Economic Cost of Solar Activity

[IDNeon]

I'd like to discuss the economic costs of solar activity; so far when google-searching all I can find is a bombastic article from 2017 bounced around 1000 times by every "social media" platform that suggests 10s of Billions of dollars of damages could happen if a huge CME blasted the Earth and fried the power grids.

But, I want to know actual costs. For instance; satellites have to adjust and correct orbits.

Transformers do fail. Do we have an estimate how much MORE transformers need to be replaced during solar maximums than solar minimums?

SpaceX "Starlink" now has a massive constellation in orbit, what are their expected costs due to large solar storms that interrupt RF, command and control, cause corrective burns, dislodge satellites from their tolerances for functionality, and outright destroys member-satellites?

I feel like this is an industry-cost in the $billions already without the need for a massive CME doing anything more fantastical? And as we get more real-time imagery from cubesat constellations; what are those costs?

I already know that near-real time satellite feed works with "Ai" to scan images of oil-tanks and oil-farms to have a near-real time estimate of global oil inventories. Gone are the days of waiting for EIA and IEA crude-draws and gasoline draws for the most saavy oil-trading firms. They use these satellite constellations to make decisions now.

Just like knowing whether or not a ship was delayed and would delay delivery of cargo was a tradeable event in the 1980s. AIN and satellite positioning of ships "democratized" that trading edge.

So I am very interested in the economic costs of solar activity.
Thanks!

PS - it goes without saying that if this site (or any forum) could start connecting the hobby and discipline of solar activity to economic cost then it can help explain to Corporate managers and Senior managers how solar weather can be used to estimate costs.

Since solar cycles are 11 years, with a steep front-end acceleration averaging 4 years into the solar maximum, these costs are strategic; not reactionary. Like building and maintaining an IT infrastructure needs 5 years lead-time and lifecycle; I'm sure only the most cutting-edge of businesses figure for solar activity costs. I'm sure PG&E which has killed something like 1,000 people in the last 5 years from decaying-infrastructure related costs are DEFINITELY NOT accounting for the solar cycle.

But I'm willing to bet that the cost in extra-transformers, extra infrastructure, etc; is in the $billions just for PG&E alone (over each cycle). 

EDIT -

List of star of min/max cycles for the Sun:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_cycles

Some ideas for areas of costs that are especially sensitive to Solar Weather:

• Deep space Satellites
• LEO Satellites
• Communications (Space)
• Communications (Ground)
• Power Grid Infrastructure
• Hospital imaging equipment? (MRIs?)
• Data Centers?
• Airports and navigation of aircraft that are satellite and GPS based systems.
  • https://www.southernavionics.com/blog/why-is-the-faa-decommissioning-ndbs#:~:text=In the US%2C the FAA,will be removed from service.
  • US intends to keep ILS backups at major airports at reduced maintenance (source: my friend); the idea is there's too many airports back east with expensive-to-maintain infrastructure. During a Geomagnetic storm aircraft would be redirected to these major airports if instrumented flight conditions also apply.
• Pipelines are corroded by geomagnetic induced currents:
  • https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1464191700000271
• Oil Refinery fires correlated to Solar Flares?
  • https://www.hud.gov/sites/documents/PETROLEUM.PDF
    • Building off the concept that Geomagnetic storms cause currents to build up in oil pipelines, where are there more pipes filled with petroleum and natural gas than petroleum refineries? Turns out that at a glance oil refinery fires do coincide with solar maximums.
      • 1980, 1990, still looking for data on "2000" and "2014".
    • The idea here would be that solar maximums cause larger wear-and-tear on the facilities than engineers would otherwise predict; leading to pipe failures. I haven't conducted a study on this but it would be worth noting.
• Wall Street and other GPS-high-precision-time sensitive infrastructure (encryption devices or server syncs).
• Autonomous driving relying upon GPS tracking.

Maybe someone can expand on some of those possibilities and what they know about how sensitive they are to degradation?

Edited March 19 by IDNeon

[Sam Warfel]

As you conduct your research, make sure to stick to reliable information, and not the pseudoscience or alarmist sensationalism that often propagates on this subject.

