7 ms·

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 furnitur

by 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.
  - functional_dev 7mo ago
    Agreed, it takes decades to build manufacturing expertise.. lose demand for a few years and all is lost Throwing more money at it does not work either, you need skilled workforse Same is happening in EU with shipbuilding
- mikeyouse 7mo ago
  This would be a great opportunity for the government to get involved.. Tell them to just make two of every order they have now and the government will buy the second one at whatever price the customer is paying. Put the spares in a strategic repository and sell them at “cost” to whoever wants them. Would be a much better use of a few billion dollars than some asinine Star Wars II or another half a trillion into the war maw.
  - avidiax 7mo ago
    > Put the spares in a strategic repository and sell them at “cost” to whoever wants them. That means that eventually the factory goes idle, when all the demand is serviced by the spares.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 7mo ago
      Have the government only sell these in times of crisis. They're not competitors, but vendors of last resort. For general maintenance replacement, the gov should tell prospective buyers to take a hike.
      - deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
  - ssl-3 7mo ago
    I'm not sure that this helps. The problem expressed, I think, that it is not useful to scale up production quickly (or perhaps at all), because a factory catching up on all of their orders means that the factory goes idle. Idle factories can't afford to pay wages, so they lay off some or all of the workers -- and those folks go and find different jobs. And when they leave, they take their institutional knowledge with them. So the sustainable goal is to never be idle, and the way to accomplish this is to never catch up. For an example of how idle factories can go sideways, look at the Polaroid film story: Polaroid closed. Everyone left. Some investors with a big dream eventually bought many of the physical assets that remained. But owning some manufacturing equipment didn't help them much because the institutional knowledge of producing Polaroid film had already evaporated. They had to largely re-invent the process. (And they've done a great job of that, but it's still not the same film as the OG Polaroid was.) --- So anyway, suppose the government steps in and simply artificially multiplies transformer orders x2, and pays them fairly for this doubled production. Since transformers are tangible things and we can't just spin up more AWS instances to cover demand, the immediate result is that the "short" lead time on new orders has increased from 2 years, to 4. That's not seeming to be very ideal. It seems to amplify the problem instead of resolve it. I suppose that the government could also offer safeguards that would help protect the businesses (including suppliers for parts) once they eventually catch up on orders, and that this might motivate them to scale production sooner instead of later (or never). Which -- you know -- that isn't unprecedented. As an example: The Lima Army Tank Plant, in Lima, Ohio, is place where I've spent a fair bit of quality time. It still exists and continuously has employees largely because the institutional knowledge of how to build tanks (and a few other war machines) is considered to be too important to lose. During lulls, it mostly just sits there on its expansive site, loafing along repairing stuff that comes in, and waiting for the day when things to turn bad enough that we need to start increasing our number of tanks again. It needs to keep operating (at any expense), and so with the magic of the government money-printing machine: It does. But it's one of the most actively depressing industrial sites I've ever been to; like the life just gets sucked right out of you before even getting past the entrance gate. We can certainly extend that kind of thing to transformer production. But should we?
- mr_toad 7mo ago
  > You'd think if it's causing this much of a problem, there would be money available. There’s plenty of economic solutions if companies are really that desperate. They can pay a premium to encourage more investment. They can invest themselves, or enter into partnerships, acquire their suppliers or even open their own facilities. Companies often complain about shortages, but it usually comes with the caveat ‘at the price we’re willing to pay’
frankharv 7mo ago
I worked in a machine shop of a large shipyard and 20 years ago they had CNC Winders for rebuilding armatures for Navy ships. They replaced older versions that were NC winders. So this "hand wound" story is just that. Windings going into Oil Tank? I think you mean varnish tank... After the rotating assembly is balanced they go into a protective coating tank that is a varnish.
- ggm 7mo ago
  Afaik utility scale Transformers operate in cooling tanks. Maybe that's what they meant about "afterward" "oil" covers many things. I believe the constant cycling and thermal load can make heinous PCBs.
  - Animats 7mo ago
