Solar Power

Sunstorms, sudden solar flares, jets of ions swirling past the earth at relativistic speeds.  They pile into the earth's geomagnetic field and make it move.  The resulting moving magnetic fields induce humungous currents into the the electric power grid, transformers melt, circuit breakers pop, and the lights go out and stay out.  This horror story made today's Wall St Journal.  Page three, not the front page. 
   Oh really?  The power grid is harder and tougher than it used to be.  Back when I was a child, lightning from ordinary summer thunder storms put the lights out on a regular basis.  That doesn't happen anymore.  Only thing that puts the lights out now-a-days is a tree falling on the wires and breaking them.  The grid is hardened against lightning bolts (no mean feat).  And, it is hardened against over-current, otherwise known as short circuits. It has to be.  Plenty of ordinary accidents will short hot circuits to ground.  The resulting currents can melt expensive and hard to replace equipment in milliseconds.  To preserve such equipment, overcurrent protection devices sense excessive current and can switch expensive alternators and transformers off line faster than short circuit currents can melt them.  This sort of equipment is composed of tons of solid iron and copper and it takes time to heat that much metal hot enough to endanger the electrical  insulation, let alone melt metal.
   Granted, there have been scary solar events in the past.  The 1859 Carrington event caused the new fangled electric telegraph wires to shower sparks into telegraph offices across the world.  Impressed the bejesus out of the operators.  We have never seen a solar storm that strong since. In 1989 the province of Quebec suffered a blackout that was blamed upon a solar storm.  However no important equipment was damaged and the lights came back on within 9 hours.