[IDNeon]

24 minutes ago, Sam Warfel said:

As you conduct your research, make sure to stick to reliable information, and not the pseudoscience or alarmist sensationalism that often propagates on this subject.

Noted; I'm actually interested in the monetary value of it so it'll be hard to drift into "pseudoscience". Maybe as we approach the more new tech like MRIs, however, where the data is very limited, it may reach some fantastical extremes.

I'll continue to edit the list at the bottom; I just found my FIRST monetary "claim" on airlines. In 2003 Halloween event redirected flights due to radiation at cruising altitude over polar routes cost about $10,000 - $100,000 per flight redirected.

Also the GPS landing guidance was down for 8 hours. In 2003 that was less of an issue as VOR and NDB were still common. An interesting cost attribution would be how much ground based redundancy must be maintained to ensure aircraft can operate during a severe geomagnetic storm. See above; but the US FAA is basically eliminating ALL but the GPS systems for navigation. Thus flights will become very sensitive to solar weather.

Edited March 18 by IDNeon

[hamateur 1953]

46 minutes ago, IDNeon said:

Noted; I'm actually interested in the monetary value of it so it'll be hard to drift into "pseudoscience". Maybe as we approach the more new tech like MRIs, however, where the data is very limited, it may reach some fantastical extremes.

I'll continue to edit the list at the bottom; I just found my FIRST monetary "claim" on airlines. In 2003 Halloween event redirected flights due to radiation at cruising altitude over polar routes cost about $10,000 - $100,000 per flight redirected.

Also the GPS landing guidance was down for 8 hours. In 2003 that was less of an issue as VOR and NDB were still common. An interesting cost attribution would be how much ground based redundancy must be maintained to ensure aircraft can operate during a severe geomagnetic storm. See above; but the US FAA is basically eliminating ALL but the GPS systems for navigation. Thus flights will become very sensitive to solar weather.

May I ask: Are you a pilot or familiar with navigational backup systems that are always employed inflight?  Mike 

[IDNeon]

9 minutes ago, hamateur 1953 said:

May I ask: Are you a pilot or familiar with navigational backup systems that are always employed inflight?  Mike 

I'm generally familiar with the backups but I direct attention to the FAA desire to do away with a lot of infrastructure. I'm no expert on the Ground Based systems or backups so if you have something specifically in mind want to expand upon them? I'm just trying to list out possible ideas - not say these ideas are where the costs and vulnerabilities really are.

[hamateur 1953]

1 hour ago, IDNeon said:

I'm generally familiar with the backups but I direct attention to the FAA desire to do away with a lot of infrastructure. I'm no expert on the Ground Based systems or backups so if you have something specifically in mind want to expand upon them? I'm just trying to list out possible ideas - not say these ideas are where the costs and vulnerabilities really are.

Ok. I wasn’t sure what your motivation might be there.  Thank you for clarifying it. Mike.    
Edit:  I wouldn’t worry too much about our sun expiring or destroying anything here btw. It provides us with great entertainment value. Aurora Borealis beats Netflix 10/1 imho.  

Edited March 19 by hamateur 1953

[IDNeon]

16 minutes ago, hamateur 1953 said:

Ok. I wasn’t sure what your motivation might be there.  Thank you for clarifying it. Mike. 

Oh ok; I'm an enthusiast but not a professional pilot. My understanding of the FAA (as I overheard also from a pilot friend of mine when probing about VOR) was that knowing how these work will no longer matter much as most of the airports are being required to go GPS-only. I could be wrong about that; but now that I'm getting into Space Weather it would seem that we are removing a less-Solar-sensitive backup and leaving only a solar-sensitive instrumentation in its place.

I'm not necessarily making a comment on the wisdom of this but definitely intrigued on how sensitive airports will become to space weather if I understand this implementation correctly.

