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Electrical transformer manufacturing is throttling the electrified future

• deleted 7mo ago
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• MisterTea 7mo ago
  > So how did we get to a point where one component can hold trillion-dollar industries hostage? Turns out, a quirk of history made the entire world’s electricity systems reliant on transformers. > At the end of the 19th century, when electricity was just starting to become a commercial source of energy, two businessmen fought to control its future in what came to be known as “the war of the currents.” Thomas Edison promoted the use of direct current (DC) and George Westinghouse, inventor and industrialist, was convinced that alternating current (AC) would prove more practical. > In a clash of personality, finance and some genuine technical advantages, Westinghouse won out and the world has been mostly stuck with using AC as a means of generating and transmitting electricity. Transformers are necessary to make the AC system work. This entire section is a glaring load of nonsense and needs to be removed. We had to start with AC for a variety of technical reasons, the main one being that boosting DC voltage pre-switching technology was impossible. DC cant pass through a transformer unless it is converted to some form of AC, usually in the form of PWM square waves these days. Before the invention of the mercury arc rectifier (And later valve) in 1902 you had boost DC using mechanical methods: generators. The problem there is physical, they did not have the ability to insulate the generator windings at high voltage potentials. They also had problems with DC voltages over 2000 volts on commutators [1] citing excessive arcing. Commutators are also a limiting factor in machine size as beyond several MW they dissipate too much power. So with all this the highest practical voltage for a DC grid using early electrical machinery is around 2 kV. Now imagine all that mechanical complexity on the distribution end. Meanwhile, early AC transmission was already in the tens of kilovolts: 11/22/33 kV (multiples of the early Edison 110 volt standard.) As for the whole war of currents, I feel it is vastly overstated and was more a public spectacle than serious scientific dispute. It was already known from early on that AC was the future thanks to its ability to easily be transformed to higher voltages for transmission and back again with no moving parts. The "war" was likely Edison marketing to sell off the remaining inventory less desirable DC machinery. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commutator_(electric) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commutator_(electric)
  • pseudohadamard 7mo ago
    Yup. The only thing missing from the writeup is a eulogy for the death of the rotary converter.
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  • algo_trader 7mo ago
    > practical voltage for a DC grid using early electrical machinery is around 2 kV. What is a current (pun!) practical limit? If a 100MW PV farm and a data center are separated by 1km (20 Olympic pools) - is there a way to avoid AC? I know there are future solutions [1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/07/former-tesla-exec-drew-baglinos-new-startup-is-rethinking-the-electrical-transformer/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/07/former-tesla-exec-drew-bag...
    • analog31 7mo ago
      The early limit was because high voltage DC required producing it at the generator, whereas you could produce high voltage AC by generating at a lower voltage and then stepping it up with a transformer for long distance transmission. The rules are changing because of switchmode voltage conversion, using transistors to switch the voltage at a high frequency, where the magnetics (transformers, inductors) can be much smaller and more efficient, then converting back to DC. This is how virtually all smaller power supplies have been made for years, the only question (which I don't know) being how far along we are at reaching the voltage levels of long distance transmission in this way. I'd think that hustling us towards DC with electronic voltage conversion would be a reasonable strategic goal for dealing with the transformer problem, worthy of support by a government.
      • angry_octet 7mo ago
        HVDC and UHVDC are used extensively for long distance transmission, notably for undersea cables and in China, which has made massive R&D investments in the technology in order to shift energy from West to East. Large solar, wind and hydro in the West. However, DC does not make sense for a radial power distribution network. The article is propagating nonsense.