    It's liquid cooling. Even ordinary pole transformers are immersed in oil.[1] As transformers get larger, cooling fins appear, then active pumped cooling. It's the usual cube-square scaling problem. Heat generation increases with the volume, while heat dissipation increases more slowly, with the surface area. For small animals, life is a struggle to keep warm. For large animals, life is a struggle to cool off. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_transformer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_transformer
schiffern 7mo ago
>Here's an AI-generated fake video of large transformer manufacturing. It's about half wrong.[2] But right enough to be worth watching. Which half? You probably got a lot from this video, because you know which half is wrong. I'd probably get negative knowledge from this video, because I don't. This may be a new incarnation of the "curse of knowledge," where one over-estimates the value of AI slop if they already know the subject...
- aejm 7mo ago
  This. Well said!
- vertnerd 7mo ago
  As far as I can tell, the video itself is 100% fake. A bad fake. I particularly love the part where the worker levitates a large coil of steel with his hands. The narration sounds OK, so just turn off your monitor.
- Animats 7mo ago
  That's a good point. The AI slop video is inaccurate, but entertaining. For comparison, here's the real deal - transformer winding at Virginia Transformer in the US.[1] That video provides a good sense of why these things take so long to make. All those wooden parts. All that slowly and carefully hand wound heavy wire. As they point out, if that wire can move at all, as the magnetic fields pushes and pulls on it, the vibration will, over time, wear out the transformer. It's a very fussy job to get the position and tension right, with wire firmly supported against movement in all directions. That's the difference between a lifetime of a few years and many decades. It's a boring video. Here's the whole manufacturing process at ETD in the Czech Republic.[2] This shows roughly the same sequence of steps as the fake video, but it's real. Big industrial bay with lots of transformers and overhead cranes. Sheets of lamination steel. Winding. The moving and shipping of the big transformer. All that is in both the real video and the AI slop. This is the real video from the manufacturer, and it assumes that if you're watching, you know what you're looking at. There's little narration. It's a confusing video. Here's a small open frame transformer.[3] If you've done much electrical or electronics work, you've seen one, and may have replaced or installed one. When you see the big ones being built, the process makes sense. Same concept, with a laminated core, windings, insulation, and lead wires. The big ones have the same key parts, just much bigger. But if you don't know a transformer from a transistor, the manufacturer videos are just wallpaper. And there's the problem. The AI slop version will give the average viewer a general idea of the process. The accurate videos from manufacturers require more background knowledge to comprehend. The target audience is different. The manufacturers don't make those videos for the general public. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bodj4f3L4RU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bodj4f3L4RU [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3O979En_kQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3O979En_kQ [3] https://www.mscdirect.com/product/details/20594073 https://www.mscdirect.com/product/details/20594073
JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
> Large transformer making is a craft Dumb question: why can’t we mass manufacture smaller transformers and join them up?
- whatevaa 7mo ago
  How would you join transformers?
- quickthrowman 7mo ago
  You can’t “join up transformers”, a single-phase transformer is an iron core with two sets of copper or aluminum windings around it. As far as I know, the only way to increase the volt-amp rating is more iron and copper/aluminum. Wiring them in series doesn’t increase the volt-amp rating but you can use (3) paralleled single-phase transformers for a three-phase circuit, I occasionally see a set of three medium-voltage to 480V ‘pineapple’ transformers (with visible live parts!) at the service entrance for older buildings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer#Construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer#Construction
  - lazide 7mo ago
    Eh, kinda…. If you’re really careful you could have parallel sets of series transformers feeding into a common feed. At a much larger scale, that is exactly what the grid is, actually. It just sucks dramatically from an operational perspective compared to having one correctly sized transformer.
    - quickthrowman 7mo ago
      I know you can wire transformers in series, but doesn’t that just change the voltage? As far as I understand it, if you have a 75kva 7.2kV -> 480V wired in series with a 75 kva 480V -> 208V transformer, you still only have 75 kva at the secondary of the second transformer. Could you parallel two (or more) sets of three single-phase transformers into a single circuit on the secondary side assuming they were all identical and the conductors are all the same length? I assume it’s more economical to just have one three-phase transformer for instrumentation/control and switching reasons, just wondering on a theoretical level.
mschuster91 7mo ago
> 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. I'd like some sort of shared blocklist support for YouTube and Instagram. I'm sick and tired of content thieves and AI slop farms.

