Scott35, I think you are referring to GICs, or geomagnetically induced currents related to solar-flare activity. That can be a real bad problem in power transmission, for they cause DC currents to circulate from one switchyard ground grid to another. High-voltage transformers are usually wye-grounded, and DC currents of <10 amperes can fry transformer windings in fairly short order. Because current transformers are AC devices, they cannot reflect DC to be sensed by protective relays that are used for a major part of transformer protection.
Solar-flare activity is supposed to peak on an 11-year cycle, so effort and money to invest in solving the problem varies. I haven’t read anything that related the NE 14-August outage to solar activity, although there have been well-documented cases of GICs being a problem at other times in the northeast. Apparently rock content in soil determines an area’s susceptibility to the problem.
A few extra-geekey links are
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/abs_free.jsp?arNumber=141760 http://wham.phys.ucalgary.ca/satellites/html/sp_weather.html http://www.estec.esa.nl/wmwww/WMA/spweather/workshops/spw_w4/proceedings/PulkkinenPoster.pdf
