A cyberattack? We will know, in time. For now, this is an ongoing issue and a Carrington event is equally possible. Or, just a human error. Look for past outages, it could happen: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages
I think it would be more widespread if it was a true Carrington event. Might still be a mini one. Actually kind of rooting for this to be the case because then the only bad actors are the politicians and power company administrators that have ignored the warnings. Might lead to reforms worldwide.
It would depend on where it was solar noon at the time the CME hit. But there haven’t been any massive CMEs (Carrington size) anyway, so whatever the cause was, it had nothing to do with solar activity.
That’s not the way a grid would fail during a Carrington event: you’d see big induced voltages along an east-west line. What happened in this case were fluctuations without any notable geographical alignment.
I give this UK Met Office link because the US center, NOAA SWPC, may be subject to attack by MAGA fanatics. The US and the UK are the only western countries with 24/7 space weather operations centers. There’s another one in China but (not surprisingly) their area of interest for geographic impacts is China.
There’s only medium space weather activity at the moment, which is about as quiet as things get at this active phase of the solar cycle.
I’d say that we’re still in the nobody knows stage on what the cause of the grid outage is, though the two main theories are a cyber-attack or anomalous thermal fluctuations causing instability in long transmission lines. It’s probably best to withhold judgement until people who know what they’re doing have looked into it more.
A cyberattack? We will know, in time. For now, this is an ongoing issue and a Carrington event is equally possible. Or, just a human error. Look for past outages, it could happen: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages
I think it would be more widespread if it was a true Carrington event. Might still be a mini one. Actually kind of rooting for this to be the case because then the only bad actors are the politicians and power company administrators that have ignored the warnings. Might lead to reforms worldwide.
It would depend on where it was solar noon at the time the CME hit. But there haven’t been any massive CMEs (Carrington size) anyway, so whatever the cause was, it had nothing to do with solar activity.
That’s not the way a grid would fail during a Carrington event: you’d see big induced voltages along an east-west line. What happened in this case were fluctuations without any notable geographical alignment.
Anyway you can always check space weather at https://weather.metoffice.gov.uk/specialist-forecasts/space-weather
I give this UK Met Office link because the US center, NOAA SWPC, may be subject to attack by MAGA fanatics. The US and the UK are the only western countries with 24/7 space weather operations centers. There’s another one in China but (not surprisingly) their area of interest for geographic impacts is China.
There’s only medium space weather activity at the moment, which is about as quiet as things get at this active phase of the solar cycle.
I’d say that we’re still in the nobody knows stage on what the cause of the grid outage is, though the two main theories are a cyber-attack or anomalous thermal fluctuations causing instability in long transmission lines. It’s probably best to withhold judgement until people who know what they’re doing have looked into it more.
Thanks!!!
There has been no space weather event remotely close to a Carrington one
Canada would be more susceptible to that than Spain. Also, there were no large CMEs in the last few days.