• alexeischiopu 7mo ago
  I dug into root causing this and copper prices using Claude to gather data and visualize it. I learned a bunch. The write up with tldr at the top: https://usevawn.com/blog/copper-electrical-equipment-prices/ https://usevawn.com/blog/copper-electrical-equipment-prices/
• burnt-resistor 7mo ago
  Possibly the easiest way to bring any metropolitan area or region into the Stone Age for unknowable amounts of time is simply to destroy large, bespoke transmission (rather than distribution) transformers. Crazy people shooting out the cooling systems have done this several times. Meaningful grid security means these items need rapid, standardized, domestic production capacity and cold spares distributed offsite and ready to be deployed should anything happen to ones in use. These are critical items that must not be neglected to reactive actions disaster recovery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_County_substation_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_County_substation_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_grid_security_in_the_United_States#Washington_and_Oregon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_grid_security_in_th...
  • standeven 7mo ago
    Yet another good reason for at-home solar and storage.
    • SoftTalker 7mo ago
      Does very little to offset things like no power for hospitals, refrigerated food distribution, manufacturing of almost anything.
      • ErroneousBosh 7mo ago
        > no power for hospitals Which have days worth of backup generator power > refrigerated food distribution Do you think refrigerated trucks trail big long extension leads to a socket somewhere?
        • Nasrudith 7mo ago
          Way stations still need power to accept and refrigerate shipments. Distribution isn't just on trucks - although they could act as a small stopgap that also prevents them from making deliveries while being used as storage.
• joe_the_user 7mo ago
  Also https://archive.ph/yn2It https://archive.ph/yn2It
• hedora 7mo ago
  I can think of thousands of components that can hold trillion dollar industries hostage. I challenge you to name one that cannot and that also makes it into high school curricula or How Things Work. https://mst3k.fandom.com/wiki/A_Case_of_Spring_Fever_(short) https://mst3k.fandom.com/wiki/A_Case_of_Spring_Fever_(short) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vzKfAFsbRSk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vzKfAFsbRSk If you are not ready to lock yourself in a bunker after reading the article and watching that short, I strongly suggest you consider the inclined plane. You’d better do it now. Very few locks work in the absence of transformers, springs and inclined planes.
  • JSR_FDED 7mo ago
    This is so great!
  • NooneAtAll3 7mo ago
    why not link the original? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ttYlcrA7ys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ttYlcrA7ys
• Animats 7mo ago
  The large transformer shortage has been a problem for years. Large transformer making is a craft, where the winding supports are made of hardwood, like furniture, and wound by hand. Then the windings go into a case that's an oil tank. The build teams aren't that big - 30-50 people. The main barrier to entry is that it takes people who know how to hand-build big transformers. Utility buyers want a supplier who's going to be around half a century from now, since these things last that long. Here's a summary of the market, from a transformer maker in China.[1] Here's an AI-generated fake video of large transformer manufacturing. It's about half wrong.[2] But right enough to be worth watching. I'd like to see the prompts for this. Virginia Transformer is the US's biggest maker of large transformers.[3] They advertise their "short lead times" of two years. The margins are low, and makers don't want to go idle between orders. This is a problem with much heavy machinery. It could be built faster, but when you catch up, everybody gets laid off and the factory sits idle. There goes your profit margin. [1] https://energypowertransformer.com/2025-u-s-power-transformer-market-a-breakdown-of-the-top-10-manufacturers/ https://energypowertransformer.com/2025-u-s-power-transforme... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVVCCG0KkaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVVCCG0KkaE [3] https://www.vatransformer.com/shortest-lead-times/ https://www.vatransformer.com/shortest-lead-times/
  • HPsquared 7mo ago
    You'd think if it's causing this much of a problem, there would be money available.
    • Animats 7mo ago
      It's a generic problem with flat demand in heavy industry. Shipbuilding, bridges, nuclear reactors - when the production backlog runs down and the factory goes idle, the factory dies. So do the companies that feed specialized parts into the process.
      • angry_octet 7mo ago
        Governments keep making contracts with megacorp prime contractors, who stiff their suppliers at the first opportunity, instead of the SMEs that are essential to reliable long term capability. It's the bean counter obsession with counting delivered parts as the only basis for payment.
