March 13, 1989. 2:44 in the morning.

A storm hits the Hydro-Québec grid. Ninety seconds later, the whole thing is dark.

Six million people wake in the pre-dawn cold with no heat and no power, and stay that way for nine hours.

Natural Resources Canada still calls it the biggest geomagnetic storm of the Space Age.

Ninety seconds. That's the entire window between "everything's fine" and "the province is offline."

It can happen that fast. 

It Begins With a Belch

First, the sun flings off a coronal mass ejection—a billion tons of charged plasma, moving over a million miles an hour.

It reaches Earth in a day or two. One came off the sun over the July 4th weekend—another's lined up behind it, set to hit as soon as tomorrow.

When it slams into Earth's magnetic field, a moving magnetic field induces current in anything long and metal—pipelines, rail, and above all the high-voltage lines strung across the continent.

These geomagnetically induced currents—GICs—crawl through the grid as direct current.

The grid runs on alternating current. It's not built to carry DC. And the transformers at every substation hate it.

The current forces its way in through the transformer's ground and throws the machine out of rhythm. 

It starts running hot and spitting out electrical noise that blinds the grid's safety equipment—the sensors meant to catch trouble before it spreads.

That’s when the gear holding the system's voltage up gives out, and the power drops across the network all at once—faster than any human can react.

That's a blackout.

Expensive, frightening, and over in hours. The grid trips itself offline to survive, and when the storm passes, the lights come back. Quebec was dark for nine hours. Then the power returned.

But, here’s the problem… 

The permanent damage is quieter—and can be far bigger.

Lloyd's of London ran the numbers on the potential long-term effects of a severe solar storm. They put the total damage as high as $9.1 trillion—more than the annual output of every economy on Earth but two. 

One big reason: 

A strong enough storm can cook transformers from the inside. A big unit can limp through the storm and die weeks later—and it takes years to replace.

Frying transformers by the hundreds takes a monster: a Carrington-class storm. 

Unlikely in any given year. But "unlikely," stacked across a decade against hardware you can't replace and a grid with no slack, is a risk you position for.

A Grid With No Slack

Quebec is one way the grid dies. There are others—all live right now, stacked on top of each other in the same aging network.

Count them.

One: it was built to fail this way.

When Edison switched on the first power plant in 1882, it produced about 600 kilowatts—barely enough to run a few racks of AI chips today. 

It grew from there in a mad scramble to keep up. Utilities wired their systems together to scale faster. They optimized for speed. Resilience came dead last.

The byproduct: a vast, interlinked web where one small failure can cascade across half a continent.

Two: it's ancient.

The average piece of the transmission system is past 40 years old—running long past the life it was built for.

Three: it's being starved.

Demand is exploding. Data centers are measured in gigawatts now—Stargate targeting 10, industry plans running into the hundreds.

Supply isn't answering. New plants take years to build, and regulators made it pointless to try—capping wholesale prices near $333 per megawatt-day when their own math says $500 is the floor to justify a new one.

So they don't get built. PJM—the grid from Chicago to the Atlantic—is now 6.5 gigawatts short of its own reserve requirement, for the first time ever.

The buffer is gone. Same electric bill, less reliability behind it. 

Four: and then there's the sun.

Take that machine—brittle by design, decades past its prime, stripped of every ounce of reserve—and aim a strong enough coronal mass ejection at it.

A grid with no slack has nowhere to fail safely. 

But fear is the wrong response here—it's the opportunity. 

A fragile grid is a threat. It's also the largest forced-spending event of your lifetime. 

Don’t overthink it. 

Until next time,