Electric power systems, GICs

Moderator:

TBD

Geomagnetically induced impacts on the electric power system (or any other extended conductors like railways or pipelines) are typically caused by a combined effect of rapid changes in the external geomagnetic field. The severity of events depends on the extent, duration and amplitude of such changes - and for some infrastructure elements even the repetitiveness of e.g. high amplitude spikes..

Different parts  of our man-made infrastructure will be susceptible in different ways to any given variety of imposed rapid changes in induced electric fields (as caused by variable ionospheric and/or magnetospheric currents).

One will need to characterise typical classes or types of variabilities (as e.g. high amplitudes, rapid repetitive changes, particular directions of such changes, and the like) as to determine exactly which part of any exposed infrastructure may be suffering more or less from any such classes of events., Specific warnings need to be tailored accordingly.

There is an additional role of soil, ocean or crustal conductivities, either enhancing or suppressing any such electric fields induced by the geomagnetic disturbances.

For any particular infrastructure one will therefore need to characterise the combined effect of the infrastructure itself (its detailed layout and directional structure (e.g. nodes, transformators, terminals ("ends of conductors") and directions of of long conductors) with the local ground conductivity structure (including directional gradient effects), when analysing potential impacts on the affected infrastructure itself.

This will have to be done for every region individually, and will put particular requirements on the quality of SWx predictions, as errors in the predicted timing of magnetospheric events will off-shift the geomagnetically induced currents to different regions with different ground-conductivities and potentially different vulnerabilities.

Relevant Clusters:

Variability and repetitiveness G1, H2, S3, G2b

Amplitude G1, H2, S3

 

Additional link to end-user community:

Lithospheric conditions and infrastructure details

(geographical region and network dependent)