Solar storm spares province of any power outages, Hydro-Québec says (2024)

The geomagnetic storm currently striking Earth did not cause any power outages in Quebec. Instead, it left its mark in the sky, while the northern lights were seen in several places in the province overnight Friday.

The solar storm did not affect the electrical grid, said Pascal Poinlane, a spokesperson for Hydro-Québec.

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In 1989, a geomagnetic storm caused a nine-hour outage on Hydro-Québec’s transmission networks.

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The electric utility has “taken several steps to improve the robustness of our transportation network” since then, Poinlane said

The current storm, which affects the entire planet, began on Friday and is the most powerful of its kind in 21 years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

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Hydro-Québec, therefore, remains “in vigilance mode. We have teams monitoring what is happening. We are looking at how geomagnetic storms influence our transmission lines,” Poinlane said.

The effects of the storm, which will last until Sunday, will be felt until Monday, says Lorne McKeen, chief of operations at the Canadian Space Weather Centre. “With all this activity coming from the sun directed toward the Earth, we can have disturbances in the ionosphere.”

These disturbances are associated with the northern lights, or the aurora borealis, McKeen explained, but also with power outages, problems with radio transmissions and failures of GPS satellites.

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A geomagnetic storm is first caused by a solar flare, explains Paul Charbonneau, a professor specializing in solar physics at the Université de Montréal. When a group of sunspots arrives on the surface of the sun, “it is a manifestation of a magnetic structure that was produced inside the sun and which emerged,” he said.

Part of this magnetic structure is then sometimes ejected toward the Earth “taking with it part of the plasma, the fluid of the sun.”

The phenomenon, which is impossible to predict, is completely benign on the Earth’s surface, because all the energy is absorbed in the upper atmosphere, Charbonneau said. Several solar flares have arrived in Earth’s atmosphere since Friday.

Northern lights could appear across the country, particularly in the south, overnight from Saturday to Sunday, according to McKeen.

The colourful display in the night skies was also seen in other countries across the planet and much farther south than usual, such as California.

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