• joe_the_user 7mo ago
  An article that deeply buries the lede under elementary facts about electrical transmission. Transformers are made in specialized factories and use specialized components made in even more specialized factories. Expanding production requires not just immediate demand but commitment to future demand because a factory is a very expensive thing. The big thing is that increased demand often involves a demand that won't continue for a long period of time. You could see the same thing with both masks and vaccines during covid - ramping up ten factories to meet a temporary demand would be very expensive.
  • XorNot 7mo ago
    They're also heavy. The tragedy of Russia destroying the Ukrainian An-225 was it was one of the only ways to move very big grid scale transformers on short notice. This is a problem in strategic reserve territory.
  • leonidasrup 7mo ago
    Maybe few manufacturers of specialized components colluded to not increase much production capacity, even with increased demand, so that prices don't collapse.
• elihu 7mo ago
  I've been wondering for awhile about the economics of the AC vs DC grid thing. Historically, AC made a lot more sense because transformers are simple and relatively straightforward to make. But now we have amazing capabilities to handle enormous amounts of power with modern IGBTs and similar power-switching transistors. (A modern high-end EV motor controller, for instance, might be able to handle a megawatt of power. Not continuously, but still.) Is a DC-DC converter now more economically viable than an equivalent transformer? The former is more techincally complicated, but the latter is bulky and requires large quantities of expensive input materials like copper.
  • jschveibinz 7mo ago
    Still roughly 2x the cost and about 10x lower MTBF.
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    • nimish 7mo ago
      That seems like it's within striking distance of competitive, no? You get some major advantages in size and production automation. Perhaps it's ok for it to die sooner if you can get it built now and then replace it later.
      • PunchyHamster 7mo ago
        well aside from being effectively 20 times more expensive over entire operation... DC switches (as in, just a power switch) are vastly more expensive because while in AC you have 100 breaks in current a second, DC is constant so it is far harder to break. So even if you had device that could use both (not hard with SMPS, they have rectification as first step), it's still essentially " replace everything".
        • VgsIndustries 7mo ago
          The protections side is a big problem - most HVDC has circuit breakers operating on the HVAC sides of the link so going to full DC transmission presumably wouldn't eliminate that equipment.
• mikewarot 7mo ago
  The basic problem is easy to grasp, like the mess with charging cords for laptops before it, every large power transformer is a custom design. The fix would be to standardize on a much smaller number of options, and parallel them for the desired loads. Think of it as analogous to USB-C power, on the megawatt/gigawatt scale. ;-)
  • ninalanyon 7mo ago
    People already parallel transformers. That's nothing new but it's usually undesirable because the extra ancillary equipment costs make paralleling more expensive than having a single transformer of equivalent rating if you are building it all at once. But even fairly small standard specification distribution transformers are custom designs or very short runs. It's not economical to make the same design year after year because the relative prices of copper and core steel vary over time. A design made last year can be uneconomical to make this year because last year copper was relatively cheap so the designer used a lighter core and more copper to achieve the required efficiency. But if this year the copper price has gone up while the core steel price has gone down it would cost more to make the same design while the same specification could be achieved for a lower material cost by making a new design. The new design is not a new type and for distribution transformers the effort required to design it is of the order of a man hour or two, far less than the difference in material costs. For very large transformers (megavolt HVDC for instance) the situation is somewhat different and the design can take a very long time. But the opportunities for standardisation are relatively small because the quantity of units in the market is small and the manufacturers and regulators are always chasing ever greater efficiencies. A far as specifications go there is already quite a lot of standardisation. But standards evolve over time and transformers can last for over half a century so you inevitably end up with a mixture of device types Also, if one of your paralleled large power transformers fails you can't just buy an off the shelf replacement because no one keeps a stock of items that cost a million dollars each. Switching to USB-C was trivial because most of the devices involved are essentially consumables with lifetimes measured in handfuls of years ad often much less so the old stuff withers away rapidly. That is not the case with large capital projects such as national electrical networks
    • 7mo ago
• ninalanyon 7mo ago
  I think the article has things backwards. It's the shortage of stable demand that is holding back the building of transformers. A transformer factory that can make reliable, efficient, large transformers takes a long time to create because a lot of it relies on institutional memory. But it can be destroyed much more quickly by adverse market conditions and impatient investors. Remember that the product has a typical lifetime measured in decades, there are huge numbers of large power transformers that have been in near continuous operation for over half a century. When one of those fails it is often more economical to repair it than replace it with a new one but that depends on there being institutions that understand what was done fifty years ago. All this requires the opposite of modern move fast and break things investing.
