigation strategies to be put into place. Hospitals already have emergency generators, so it not like they're strangers to the concept. Also, the 2003 northeastern blackout affected 55 million persons for up to two days and only ten fatalities were attributed to the outage.
Anyway, this seems like a good thing to have a contingency plan written up for. The NASA article suggest there isn't, but that just might be that they don't know about it - they wouldn't be responsible for executing it anyway.
It seems much more likely that the grids around critical infrastructure would be taken offline, but major metropolitan areas would be left connected. In a TEOWAWKI scenario, we would expect a government to prioritize its military capacity ahead of the comfort of the civilian population. Also, the riot and crime risk would heavily weigh against any actions to take cities offline, not to mention the PR nightmare of being wrong.
It seems "the grid" is a singular thing here. Either you shut it down completely (and then back on later), or you lose it completely.
If you leave cities connected, and the solar solar storm hits, then the cities are without power for a much longer period of time than if you took preemptive measures - with all the risks of crime that follow. Also, I'll refer to the 2003 blackout for a dry run of the mayhem that will unfold in the face of a vast power outage (ie. not much), and in this case, you'll even be able to provide a quite fair number of hours warning, so most people should be able to get home - you won't have a million office workers stranded in Manhattan. Hoarding will happen, though, and it won't be pretty. That survivalist nutcase guy at the end of the street will have a field day when he struts out of his well-stocked bunker after the power comes back on.
The PR nightmare of having shut down the grid for a few hours with warning (presumably, you'll shut it down immediately before the hit is expected, so if you're wrong, you can turn it back on fairly quickly[1]) is much, much lighter than frying the entire nations electrical grid, causing trouble for years because you acted against advice from your NASA director. Also, if he was wrong, the NASA director will make a pretty good fall guy and it won't even be all that unfair. If your PR guy can't spin "I listened to the best scientists in the country and followed their recommendations, I'm sorry they were wrong, but better safe than sorry", fire him too.
1: Spinning a grid back up isn't anywhere near instant, I know, but it'll be a lot faster than having to rebuild the grid first.
Not true. You can turn off the power in a nuclear plant pretty much instantly. You can turn it on pretty much instantly. What you can't do is efficiently turn it on and off - it takes time for the reactor pile to warm up after you've dropped the control rods to shutdown.
But there's no specific reason you need to do that - the reactor won't be effected, the control rod circuits are heavily shielded and fail safe these days (i.e. if power does go, the arms holding the rods drop them in automatically when the electromagnets fail).
For a day or 2 of shutdown, you could leave the reactor hot.
Sorry but you're simply wrong here about the conditions of the shutdown. These are not planned months ahead shutdowns they are near instantaneous emergency shutdowns and it takes a while to recover from those. After the 2003 blackouts the nuclear plants took the longest to be brought back on-line.
This isn't a reactor SCRAM though - or at least, it doesn't have to be. It's a momentary need to disconnect the reactor generators from the electrical grid.
If you planned in advance (to manage the reactor's thermal state - i.e. keep the heat exchangers going) in such a situation, then all you're doing is disconnecting the transformers.
The problem is no one's planned ahead for this type of shutdown of a nuclear plant. The procedure you follow is the one you have since you definitely don't want to make it up on the fly with a nuclear plant.
>but I assume after a disaster we would massively increase the rate of production and it wouldn't be as bad as some make out
Unfortunately it's not so easy. A number of the raw materials have quite limited supply and even after production, transportation is very time consuming.
Transportation can be shorted by producing locally, but in 2010, only 15% of large power transformers (>60 MVA) deployed in the US were supplied by domestic producers[1] (although domestic production capacity is increasing):
LPTs require a long lead time, and transporting them can be challenging. The average lead time for an LPT is between five and 16 months; however, the lead time can extend beyond 20 months if there are any supply disruptions or delays with the supplies, raw materials, or key parts. Its large size and weight can further complicate the procurement process, because an LPT requires special arrangements and special rail cars for transport.[1]
For more than you ever wanted to know on the subject, see the following:
I don't think it would really be this dire if push came to shove. A whole country without transformers and lacking ability to import them would be like a war effort. It would certainly be a huge disaster, but it wouldn't be cataclysmic. People would come out of their regular job roles and work with rebuilding.
If you read up about e.g. the crazy efforts that went on during World War II, this would be a good example of how focused a large economy can be in times of crisis. Of course there would be less time available to make the next Instagram, but it would probably have some positive side effects too.
The high quality (i.e. efficient) version (electrical steel) has limited supply, but if you didn't care about that, and just wanted something to work now, there is much more supply. All the other materials are common and widely available.
> Its large size and weight can further complicate
I would expect the military to step in with some heavy lift vehicles.
All of what you say is for normal times, but in an emergency (i.e. cost is no object) we could do things a LOT faster.
So why was the 1989 storm localized? Just because it was much smaller? Do those metrics for measuring the six did the storm correspond to geographic spread?
It was not localized (It affected both the US and the UK), but rather Canada was uniquely sensitive to it because of the very long transmission wires and that there is no conductive soil to earth the power.
These days everyone is "uniquely" sensitive to it.
Although we would fix it. Assuming current levels of production it would take years to fully repair, but I assume after a disaster we would massively increase the rate of production and it wouldn't be as bad as some make out.
Poorer counties, and those without a manufacturing base, would be in much much worse shape though.