Cost of Space Weather Hardening

By Sidd @ 2026-04-08T15:21 (+9)

I've been researching the potential impacts of a Carrington-level event, but am unable to find credible research describing the cost of hardening the globe against these risks. Specifically, no literature exists that describes the cost to fund an international agency or an international project to build societal resilience.

Can someone with sound methodology and sufficient qualifications explain how to either estimate this number or what this number would be?

Denkenberger🔸 @ 2026-04-08T21:23 (+2)

This has some discussion of space weather hardening costs. This has costs for EMP hardening.

Sidd @ 2026-04-09T16:22 (+1)

Thank you! I'm a big fan of your work on nuclear war resilience.

While this article is pretty good about describing what costs are imposed by solar flares, it doesn't get at the cost of hardening. Do you think there is an actual numerical estimate anywhere?

Denkenberger🔸 @ 2026-04-09T23:21 (+2)

Thanks! There's this estimate in the LW article:

Meanwhile, protecting the grid's "6,000 most critical transformers" with SolidGrounds would cost 3-4 billion dollars to the US. That's 0.3% of the 2021 infrastructure bill, recuperable within the year!