Statistical Analysis of the Correlation Between Anomalies in the Czech Electric Power Grid and Geomagnetic Activity

Abstract

Eruptive events on the Sun have an impact on the immediate surroundings of the Earth.Through induction of electric currents, they also affect Earth-bound structures such as the electric power transmission networks. Inspired by recent studies we investigate the correlation between the disturbances recorded in 12 years in the maintenance logs of the Czech electric power distributors with the geomagnetic activity represented by the K index. We find that in case of the data sets recording the disturbances on power lines at the high and very high voltage levels and disturbances on electrical substations, there is a statistically significant increase of anomaly rates in the periods of tens of days around maxima of geomagnetic activity compared to the adjacent minima of activity. There are hints that the disturbances are more pronounced shortly after the maxima than shortly before the maxima of activity. Our results provide indirect evidence that the geomagnetically induced currents may affect the occurrence rate of anomalies registered on power-grid equipment even in the midlatitude country in the middle of Europe. A follow-up study that includes the modeling of geomagnetically induced currents is needed to confirm our findings.

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

“…Recently, the functioning of electrical power networks under the influence of space weather effects was extensively studied also in Europe: in the Czech Republic (Výbošt'oková & Švanda, 2019;Švanda et al, 2020), in Italy (Tozzi et al, 2018(Tozzi et al, , 2019Piersanti et al, 2020), in Greece (Zois, 2013), in Spain (Torta et al, 2012) and in Austria (Bailey et al, 2018). Besides European studies, Schrijver et al (2014) found an increase in the number of insurance claims in United States around time of space weather events.…”

“…Threats of aging electrical equipment and components reduce their efficiency, being potentially dangerous. Overheating in electrical enclosures can shorten the life of the equipment or worse, leading to costly downtime (Výbošt'oková & Švanda, 2019).…”

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

“…Discussion of various time-delay durations can be found in Vybostokova and Svanda (2019). The visible increase in the number of failures caused by the ageing of infrastructure elements appeared precisely at the time of rapid changes of dB X dt [nT min −1 ] and dB Y dt [nT min −1 ] (Figure 9), especially visible in the second component.…”

Immediate and delayed responses of power lines and transformers in the Czech electric power grid to geomagnetic storms

“…All four above-mentioned power companies have agreed to provide us their maintenance logs. The datasets used in this study are exactly the same datasets already used in the study by Výbošt'oková & Švanda (2019). Thus, we refer the reader to Section 3.2 of this previous paper for a more detailed description of the datasets.…”

“…A first study of anomalies in the Czech power grid as a function of geomagnetic activity (defined by the K index computed from the measurements of the Earth's magnetic field at a local magnetometer station near Budkove.g., see Mayaud, 1980;McPherron & Chu, 2017) has already identified some statistically significant increases of the rate of anomalies around month-long periods of higher geomagnetic activity than nearby periods of lower activity (Výbošt'oková & Švanda, 2019). Nevertheless, the relationship between geomagnetic events and anomalies still remained somewhat loose.…”