Does time series analysis confirms the relationship between space weather effects and the failures of electrical grids in South Poland?

Abstract

Nowadays, when the global and national industry is addicted from various electrical and electronic equipment at a very high level, it is of a special interest to understand the possible origins of the interruptions in the electricity supply. Failures in ground-based electrical and electronic systems, or disturbances of satellites operation caused by influential magnetic storms initiated by the changeable Sun can have a high economic impact on the industry. These strong magnetic storms are triggered by solar-driven disturbances in interplanetary space. Studies of these phenomena have gained a special attention since the incident that had occurred in northern Canada in March 1989. During this event the work of the hydroelectric plant in the region of Quebec was blocked for long, winter hours and many citizens of this region of Canada suffered from a blackout. Analysis performed in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory showed that if that blackout have had taken place in the USA then costs generated only by a not supplied electricity could even reach 6 billion USD. In our paper, we apply time series and statistical analysis tools, i.e. superposed epoch analysis and Wilcoxon Matched Pairs Test, for a large set of data, among them: 4625 failures of electrical grids in southern Poland in 2010, from the total number of 25,616, and 10,656 in the first seven months of 2014, from the total number of 30,155. We investigate only those failures which might be connected with the above described effects. We analyze data of breakdowns with unidentified reasons, as well as failures connected to the aging and electronic devices breakdowns, which occurred during the periods of an increased geomagnetic activity. Based on the data from The Institute of Meteorology and Water Management-National Research Institute we eliminate from the consideration those failures which had meteorological grounds. Our analysis shows the usefulness of these mathematical tools in such a vital for the global and national industry issue, as well, that powerful phenomena of solar origin, somewhat disturbed in 2010 and January-July 2014 the electrical grids productivity in southern Poland.

Evaluating the relationship between strong geomagnetic storms and electric grid failures in Poland using the geoelectric field as a GIC proxy

“…2.1, details in the Table 1). Because of various delays between geomagnetic disturbances and transmission line failures appearance described in the literature (e.g., Zois, 2013;Gil et al, 2019Gil et al, , 2020aŠvanda et al, 2020), we considered here data sets where EGFs are: zero, one, two, and three days delayed in relation to the heliospheric and geomagnetic parameters. We compared our results with computations for an undisturbed period at the beginning of 2010 (control data set).…”

“…We utilize around half of the million transmission line/network operator logs about electrical grid failures (EGFs), starting from January 2010 to July 2014. EGFs causes were aggregated into six general groups denoted by A-F (details in Gil et al, 2019). Comparable categorization was used by Zois (2013).…”

“…Liemohn et al (2008) explored an occurrence time or magnetic storms strength as their features. Gil et al (2019) showed an increase in the superposed averaged number of EGF appearing around one day after the fast halo coronal mass ejection (CME) occurrence, on the day of sudden storm commencement, as well as around zero-day or the day after when the daily maximal Kp geomagnetic index value was greater or equal to 5.…”

The Solar Event of 14 – 15 July 2012 and Its Geoeffectiveness

“…The overall TG system includes, among others, 11 143 km of high voltage (HV) lines, 487 HV/MV stations and 58 611 transformers (e.g. Gil et al, 2019). In this article, we considered data from the region of Poland, which is covered by radial grids with a single power supply by TG.…”

Signs of geoeffective space weather events in cosmic rays during the first half of the solar cycle 24

“…Kudela 2009; Gopalswamy 2016; Pulkkinen 2017, and references therein). There are signatures that solar storms evolving to geomagnetic storms affect transmission lines in Poland (Gil et al 2019(Gil et al , 2020a.…”