Garry Denke has also been mentioning this in his posts for some time.
the risk to the electricity supply is because of big pylons with uninsulated aluminium cable carrying 132 000V or 400 000 V in this country.
the solar wind itself blows at the field of magnetic particles which surround the earth.
if it is strong enough, a changing magnetic field what wasn’t there before is set up next to the wires of the pylon. You may remember from high school science that a changing magnetic field next to a wire generates electricity.
but all this electricity is in addition to the 400 000V already there, and it is a pulse of direct current..
when this arrives at the National Grid to EDF transformer (which is not designed to handle this kind of extra electricity ) it can overheat quite spectacularly (like that one in Chelmsford what blew).
Also there are now way more small devices which depend on wireless comms – mobile phones, GPS etc. all this extra electricity in the air means that the wireless signals all end up in the wrong place. although in most cases these will just temporarily refuse to work until all the interference has gone, even this will have knock on economic and social effects, for instance if no one can use their mobile buisness will use the fixed telephone, internet and VOIP more and these will be overloaded. that is of course assuming there is still leccy to make things work, only BT tend to have long term backup power systems!
