From Wikipedia: “When the ejection reaches the Earth as an ICME (Interplanetary CME), it may disrupt the Earth’s magnetosphere, compressing it on the day side and extending the night-side magnetic tail. When the magnetosphere reconnects on the nightside, it creates trillions of watts of power which is directed back toward the Earth’s upper atmosphere. This process can cause particularly strong aurora also known as the Northern Lights, or aurora borealis (in the Northern Hemisphere), and the Southern Lights, or aurora australis (in the Southern Hemisphere). CME events, along with solar flares, can disrupt radio transmissions, cause power outages (blackouts), and cause damage to satellites and electrical transmission lines.”
Just think if we could capture a fraction of those trillions of watts.
Funny you should say that.
The earth has a metal core, covered in a layer of dielectric, and it turns in a magnetic field. That is nearly the textbook definition of a generator.
What happens when you make a generator, but you forget to put brushes down on the rotor to harvest the charge off the surface?
Arcing and Sparking. That’s how clouds develop charge, and how lightning eventually occurs.
Magnetism is another of God’s wonders. We know almost nothing about it (or gravity), except that we can observe it and manipulate it a bit. We know that electicity and magentism are related. (Current moving through a wire will create a magnetic field 90 degrees from the direction of the current)
If you increase the magnetic field around the earth, and the earth rotates through that magnetic field, then metal objects will have a current induced in them that will be slightly more than normal. If your system isn’t grounded, then that will cause a problem.
In most solid state electronics, the induced current may exceed the circuits ability to handle a current in a part of a circuit it isn’t expecting to see current. That could cause bit flipping and trigger digital states to flip (switches to come on, or go off) that would not normally happen absent of this big increase in magnetic field.
Nothing will normally ‘fry’ except in older CMOS type chips and other chips that are especially vulnerable to ‘static’ electricity. That’s ultimate what this additional magnetic intensity causes - an increase in ‘stray’ or ‘static’ charges building up on the surface of dielectrics, insulators, and pieces of circuit that aren’t supposed to see current.
One of the biggest problems with space systems is figuring out what to do with the charge that builds up on the surfaces of the craft. Some have floated the idea of a massive ground strap that is long enough to touch the surface of the atmosphere so that the current has somewhere to go. Obviously, not practical.
It’s not the only problem, of course. How do you cool systems in an airless environment? Can’t use fans, right? Gotta use ammonia and heat exchangers. There’s no air in space either, so you can’t through the heat overboard. You have to play shell games with heat, since whatever heat you create has to be transferred (it can’t be destroyed).
We have been successfully plying space for a while now. This increase in magnetic field is not going to be much of a problem.