The idea that clocks are set by GPS is also fascinating; since in my varied career path I've landed in IT and Cybersecurity Administration. Time synchronization is an important part of authentication. This was less true 10 years ago. 10 years ago the iPhone was relatively new, SpaceX was a novelty; Starlink was barely born, self-driving cars didn't exist, Ai wasn't relying upon Exa FLOPs of compute; and Wall Street had barely scratched the surface of time-synchronous high frequency trading.

A lot has changed in a solar cycle; and a lot more will continue to change.

So airports popped into my head, but also things like the oil refineries come to mind; again just a cursorily glance but I wonder if we pull up a global record of refinery fires and chemical spills if we'll see a frequency matching solar cycles given that it's a known problem that oil pipes in the ground corrode faster with higher solar activity?

So many interesting paths to make Solar Weather relevant to cost!

[hamateur 1953]

31 minutes ago, IDNeon said:

Oh ok; I'm an enthusiast but not a professional pilot. My understanding of the FAA (as I overheard also from a pilot friend of mine when probing about VOR) was that knowing how these work will no longer matter much as most of the airports are being required to go GPS-only. I could be wrong about that; but now that I'm getting into Space Weather it would seem that we are removing a less-Solar-sensitive backup and leaving only a solar-sensitive instrumentation in its place.

I'm not necessarily making a comment on the wisdom of this but definitely intrigued on how sensitive airports will become to space weather if I understand this implementation correctly.

The idea that clocks are set by GPS is also fascinating; since in my varied career path I've landed in IT and Cybersecurity Administration. Time synchronization is an important part of authentication. This was less true 10 years ago. 10 years ago the iPhone was relatively new, SpaceX was a novelty; Starlink was barely born, self-driving cars didn't exist, Ai wasn't relying upon Exa FLOPs of compute; and Wall Street had barely scratched the surface of time-synchronous high frequency trading.

A lot has changed in a solar cycle; and a lot more will continue to change.

So airports popped into my head, but also things like the oil refineries come to mind; again just a cursorily glance but I wonder if we pull up a global record of refinery fires and chemical spills if we'll see a frequency matching solar cycles given that it's a known problem that oil pipes in the ground corrode faster with higher solar activity?

So many interesting paths to make Solar Weather relevant to cost!

Wow. Ok then. I’m a mere individual interested in solar activity as it relates to Amateur Radio and of course Aurora. And arcane at that.  🤣. Adios. Mike. 

[Christopher Shriver]

15 hours ago, IDNeon said:

I'm not necessarily making a comment on the wisdom of this but definitely intrigued on how sensitive airports will become to space weather if I understand this implementation correctly.

You are not understanding the fundamentals of space weather and its impact on infrastructure, and we're not understanding the nuances of running an airport. You're much better off taking this inquiry to aviation specialists or even the FAA. Such a question is several layers of legitimate expertise removed from a viable answer on this one, but I'll chip in my two cents and say that GPS presents other vulnerabilities, and should have redundancy to account for technical difficulty.

 

As for what that redundancy should be: this far away from what my interests and hobbies can confidently suggest, as I tend to "worry" more about radiation exposure than the vacation days being cut at my local airport.

[helios]

Regarding transformers:
They don't regularly blow up (as it can be prevented)
I think in history there only 2 documented incidents, one was the 1989 Hydro-Quebec incident. And 2003 in Sweden, although I'm not sure about that.

Starlinks RF links are probably not affected. The problem with GPS is that solar flares affect the time of flight of the electromagnetic wave within the ionosphere. For GPS operation it's critical to know the time of flight. For starlink this doesn't matter.

Common space weather is not an issue I would say, as technology can be designed to be resilient. It's probably hard to get a number how much that costs.
 

Edited March 19 by helios

[IDNeon]

5 hours ago, Christopher Shriver said:

You are not understanding the fundamentals of space weather and its impact on infrastructure, and we're not understanding the nuances of running an airport. You're much better off taking this inquiry to aviation specialists or even the FAA. Such a question is several layers of legitimate expertise removed from a viable answer on this one, but I'll chip in my two cents and say that GPS presents other vulnerabilities, and should have redundancy to account for technical difficulty.