by Animats 7mo ago

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.
- functional_dev 7mo ago
  Agreed, it takes decades to build manufacturing expertise.. lose demand for a few years and all is lost Throwing more money at it does not work either, you need skilled workforse Same is happening in EU with shipbuilding
mikeyouse 7mo ago
This would be a great opportunity for the government to get involved.. Tell them to just make two of every order they have now and the government will buy the second one at whatever price the customer is paying. Put the spares in a strategic repository and sell them at “cost” to whoever wants them. Would be a much better use of a few billion dollars than some asinine Star Wars II or another half a trillion into the war maw.
- avidiax 7mo ago
  > Put the spares in a strategic repository and sell them at “cost” to whoever wants them. That means that eventually the factory goes idle, when all the demand is serviced by the spares.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 7mo ago
    Have the government only sell these in times of crisis. They're not competitors, but vendors of last resort. For general maintenance replacement, the gov should tell prospective buyers to take a hike.
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
- ssl-3 7mo ago
  I'm not sure that this helps. The problem expressed, I think, that it is not useful to scale up production quickly (or perhaps at all), because a factory catching up on all of their orders means that the factory goes idle. Idle factories can't afford to pay wages, so they lay off some or all of the workers -- and those folks go and find different jobs. And when they leave, they take their institutional knowledge with them. So the sustainable goal is to never be idle, and the way to accomplish this is to never catch up. For an example of how idle factories can go sideways, look at the Polaroid film story: Polaroid closed. Everyone left. Some investors with a big dream eventually bought many of the physical assets that remained. But owning some manufacturing equipment didn't help them much because the institutional knowledge of producing Polaroid film had already evaporated. They had to largely re-invent the process. (And they've done a great job of that, but it's still not the same film as the OG Polaroid was.) --- So anyway, suppose the government steps in and simply artificially multiplies transformer orders x2, and pays them fairly for this doubled production. Since transformers are tangible things and we can't just spin up more AWS instances to cover demand, the immediate result is that the "short" lead time on new orders has increased from 2 years, to 4. That's not seeming to be very ideal. It seems to amplify the problem instead of resolve it. I suppose that the government could also offer safeguards that would help protect the businesses (including suppliers for parts) once they eventually catch up on orders, and that this might motivate them to scale production sooner instead of later (or never). Which -- you know -- that isn't unprecedented. As an example: The Lima Army Tank Plant, in Lima, Ohio, is place where I've spent a fair bit of quality time. It still exists and continuously has employees largely because the institutional knowledge of how to build tanks (and a few other war machines) is considered to be too important to lose. During lulls, it mostly just sits there on its expansive site, loafing along repairing stuff that comes in, and waiting for the day when things to turn bad enough that we need to start increasing our number of tanks again. It needs to keep operating (at any expense), and so with the magic of the government money-printing machine: It does. But it's one of the most actively depressing industrial sites I've ever been to; like the life just gets sucked right out of you before even getting past the entrance gate. We can certainly extend that kind of thing to transformer production. But should we?
mr_toad 7mo ago
> You'd think if it's causing this much of a problem, there would be money available. There’s plenty of economic solutions if companies are really that desperate. They can pay a premium to encourage more investment. They can invest themselves, or enter into partnerships, acquire their suppliers or even open their own facilities. Companies often complain about shortages, but it usually comes with the caveat ‘at the price we’re willing to pay’

frankharv 7mo ago

I worked in a machine shop of a large shipyard and 20 years ago they had CNC Winders for rebuilding armatures for Navy ships. They replaced older versions that were NC winders. So this "hand wound" story is just that. Windings going into Oil Tank? I think you mean varnish tank... After the rotating assembly is balanced they go into a protective coating tank that is a varnish.

