Wow! Read it!-----The CME Risk to American Infrastructure - Watts Up With That?

The sun is both friend and foe. - The Grid - R. Richard Geddes Sol Gruner

Occasionally a violent solar flare, technically called a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), erupts from the sun’s surface...

Those jets of magnetized plasma (think of lightning, a common example of a plasma) travel at speeds ranging from 500,000 to nearly 7 million miles per hour. They sometimes head directly to Earth. 

The resulting “geomagnetic storms” can be incredibly destructive to our infrastructure. 

• The induced currents produced by a CME can permanently destroy the high-voltage transformers intrinsic to high voltage electrical transmission lines, thereby resulting in cascading blackouts. 
• Recovery is a lengthy process because the transformers are custom-built items that have replacement times of months to years.

A catastrophic CME is not wild-eyed speculation...

How destructive could a geomagnetic storm be today, given America’s near-total dependence on the electrical grid?...

Importantly, the question is not whether a large CME will strike, but rather when. 

The likelihood that a Carrington-level event will strike the Earth in any given year is estimated to be about 1%...

Today it is possible to detect a CME within minutes of its formation via solar observational satellites. 

A CME typically takes between 15 hours and 3 to 5 days to reach Earth depending on its speed. 

This affords time to implement mitigating steps, if they have been prepared in advance...
These mitigations have been known for well over a decade, yet few have been implemented. 

Why has so little been done to avoid this ticking time bomb?...