I'll run up my credit card and don't pay the bills

You would also then have to pay attention to my disaster prep thread on social or die.

Solar flares are dangerous and we have had a few near misses. In an instant they can fry global electronics and electrical systems and turn us back into the dark ages. No vehicles will work ( except real old ones) no communications device...nothing with modern circuits. 

The government is right to anticipate this. Note the Internet originated from contemplating a similar problem...except man made...EMP bursts from nuclear weapons.

Surely you will not be selected to lead us out of our "Egypt" to the holy land.

This bhai D2 is a crazy Hawkins.

Don't get too hyped up about solar flares and its effects on the electric system. Some would argue that it is more political/business hoop la.  Remember the year 2000 bug and the $Billions we spent behind it for nothing?

We didn't spend billions on Y2K for nothing. Without the Y2K fix, many applications in various industries would not have worked correctly.

Yeah right, it worked everywhere else in the world.

You obviously do not know what you're talking about. It worked out well because companies were prepared years in advance, spent years of fixing and testing and billions of dollars behind the problem. Without these changes, many applications would not have functioned properly.

It is not fiction it is fact. I has crippled electronics before and given you are in the electrical grid management you should read up on studies that show if ever we are in the path of a flair under the proper alignment to the sun the grid is gone. It has affected the grid before. We were lucky recently when the earth's magnetic field re directed a big one. We never had a big one hitting us directly head on. Just go and look at some of the solar max shots

And that's why (bold) I tell you don't get hyped up too much.  I cannot say much about what I know.  Let's just say it will be more of a Canadian problem, if any, than for the USA.  If I find an article that I can provide I will.

It will be all our problem...globally...from handheld calculators to phones to absolutely everything that is on. We lost satellites in 2014 and since we do not have much history with flares ( having been in the electronic era for only a few solar max cycles) we do not know what to expect or the frequencies with which we are hit by CME waves. We have not built our system for them. A world without electricity means a world without technology. A few days of that and the collapse of civilization would not be contained. Our entire culture is electronic dependent. That is why we need to monitor the sun and also to protect ourselves. The sun is our life source but it can also kill us...actually it will kill us one day.

Here Stormborn read the attached.  I would not worry too much about the electric grid because major studies are undertaken and things are being done.  Satellites, and therefore communication, could be affected but we have lived without satellites before...and they even have ways of protecting satellites.

The only way to protect the grid completely is to shut it down but given the time is under 12 mins for the flare and a few days later by the CME wave. If the wave is powerful and is at the right polarity with our magnetic field we would be crushed by the plasma pulse that plummets down through the poles spreading out to the equator where it will propagate globally. We do not have an abundance of 125Kilovolt transformers so we better stockpile them since they take months to build so we can recover within a few days or to the woods foraging for kindling we go.  We need to prepare.+

You don't know what you are talking about.  I am a member of a NPCC committee that looks at this thing.  I am just a regulator, but I do talk to people directly involved in these studies.

Saw a number of reports on it a couple of years ago and also on one of those PBS shows. I will look for the documentary for you. It was recent

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylNSHAc243Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDWOqpDMAok

That attachment I posted covers all the angles.  People who do documentary are not always experts on the subject.  And by the way, even engineers are sometimes forced to write what politicians want to hear.  You have to be in the belly of the beast to understand.    

There is not going to be any catastrophic incident on the electric grid because of GMD.   If it is big enough to cause a catastrophic event on the electric grid then we might all be killed in that event so we don't have to worry. That's all I am going to say. 

those are scientists. NASA is the researcher and observer and the one who calculates the potential for damage. If they say we are in danger I know we are in danger. And then there is the physics of it. I cannot imagine a pulse of a trillion watts. That is what missed us.

One has too many examples of people concerned with the grid telling us one thing and another happened. Remember ***ushima Daiichi? they said they have every back up and it was millions to one a tsunami can take them out. Indeed it did not take them out but it flooded the cooling diesels and voila....disaster of mega proportion.

That is why one questions. We are fallible creatures and cannot calculate all possible scenarios.