Severe Space Weather

[anonamatic]

Any electronics above 8k feet are at higher risk. Altitude really plays hell with this stuff in my experience (I've done a lot of high altitude computing). So people living in mountain states in high areas have a higher risk of outages than people at lower levels.

[Sergeant T]

I'm not anything approaching technically versed in this matter, but I read something a few years ago about step down transformers. Apparently that's the weak link in the power grid. Thing I read (Ted Lewis' Critical Infrastructure Protection book.) said that they're custom made and take several months to produce.

[anonamatic]

I'm not an expert in grid related issues. I know more about compute related issues. Things like using ECC ram get critical for instance. There get to be weird issues with nanometer distances in chip components too. Also most equipment handles faults better than doomsayers generally predict. For instance a lot of equipment might fail during an event, but if there's circuits in place to prevent over-voltage & overloads, they'll trip & the gear can recover. Without those sorts of precautions though (which are more commonly put in place due to other, more common risks to start with), equipment can permanently fail when the magic smoke escapes.