So I'm surprised to hear you say you don't think it's worth investing in shielding our major transformers. If one of these things is bound to hit us sooner or later, wouldn't we improve our odds if we erred on the side of trying to prepare the grid for it sooner?
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The odds of a Carrington-size event in the next decade are either something like 4%-6% or 12%, depending on which scientists you ask ( http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011SW000734/pdf ; http://polaris.nipr.ac.jp/~ryuho/pub0/Kataoka2013SW_CarringtonStorm.pdf ). Either of these seems uncomfortably high to me, given that Oak Ridge has judged that even a storm of the size of the one we had in 1921 would probably be catastrophic for half of the U.S. ( http://web.ornl.gov/sci/ees/etsd/pes/pubs/ferc_Meta-R-319.pdf ). Furthermore, since the stats are pretty similar every decade, it seems pretty clear that one of these major storms will eventually hit us, hopefully later rather than sooner.
So I'm surprised to hear you say you don't think it's worth investing in shielding our major transformers. If one of these things is bound to hit us sooner or later, wouldn't we improve our odds if we erred on the side of trying to prepare the grid for it sooner?
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