Lloyd’s Report Highlights Solar Storm Threat as Emerging Risk
May 23, 2013
“A large solar storm could leave tens of millions of people in North America without electrical power for several months, if not years, potentially costing trillions of dollars,” according to Lloyd’s latest emerging risks report: “Solar Storm Risk to the North American Electric Grid.”
The report, which is being launched at the Electric Infrastructure Security Summit in London, was produced in co-operation with U.S.-based Atmospheric Environmental Research. It notes that while large geomagnetic storms are relatively rare, they “can create a massive surge of current, potentially overloading the electric grid system and damaging expensive, and critical, transformers.”
According to the report, a large solar storm in 1989 triggered the collapse of Quebec’s electrical power grid, leaving six million Canadians without power for nine hours. A smaller storm in 2003 caused blackouts in Sweden as well as damage to transformers in South Africa (transformers at that latitude were previously thought to be immune from such damage).
...The report describes the Carrington Event of 1859, which is widely regarded as the most extreme space weather event on record. Such an event today would affect between 20-40 million people in the U.S. with power cuts lasting from several weeks to one to two years. The economic costs would be “catastrophic,” according to Lloyd’s – estimated at between $0.6 and $2.6 trillion.
Fortunately, Lloyd’s says, a Carrington-level extreme geomagnetic storm is rare ...
http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2013/05/23/293060.htm
Download report:
http://www.lloyds.com/~/media/lloyds/reports/emerging%20risk%20reports/solar%20storm%20risk%20to%20the%20north%20american%20electric%20grid.pdf
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