Silent solar
Exposure to solar storm neither excluded nor affirmatively covered by property policies, on the silent-cyber model.
On March 13, 1989, a geomagnetic storm brought down the Hydro-Québec grid and left about six million people without power for nine hours. For a plant in the province, the loss came from supplier failure, with no damage on its own site. Silent solar denotes the implicit contractual treatment of geomagnetic-storm risk, almost never excluded by name from property policies yet almost never affirmatively covered either. The exposure lives in the silence of the wordings, unpriced and unreserved, surfacing only at the claim in a dispute over interpretation. The sticking point: the real loss is an outage with no physical damage at the insured site, which is precisely what the cover is designed not to pay.
Textbook case: like silent cyber before it, silent solar calls for clarifying wordings before the event, since the three locks of physical damage, business interruption and supplier failure all work against the insured.
silent solar, unpriced solar exposure
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