  • idiotsecant 7mo ago
    We had a decent domestic transformer manufacturing ecosystem for decades, and all the major manufacturers shut down their NA plants and moved them to South America to make a little bit more money. The problem is, as it often is, the perverse incentives of the religion of quarterly earning reports. Capitalism is a fire - if you tend it well and regulate it, it serves a useful function. Let it burn out of control and it will consume everything.
    • GorbachevyChase 7mo ago
      We should learn something from the Cuban heavy transformer manufacturing enterprise. I mean I get that critical theory is that easy, but the step everyone always seem to miss is a credible explanation how a centrally managed command economy is better. There is also basically no free market mechanisms functioning in power delivery in the United States. You can’t stick a solar panel in your backyard and sell the output.
      • mschuster91 7mo ago
        > There is also basically no free market mechanisms functioning in power delivery in the United States. You can’t stick a solar panel in your backyard and sell the output. Part of that is because most of the world's power grids are extremely dumb. There's no visibility anywhere, certainly not in real time - if you're lucky, there is some sort of alert monitor for overtemperature in local transformers, but no voltage/current monitoring on an individual consumer level and no current monitoring on both sides of a transformer. Imagine a small pole transformer plus secondary-side distribution lines rated and fused for 100 kVA. Enough for a few farms. Now farm A and B each install an 80 kVAp solar panel set - and farm C, D and E consume 50 kVA each. Without the decentralized solar, the pole transformer fuse would have been triggered - but now, there's 150 kVA of consumption going on, fed by the 160 kVA solar panels, on a distribution line only supporting 100 kVA, that's now acting as a fuse. An immediate risk of damage, if not outright fire. That is why large scale solar/wind or large consumers all need permits, plannings and sometimes dedicated lines and transformers. The only other way to run a system without creating tons of new infra but still able to catch such dangerous situations is a detailed (!) network map on the utility side plus realtime monitoring of the transformer and all five farms input/output currents.
• dreamcompiler 7mo ago
  "Transformers are necessary to make the AC system work." This isn't quite wrong but the motivation is backwards: AC is necessary to make transformers work. 1. All grids need to move energy at high voltage and low current to minimize losses. 2. This requires a mechanism to step voltages up and down for transmission. 3. In 1890 the only such mechanism was the transformer. 4. Transformers only work on AC, not DC. Hence our legacy grid is AC. Nowadays we have an additional mechanism: Power electronics. Power electronics work on both AC and DC, so transformers with their huge requirements for copper and steel are no longer necessary. We need to accelerate the transition of our grid to DC because DC grids are simpler and cheaper than AC grids.
  • rcxdude 7mo ago
    Grid-scale power electronics are also extremely niche and expensive, perhaps moreso than transformers. HVDC is used where it has a significant advantage, but ease of conversion is not one of those.
