“The exercise was held from May 8 to 9, 2024, at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, and at a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) site in Denver, Colorado.”
Article refers to a PDF of the report it’s based on:
https://www.jhuapl.edu/sites/default/files/2025-04/Space-Weather-TTX-Report-Summary-v3-FINAL.pdf
During a normal power outage, you’re right. That does keep you isolated on your own island. But in a case like this, the voltage is likely to spike to incredibly high levels on wires that aren’t meant to carry it and cause arcing and possibly fires. That’s why you want to be physically disconnected.
Got it, at that point (extremely high voltage) you’d need suppression at the panel. Which I would hope people have inline, but not expect like an LVD.
With a high enough voltage the air will ionized and the power will literally jump over many protection mechanisms. Also it can cause certain dialetrics (electrically isolating materials) to break as they all have a breaking point.
An extreme enough event can be way beyond even the biggest of tolerances of safety systems as there is some distance between where the outside end and the inside end are wired into the system and that distance is chosen with certain maximum voltages tolerances in mind which are finite and beyond those design voltages and as I said the air will just ionize becoming conductive and many isolators will just blow up.
So it makes sense that when a massive electromagnetic storm is inducing electric currents along tens or hundreds of miles long wires, the only guaranteed safe system is to not even have a cable from the grid coming into your house.
At that point, that grid connection will be the least of anyone’s worries. The storm in Quebec in… 1990? Ish. tripped breakers, and shut things down for like a day.
A storm on the scale youre talking about I am pretty sure would wipe out satellites (maybe even take them down due to atmospheric drag?), impact cables other than power like copper laid for internet and phone, etc. Grid-connected power or not you’d be severely impacted and potentially at risk.
Along with tripping breakers, induced currents can also fry some of the massive capacitors that are attached to high-voltage transmission lines. Those are expensive and not quick to replace.
Oh yeah, a large enough solar mass ejection in such a direction that it would directly hit planet Earth would be extremely bad.
The breakers at transformers in each neighborhood would surely trip before frying a house I would think.
They go whenever a tree comes down near our street anyway.
The voltages involved are more likely to cause the transformers to explode rather than just tripping the breakers.