Geomagnetically induced current heats transformers and creates harmonics that protection systems are built to notice. Sometimes the right action is to take a line or a unit offline before it is destroyed. Customers experience that as an outage and, understandably, as a utility failure.

Relays do not have a public-relations setting. They compare what they see — current, harmonics, temperature where it is measured — to a setting chosen in calmer weather. If the setting says trip, the breaker opens. From the kitchen, the refrigerator stops and nobody on the block can see the unit that was about to cook itself.

Operators are stuck between two bad headlines: a two-hour trip that protected a unit you cannot replace, or a heroic attempt to hold voltage that ends in a wrecked transformer and a two-month outage. The procedures for that choice should be public enough that a deliberate trip is not mistaken for incompetence.

The choice is worse when the storm is still building. Taking equipment off early can look like an overreaction if the aurora fades. Leaving it on can look like negligence if the unit is damaged. A written procedure, exercised, is how a control room survives both headlines.

Customers can tell the difference only if someone says so. “We took this line out to keep the transformer” is a sentence a person can repeat to a neighbor. Silence, or a vague note about system conditions, teaches people that the utility is guessing.

If your utility explains a space-weather trip in plain language, that is a sign of a grown-up control room. Save the explanation. You will want it the next time the sky is active.

Save it because the next event will come with the same rumor: that the outage was a mistake, or a cover, or a drill nobody announced. A plain explanation from the last time is a reference. It tells you what a deliberate trip sounded like when your lights were the ones that went out.