  • PunchyHamster 7mo ago
    > so transformers with their huge requirements for copper and steel are no longer necessary. smelting some copper and steel and wounding it up is far, far, far, far cheaper than replacing it with power silicon(which might be smaller, but overall needs tons more of energy to produce) It will be also less reliable. Transformers deal with any overload far better and routinely run for like 50+ years
• metalman 7mo ago
  transformers are infrastructure, 100% duty cycle with a significant overload capacity that can be 3 times name plate, right there with dams and bridges, and if one developes a fault, realy bad things happen and you get a crater. There very nature makes them imensely heavy and very compact, all of the equipment used to form the parts is gargantuan, and materials to build them come in units that must be moved by house sized forklifts, consider changing a tire on such a forklift. Remember that the largest transformers travel on the heaviest rail cars, specials, these things are way heavier than anything else per ft³. Which gets us to cold,warm, or hot idle, or decomisioning, which are your choices when a huge factory has no work, hot idle means limited production, warm means some of the guys hang out and tinker with stuff, cold means, locked up,no employees but security, as decomisioning something like this has strategic considerations, or should.
• golem14 7mo ago
  I don't understand: is it illegal to buy transformers from China? It looks like they are building them like crazy, and are available for sale: E.g., https://lindahongli.en.made-in-china.com/product/SAapQolWVUYV/China-132-Kv-33kv-10-5kv-69kv-275kv-160-Mva-Power-Transformer-with-Remote-Monitoring-Control.html https://lindahongli.en.made-in-china.com/product/SAapQolWVUY... That's in the ballpark of the Heathrow transformer that blew, I think. I understand they will be not cheap, with tariffs and all, but nothing the Magnificent 7 or Heathrow could not afford. It seems to me that (as the article points out) that production facilities are pretty old and production COULD be much more automated, and products improved if there was a will. However, "Now those firms are seeing a rise in demand for transformers alongside the buildout of data centers for AI, but remain unsure if the trend will continue, says Gonzalez Isla. “Transformer companies aren’t going to open new plants only to shut it down after 10 years of business,” she says." And THAT seems to be the crucial difference here between the transformer industry and, say, NVIDIA.
  • KennyBlanken 7mo ago
    Standards/regulations that the transformers almost certainly don't meet, produced in factories that don't follow any standards or regulations, and then add in the cost and delay in shipping something like that.
    • golem14 7mo ago
      Maybe. https://evernewtransformer.com/pt/how-to-purchase-power-transformers-from-china-a-practical-guide-for-germany-and-france/ https://evernewtransformer.com/pt/how-to-purchase-power-tran... If I were to desperately need a power transformer, I'd consider going down this route in parallel to waiting for years for a "blessed" one.
    • PunchyHamster 7mo ago
      And yet somehow the biggest electric grid in the world is running on them just fine.
    • JSR_FDED 7mo ago
      China has the most sophisticated grid in the world, and is spending $100B a year on expanding and upgrading. They have a uniquely high share generated by renewables. It runs 800kV and will go higher after the upgrade. The first Small Modular Reactor will come online this year. If you think that’s all just being built in random factories without standards you’re very much mistaken.
• themafia 7mo ago
  And if we didn't have all these data centers would we still be "bottlenecked?" Or is this a case of blind greedy investment outcompeting civilian life once again? Probably given that Bloomberg feels the need to throw it's voice for the cause.
  • trekkie99 7mo ago
    One of the big complaints you’d hear a lot from some about EVs early on was the tax on the electric grid. But whenever it’s AI data centers being discussed, they’re not talked about as a tax, but that they don’t have enough power. As if the former is a detriment to humanity and the latter is a benefit that deserves more resources, when the opposite is extremely true. “Hello! I like money!” - Mr. Krabs Or perhaps there’s even some Malthusianism at play?
    • fragmede 7mo ago
      The AI companies don't have the fossil fuel companies paying for propaganda against them.
• 8bitsrule 7mo ago
  This problem threatens more than just business as usual. In the past, intense geomagnetic storms have caused big transformers to explode. Without a backup transformer supply, entire regions may face long-term power outages. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12303307/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12303307/
• 1970-01-01 7mo ago
  It's a well known bottleneck for the entire grid stability, not just the EV future. We even had a way to improve the losses but Congress decided that was too progressive and we're back to just not having enough.