ggm 7mo ago
Afaik utility scale Transformers operate in cooling tanks. Maybe that's what they meant about "afterward" "oil" covers many things. I believe the constant cycling and thermal load can make heinous PCBs.
- Animats 7mo ago
  It's liquid cooling. Even ordinary pole transformers are immersed in oil.[1] As transformers get larger, cooling fins appear, then active pumped cooling. It's the usual cube-square scaling problem. Heat generation increases with the volume, while heat dissipation increases more slowly, with the surface area. For small animals, life is a struggle to keep warm. For large animals, life is a struggle to cool off. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_transformer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_transformer

schiffern 7mo ago

>Here's an AI-generated fake video of large transformer manufacturing. It's about half wrong.[2] But right enough to be worth watching. Which half? You probably got a lot from this video, because you know which half is wrong. I'd probably get negative knowledge from this video, because I don't. This may be a new incarnation of the "curse of knowledge," where one over-estimates the value of AI slop if they already know the subject...

aejm 7mo ago
This. Well said!
vertnerd 7mo ago
As far as I can tell, the video itself is 100% fake. A bad fake. I particularly love the part where the worker levitates a large coil of steel with his hands. The narration sounds OK, so just turn off your monitor.
Animats 7mo ago
That's a good point. The AI slop video is inaccurate, but entertaining. For comparison, here's the real deal - transformer winding at Virginia Transformer in the US.[1] That video provides a good sense of why these things take so long to make. All those wooden parts. All that slowly and carefully hand wound heavy wire. As they point out, if that wire can move at all, as the magnetic fields pushes and pulls on it, the vibration will, over time, wear out the transformer. It's a very fussy job to get the position and tension right, with wire firmly supported against movement in all directions. That's the difference between a lifetime of a few years and many decades. It's a boring video. Here's the whole manufacturing process at ETD in the Czech Republic.[2] This shows roughly the same sequence of steps as the fake video, but it's real. Big industrial bay with lots of transformers and overhead cranes. Sheets of lamination steel. Winding. The moving and shipping of the big transformer. All that is in both the real video and the AI slop. This is the real video from the manufacturer, and it assumes that if you're watching, you know what you're looking at. There's little narration. It's a confusing video. Here's a small open frame transformer.[3] If you've done much electrical or electronics work, you've seen one, and may have replaced or installed one. When you see the big ones being built, the process makes sense. Same concept, with a laminated core, windings, insulation, and lead wires. The big ones have the same key parts, just much bigger. But if you don't know a transformer from a transistor, the manufacturer videos are just wallpaper. And there's the problem. The AI slop version will give the average viewer a general idea of the process. The accurate videos from manufacturers require more background knowledge to comprehend. The target audience is different. The manufacturers don't make those videos for the general public. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bodj4f3L4RU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bodj4f3L4RU [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3O979En_kQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3O979En_kQ [3] https://www.mscdirect.com/product/details/20594073 https://www.mscdirect.com/product/details/20594073

JumpCrisscross 7mo ago

> Large transformer making is a craft Dumb question: why can’t we mass manufacture smaller transformers and join them up?

whatevaa 7mo ago
How would you join transformers?
quickthrowman 7mo ago
You can’t “join up transformers”, a single-phase transformer is an iron core with two sets of copper or aluminum windings around it. As far as I know, the only way to increase the volt-amp rating is more iron and copper/aluminum. Wiring them in series doesn’t increase the volt-amp rating but you can use (3) paralleled single-phase transformers for a three-phase circuit, I occasionally see a set of three medium-voltage to 480V ‘pineapple’ transformers (with visible live parts!) at the service entrance for older buildings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer#Construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer#Construction
- lazide 7mo ago
  Eh, kinda…. If you’re really careful you could have parallel sets of series transformers feeding into a common feed. At a much larger scale, that is exactly what the grid is, actually. It just sucks dramatically from an operational perspective compared to having one correctly sized transformer.
  - quickthrowman 7mo ago
    I know you can wire transformers in series, but doesn’t that just change the voltage? As far as I understand it, if you have a 75kva 7.2kV -> 480V wired in series with a 75 kva 480V -> 208V transformer, you still only have 75 kva at the secondary of the second transformer. Could you parallel two (or more) sets of three single-phase transformers into a single circuit on the secondary side assuming they were all identical and the conductors are all the same length? I assume it’s more economical to just have one three-phase transformer for instrumentation/control and switching reasons, just wondering on a theoretical level.

mschuster91 7mo ago

> 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. I'd like some sort of shared blocklist support for YouTube and Instagram. I'm sick and tired of content thieves and AI slop farms.