this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
359 points (97.1% liked)
Technology
70199 readers
4595 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
During a normal power outage, you're right. That does keep you isolated on your own island. But in a case like this, the voltage is likely to spike to incredibly high levels on wires that aren't meant to carry it and cause arcing and possibly fires. That's why you want to be physically disconnected.
The breakers at transformers in each neighborhood would surely trip before frying a house I would think.
They go whenever a tree comes down near our street anyway.
The voltages involved are more likely to cause the transformers to explode rather than just tripping the breakers.
Got it, at that point (extremely high voltage) you'd need suppression at the panel. Which I would hope people have inline, but not expect like an LVD.
With a high enough voltage the air will ionized and the power will literally jump over many protection mechanisms. Also it can cause certain dialetrics (electrically isolating materials) to break as they all have a breaking point.
An extreme enough event can be way beyond even the biggest of tolerances of safety systems as there is some distance between where the outside end and the inside end are wired into the system and that distance is chosen with certain maximum voltages tolerances in mind which are finite and beyond those design voltages and as I said the air will just ionize becoming conductive and many isolators will just blow up.
So it makes sense that when a massive electromagnetic storm is inducing electric currents along tens or hundreds of miles long wires, the only guaranteed safe system is to not even have a cable from the grid coming into your house.
At that point, that grid connection will be the least of anyone's worries. The storm in Quebec in... 1990? Ish. tripped breakers, and shut things down for like a day.
A storm on the scale youre talking about I am pretty sure would wipe out satellites (maybe even take them down due to atmospheric drag?), impact cables other than power like copper laid for internet and phone, etc. Grid-connected power or not you'd be severely impacted and potentially at risk.
Oh yeah, a large enough solar mass ejection in such a direction that it would directly hit planet Earth would be extremely bad.