Tag: power grids

Blackouts This Summer: 1 Billion At Risk

Mac Slavo – May 25, 2022

The ruling classes of the globe are continuing to warn that the power grids all across the globe will be stretched thin this coming summer. There will not be electricity worldwide to meet the soaring demand for more energy, which is threatening more than one billion people with rolling blackouts.

Power grids are already being stretched thin by fuel shortages, droughts and heatwaves, commodity disruptions, soaring prices due to the war in Ukraine, and the failed green energy transition where grid operators retired too many fossil fuel generation plants. Combine this all together, and a perfect storm of blackouts threatens much of the Northern Hemisphere, according to a report by ZeroHedge.

This power crisis, which is going to be affecting much of the world’s top economies, could be less than a month away when summer begins on June 21. Regions that concerned Bloomberg are Asia, Europe, and the US, where there’s not enough power to go around when cooling demand is set to surge as households crank up their air conditions to escape the sweltering heat.

The warnings of blackouts continue as people begin to get ready for their summer in the Northern Hemisphere. Henning Gloystein, an analyst at Eurasia Group, warns if major blackouts spread across the world this summer, “that could trigger some form of humanitarian crisis in terms of food and energy shortages on a scale not seen in decades.”

Since we have already been experiencing food shortages, it is hard to say what we could experience next.

https://www.shtfplan.com

Solar storms are back, threatening life on Earth as we know it

The Associated Press – May 23, 2021

A few days ago, millions of tons of super-heated gas shot off from the surface of the sun and hurtled 90 million miles toward Earth.

The eruption, called a coronal mass ejection, wasn’t particularly powerful on the space-weather scale, but when it hit the Earth’s magnetic field it triggered the strongest geomagnetic storm seen for years. There wasn’t much disruption this time — few people probably even knew it happened — but it served as a reminder the sun has woken from a yearslong slumber.

While invisible and harmless to anyone on the Earth’s surface, the geomagnetic waves unleashed by solar storms can cripple power grids, jam radio communications, bathe airline crews in dangerous levels of radiation and knock critical satellites off kilter. The sun began a new 11-year cycle last year and as it reaches its peak in 2025 the specter of powerful space weather creating havoc for humans grows, threatening chaos in a world that has become ever more reliant on technology since the last big storms hit 17 years ago. A recent study suggested hardening the grid could lead to $27 billion worth of benefits to the U.S. power industry.

“It is still remarkable to me the number of people, companies, who think space weather is Hollywood fiction,” said Caitlin Durkovich, a special assistant to President Joe Biden and senior director of resilience and response in the National Security Council, during a talk at a solar-weather conference last month.

The danger isn’t hypothetical. In 2017, a solar storm caused ham radios to turn to static just as the Category 5 Hurricane Irma was ripping through the Caribbean. In 2015, solar storms knocked out global positioning systems in the U.S. Northeast, a particular concern as self-driving cars become a reality. Airline pilots are at greater risk of developing cataracts when solar storms hit. Female crew see higher rates of miscarriages.

In March 1989, a solar storm over Quebec caused a province-wide outage that lasted nine hours, according to Hydro-Quebec’s website. A 2017 paper in the journal of the American Geophysical Union predicted blackouts caused by severe space weather could strike as much as 66% of the U.S. population, with economic losses reaching a potential $41.5 billion a day.

https://www.pennlive.com