[HN Gopher] Electrical Transformer Manufacturing Is Throttling t...
___________________________________________________________________
Electrical Transformer Manufacturing Is Throttling the Electrified
Future
Author : toomuchtodo
Score : 50 points
Date : 2026-04-01 18:47 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://archive.today/yn2It
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Also https://archive.ph/yn2It
| MisterTea wrote:
| > 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)
| pseudohadamard wrote:
| Yup. The only thing missing from the writeup is a eulogy for
| the death of the rotary converter.
| algo_trader wrote:
| > 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-
| bag...
| analog31 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lstodd wrote:
| That link talks about 5MW 35kv AC / 800v DC converters..
| completely different thing, they try to sell a single-source
| PV invertor-to-35KV AC solution first, then 35KV to 800V DC
| second, to have a sorta complete solution of PV-to-
| datacenter. And it's only 5MW. And only 35KV AC. For moving
| 100MW even over a few km you would need 110KV at least. I
| think. An overhead wire can handle about 600A of current,
| that's the physical limit and the reason for kilovolts there.
|
| Consider also that there is nothing existing in transmission
| and switching gear certified for HVDC it being rare one-off
| projects so far, while AC is ubiquitious, more-or-less mass-
| produced and many people are trained in its maintenance.
| nerdralph wrote:
| HVDC transmission over 100kV lines are common now.
| https://www.emeranl.com/maritime-link/overview
| skeletoncrew2 wrote:
| Yes this is the most glaring issue. There also two disconnects
| later in the article: at the end it laments how china has been
| increasing transformer manufacturing but the US government has
| done nothing. Then in the next sentence its mentions trumps
| tariffs have increased transformer costs, I. E. Government
| action to increase domestic production. It also glosses over
| the new DOE rule on how transformers are made...so maybe there
| is a larger story there relevant to the lack of supply.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| We had targeted policies under Biden to increase US
| production of grid components. This entailed invoking the DPA
| and setting aside millions for manufacturing improvements.
| Trump paused all that and created blanket tariffs that don't
| seem like they're designed to onshore US manufacturing of
| these very specific components but _do_ increase all the
| material costs. This is not an easy thing to fix with dumb
| tariffs, and it's really easy to make everything worse.
| skeletoncrew2 wrote:
| I'm just noting the article doesn't have anything specific
| of value to say about tariff's. This is not directed at you
| but rather the reporters: I can read general opinions on
| tariffs or political parties anywhere; I need details
| relevant to transformers here to not just ignore other
| opinions
| rcxdude wrote:
| Tariffs don't help onshore manufacturing when they apply to
| the materials that the manufacturing needs and might
| evaporate before the manufacturing capability is actually
| created. Tariffs needs to be applied carefully and
| consistently to actually encourage this.
| skeletoncrew2 wrote:
| Sure, I'm just saying the article was pretty long but
| pretty short and declarative on the impact of tariffs.
| Earlier in the article for example is said there was still
| a factory in the US where the magnetic core material was
| made.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| 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/Moore_County_substation_attack
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_grid_security_in_th...
| standeven wrote:
| Yet another good reason for at-home solar and storage.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Does very little to offset things like no power for
| hospitals, refrigerated food distribution, manufacturing of
| almost anything.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| XorNot wrote:
| Also the sewer system backs up after about a week because
| the pumping and lift stations need power to operate.
|
| The water system shuts down because the tanks aren't
| reserve supply they're pressure support.
|
| And solar plus storage will keep you running for _maybe_ a
| week if you 're conservative and mostly don't use
| anything...which doesn't help you if it's months till
| replacement.
| amluto wrote:
| It might be easier for DC transmission components to be
| standardized. Sure, anything with complex controls has a lot
| more opportunity to fail to interoperate, but DC gear can often
| be configured for different voltage ratios and can much more
| directly control how much current flows where.
|
| Maybe the grid needs a multi-source agreement for equipment
| like the network industry has for optics.
| hedora wrote:
| 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://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.
| Animats wrote:
| 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-
| transforme...
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVVCCG0KkaE
|
| [3] https://www.vatransformer.com/shortest-lead-times/
| HPsquared wrote:
| You'd think if it's causing this much of a problem, there would
| be money available.
| Animats wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| 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?
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Depends if we intend to reboot after a major geomagnetic
| event or a war that destroys electrical infrastructure.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Sure.
|
| I mean: I've got some MREs in the pantry along with some
| other shelf-stable food, and I've got some water stored
| (primarily to fill empty space in the chest freezer for
| various practical reasons, but it exists). I keep some
| basic first aid and survival stuff in the car (bandages,
| space blankets, stuff to catch fish with, stuff to cook
| with). I've got my camping gear, including a small off-
| grid solar power system, stored in organized totes that
| can be loaded up very quickly. And I try to keep a
| minimum of a couple hundred miles worth of fuel in the
| gas tank at all times.
|
| I do these things just in case. The bulkiest items see
| frequent use. None of this cost me very much to buy, or
| to maintain. And none of these things can replace the
| lifestyle I've come to expect, but they might be able to
| buy me some time.
|
| Can we afford to have a spare copy of the hard-to-produce
| parts of the electrical grid sitting in a warehouse?
|
| Would we even want to rebuild the grid in the same shape
| if the shit really hit the fan and we had to start it
| over from scratch?
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| The Biden administration invoked the Defense Production Act
| and used $250m of IRA funds to increase production of grid
| transformers. Guess what happened when Trump took office.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You can have the government buy the equipment with the
| economy goes down, or you can have the government
| manufacturing it and letting the factory go idle when
| demand dries down.
|
| But amplifying the orders just makes the problem worse.
| angry_octet wrote:
| The US Government selling off the helium reserve at cost
| over two decades effectively capped the global price, even
| while exploration costs got higher. So exploration was
| killed, no investments made in better extraction,
| processing or recycling.
|
| Now that it's gone we're ultra dependent on a by-product of
| methane extraction and liquification for LNG transport. But
| most of the helium we extract as natural gas is not
| separated, as it just gets piped as gas. Helium is getting
| very very expensive.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| elihu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Still roughly 2x the cost and about 10x lower MTBF.
| mikewarot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| ninalanyon wrote:
| 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.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-04-04 23:00 UTC)