 

As for what that redundancy should be: this far away from what my interests and hobbies can confidently suggest, as I tend to "worry" more about radiation exposure than the vacation days being cut at my local airport.

That's because in the last Solar Maximum airport GPS was a novelty enjoyed as a luxury; it was not yet the sole landing approach for most airports.

https://www.space.com/mild-solar-storms-threat-gps-satellites

There's a signal propagation delay directly due to the ionosphere:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8515792

Propagation delay is *DIRECTLY* affected by electron flux in ionosphere; which is itself directly affected by solar activity.

https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog862/node/1715

Thus most GPS systems are degraded to sub 7meter accuracy required by the FAA and ICAO at all times:

https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ato/service_units/techops/navservices/gnss/gps/howitworks

Soooooooo

While I welcome the challenge; my point still stands that the higher-reliance on GPS since the last Solar Maximum means that there will be a higher cost associated to solar activity than before; whether or not that cost is paid for by cost-savings in reduced Ground Based backups is an interesting question.

There's probably a lot of money to be made in developing enhanced error correction in GPS with real-time solar activity data and ionosphere measurements.

Edited March 19 by IDNeon

[Christopher Shriver]

8 hours ago, IDNeon said:

While I welcome the challenge; my point still stands that the higher-reliance on GPS since the last Solar Maximum means that there will be a higher cost associated to solar activity than before; whether or not that cost is paid for by cost-savings in reduced Ground Based backups is an interesting question.

I again believe the specificity of the subject matter here is not forthcoming enough of the premise on which it stands, as countless industries rely on space-faring technology. There is no emergent cost, just a regular, assumed increase as inflation and a higher reliance upon satellite technology(modernization in most cases) means we have more electromagnetically vulnerable infrastructure. We are forced to rely upon regulations and congressional proceedings on these matters to ensure the safeguarding of operations reliant upon satellite or other telecommunication. This is divergent from a topic about the weather itself to quite a significant degree, and while I'm okay with rhetorical exercises, I feel this one is a misread of the community's shared knowledge/expertise.

[Pegasus51]

As soon as our "national security" faction can reliably predict short term major solar events and related strategic advantages of the outcomes, the "radiation exposure" factor to which Christopher Shriver pointed, may be produced from an entirely different dark-playbook cause/effect relationship... and of course, if not yet currently ongoing, there might be funding available for an outcome study similar to which you've sketched (although your sphere of associated economic costs will probably take on a significantly greater dimension).  just a fictional 2 cent divergence

[silverstingray]

I can’t speak for every gas & oil plant, but the one I worked at many years ago, had in place mitigations for GIC’s in the form of rods in the ground made from materials that would “take the damage” from GIC’s so the pipes didn’t. (Think of the similar technique of pest controllers placing very appetising bits of wood in the ground that they can monitor regularly to see if they’ve been munched on by termites, & therefore have a heads up on when to treat for termites, instead of waiting for signs that they’ve munched on a house). 
 

I can’t really expound on that, because it was something mentioned in my initial training & the memory of it was triggered by the questions you posed. 
 

As for pipe corrosion being bad enough to cause fires during a solar storm, I find that implausible, due to the pipes being “pigged” on a regular basis. Pigging is placing a device known as a pig, (because it squeals as it’s pushed down the pipe) which is basically a cylinder with a hard but slightly flexible disk at each end, into the pipe at the upstream end, and then pushed down the pipe to scrape crud off of the walls of the pipe. They then put a smart pig in behind it, which has electronics in it, which then records things like pipe thickness & distance as it is pushed down the pipe. They are then removed at the downstream end, where the smart pig is then taken away to have the data it recorded downloaded and analysed by engineers. Any corrosion noted, is then dealt with before it can become an issue. 
 

Also, my understanding of GIC’s are that they are caused by very long lengths of conductive material- as in something that stretches on for miles- so the pipework at a gas & oil plant/refinery is all in a very condensed area. It would only be the pipes stretching across the country that it might be problematic, and only if they’re headed in the right direction (as in north/south - east/west, etc).