Protecting AI leadership requires more than building data centers. It also depends on securing the power grid against space weather threats. To win the artificial intelligence (AI ) race—America is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers—facilities that demand pristine, “clean” electrical power for sensitive equipment. Yet an invisible threat from the sun can turn those massive investments into costly liabilities for the United States and hand China the upper hand in this global competition. The threat is insidious and potentially inevitable . Solar storms hurl charged particles at Earth, disturbing our planet’s magnetic field and inducing powerful currents in the Earth’s crust. These “ground-induced…Open
Northern lights could be seen further south than usual with the expected arrival of three coronal mass ejections, according to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center.
With no industry pushback, regulators have a clear path to incentivize the deployment of proven technologies that can mitigate billions in annual losses and strengthen grid resilience. In our previous article, “How to Prevent the Inevitable Collapse of the US Power Grid,” we warned of the very real risks to America’s electric grid from Ground-Induced Currents (GICs) and outlined a formal complaint we filed with the grid’s federal regulator—the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC )—urging protection against this very real threat. We also highlighted the roughly $10 billion in annual economic losses from GIC-induced harmonics from routine, low-level solar storms and the availability of a proven, low-cost GIC-blocking…Open