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The U.K. Just Spelled Out What a Carrington-Class Solar Storm Would Cost — and the Numbers Should Change Policy

The UK’s National Risk Register now quantifies a Carrington‑class solar storm as a trillion‑dollar threat, estimating $0.6‑$2.6 trillion in first‑year global damages and tens of billions of pounds in domestic losses. The country’s electricity sector alone underpins roughly $112 billion of GDP, and prolonged outages could cascade through finance, telecoms, water and transport. Current UK spending on space‑weather monitoring and grid hardening is a tiny fraction of the exposure, with transformer‑hardening projects costing only hundreds of millions of pounds. The analysis calls for mandatory hardening, strategic transformer reserves, GPS backup systems and sustained monitoring investment to close the gap before the next century‑scale event hits.