Not sure that I can speak to everything, but I did take a course specifically on space weather + its impacts on Earth and have some context I can maybe share. For your first point, you are correct it is a national security concern. There are standards already in place that aim to address/mitigate potential disruptions from solar storms/ space weather, but the concern is/would be if these standards are sufficient for an extreme event like Carrington or this 1840s example. From a national security perspective, it's also not a risk that comes from an adversary, it's not something Russia/China/Iran/[insert country] can do to us, it's just an environmental consideration, and could happen to anyone (and if any one country is effected in a significant want, it's likely that others would be facing some consequences of the storm as well - especially w.r.t. satellites). From a strategy perspective, it's similar to if an earthquake destroyed the 3 gorges dam - it's obviously a risk but it's categorized a bit differently. It's more about how quickly can you re-establish normal operations rather than how do you fully prevent it. Obviously mitigation is part of that, but it changes where it gets prioritized.

And to segue into your later points, the reason it's unknown if the current standards would be sufficient is because these sort of events, and how they interact with a continent-sized electrical/ transmission systems (the grid), is a pretty complex problem. It's also one that we can't exactly test in a lab or controlled environment beforehand with a super high degree of confidence given the scale that the phenomenon takes place at (the whole planet). EMI testing that occurs for most tech products today isn't super focussed on the currents induced by a solar storm, which are low frequency/quasi-DC/much less predictable (the effects vary geographically and in time-scales/patterns that "typical" EMI/EMC does not).

Some googling lead me to a NOAA doc that says GIC's "quasi-DC ... currents flow through transmission lines and enter/exit the power grid through grounded transformer neutrals" which to me reads that simply having a neutral line isn't sufficient, but I'm not an EE and could be misunderstanding what you're saying and what this doc is speaking to.

The good news is that events like this are relatively rare, confined (generally) to certain parts of the 11-year solar cycle.

▲

LargoLasskhyfv 25 minutes ago | parent [-]

> From a national security perspective, it's also not a risk that comes from an adversary, it's not something Russia/China/Iran/[insert country] can do to us...

Are you sure about that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse

https://jsis.washington.edu/news/chinas-high-altitude-electr...

▲

its_ethan 7 minutes ago | parent [-]

That's a valid point. I guess in my mind an EMP is an act of aggression that has viable ways of being stopped (as opposed to mitigated) whereas a solar storm is agnostic to anything happening on Earth. Even if the mechanism is similar, they are different problems with different solutions.

I believe the US already tracks (or attempts to track) anything resembling a missile headed our way, and there are systems that can take these down before they detonate and cause problems. You can't exactly "stop" a solar flare from hitting Earth. Additionally, we can also use diplomacy to create the conditions where China (or anyone else) won't want to EMP us (or at least won't benefit from doing it, even if they do want to), but we can't do that with the Sun.

And that's where my point on prioritization comes into play. We're more likely to invest in technology like Israel's Iron Dome to prevent an EMP from another nation than we would a full scale re-build of the grid to mitigate what amounts to an act of God from the sun.

	▲	Jtsummers 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		If an enemy nation wanted to conduct an EMP attack, they wouldn't need to do it with an ICBM that we'd be able to identify as such. Getting an object into LEO would not, on its own, stand out, and would provide an avenue for attack (or the threat of an attack) that would not be detectable in the same way as an ICBM launch. Of course, the harm to their own systems would be substantial as well given that it would have a huge impact on satellites in orbit, not just systems on the ground.