[HN Gopher] Electrical transformer manufacturing is throttling t...
___________________________________________________________________
Electrical transformer manufacturing is throttling the electrified
future
https://archive.today/yn2It
Author : toomuchtodo
Score : 109 points
Date : 2026-04-01 18:47 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| 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.
| analog31 wrote:
| >>> However, DC does not make sense for a radial power
| distribution network.
|
| Why not? Pure geeky curiosity.
| VgsIndustries wrote:
| Virtually all HVDC transmission currently operating is
| point to point mostly for control reasons. My
| understanding is it's very difficult to coordinate
| multiple converter stations - power flow in DC networks
| is fully determined by the control systems of the
| converters unlike AC networks which in general lack
| active control devices (see the FACTS family of devices
| for examples that can be used in AC networks to actively
| control power flow).
| lmpdev wrote:
| Not an expert but every node in an UHVDC network would
| need expensive equipment
|
| Point to point is just two nodes, but scaling that
| outward would be very expensive
|
| AC transmission is relatively cheap in comparison
| angry_octet wrote:
| Huge installed base of network elements, minimal
| efficiency improvements. Much better to invest in switch
| mode frequency stabilisation with batteries and soft open
| points (SOPs), which balance load between phases and
| distributors without needing a radial reconfiguration.
|
| Radial DC is anachronistic thinking based on
| misunderstandings perpetuated by C-suite level just so
| stories like this Bloomberg 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
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > If a 100MW PV farm and a data center are separated by 1km
| (20 Olympic pools) - is there a way to avoid AC?
|
| Not in any economical sort of way. A rectifier and two
| transformers is cheaper than directly switching HVDC. If you
| step up the voltage to 115kV, a 100MW three-phase AC circuit
| is only 500 amps.
| 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.
| Onavo wrote:
| I mean if you wanna leapfrog china just throw more money into
| switched mode inverters and rectifiers. You don't _have_ to use
| transformers. As long as you have a black cheque, there are
| plenty of options.
| erk__ wrote:
| Also it is quite a leap to the conclusion that HVDC eqipment
| will not have long lead times as well especially since there
| are quite a few less companies making it.
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Refrigerated trucks pick up from refrigerated distribtion
| centers/warehouses.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Have a wee guess at what the big boxy things beside the
| distribution centres with "AGGREKO" written on the side
| in big orange letters, a big exhaust pipe sticking out
| the top, and seriously massive electrical connections at
| one end are.
| 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.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| solar + storage + water sheath fireplace can run pretty
| much till you run out of wood.
|
| But yes, unless you spend serious money (own sewer, water
| from underground etc), it's basically solution for "the
| power pole is down", not any grid wide problems.
| XorNot wrote:
| I mean "run out of wood" is the problem though. There
| aren't that many trees, certainly not enough for everyone
| in a region to start doing it.
|
| You'd be better off with an air sourced hear pump for hot
| water anyway - the one in my house uses less power then
| my dehumidifier.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > unless you spend serious money (own sewer, water from
| underground etc)
|
| It is often the case (at least where I live) that having
| a septic system and well is far more economical than
| obtaining a property with access to city utilities.
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| Perhaps, but municipal water runs by gravity whereas your
| well pump doesn't operate during a power failure.
| defrost wrote:
| Our bore pumps are all solar powered inline immersion
| pumps fitted to boreholes under older still standing
| windmills.
|
| They're off grid, and can be swapped out if the PV panels
| or immersion pumps fail.
|
| Ideally you should be pumping into tanks in any case, for
| the buffer, and those tanks can be placed on a hill to
| gravity feed .. or pump with a motor.
|
| Here's a typical setup, sans old windmill:
| https://youtu.be/iZAMm_S3GNQ?t=383
|
| (same rough area (W.Australian wheatbelt) not our land)
| 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.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| I live near Palo Alto and a transformer blew at the closest
| PG&E substation and it took six days to ship in a replacement
| and they cut electricity to the whole area for that time, I
| want to say last year or the year prior. So it's not like they
| had to wait years as described in the article for new builds
| but I wonder where they got it from and how many do they have.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Also https://archive.ph/yn2It
| 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.
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| This is so great!
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| why not link the original?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ttYlcrA7ys
| 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.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| 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.
| 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?
| samus wrote:
| Lead times increasing to four years doesn't necessarily
| mean that _every_ order will take that long. Since the
| additional orders are just there to cover idle periods,
| the government could omit an expected delivery time so
| regular orders don 't get delayed.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I think that would mean that the factory would switch
| from operating at 100% capacity (and never catching up),
| to 100% capacity (and never catching up).
|
| For that kind of sameness, it seems like it'd be easier
| to do nothing at all.
| samus wrote:
| It is still strictly better since the actual customers
| get priority.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| the point is that the thing they would never be catching
| up on would be the surplus orders from the government.
| 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.
| parineum wrote:
| It got reversed because executive action is a stupid way
| to make policy?
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| Yah it was an extremely foolish and short sighted EO by
| Trump, and the country will pay for it for a long time.
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| The head of Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock, which
| builds the US aircraft carriers, once ran a full page ad
| announcing that if Congress would order two carriers at
| once, instead of one at a time, they'd throw in a third
| carrier for free. The total shutdown between jobs was that
| expensive for them.
| imtringued wrote:
| That reminds me of the restaurant using its liquidity to
| prepay its dry aged steak supplier.
|
| https://commoncog.com/cash-flow-games/#3-pre-payments-in-
| the...
|
| Liquidity is expensive. Selling a carrier one at a time
| is like a retail business where you're expected to hold
| onto stock. If you don't build up an inventory to sell
| from and just sell one unit, you have to markup the price
| to cover the cost of the factory when it is idle.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| It's a major cause of why the U.S. shipbuilding industry
| produces such a pathetically tiny number of surface
| combatants per year, despite having the industrial
| capacity to do far more if it was steady work.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| > This would be a great opportunity for the government to
| get involved
|
| They have been:
|
| https://www.energy.gov/oe/transformer-resilience-and-
| advance...
| frankharv wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| schiffern wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| This. Well said!
| vertnerd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3O979En_kQ
|
| [3] https://www.mscdirect.com/product/details/20594073
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Large transformer making is a craft_
|
| Dumb question: why can't we mass manufacture smaller
| transformers and join them up?
| whatevaa wrote:
| How would you join transformers?
| quickthrowman wrote:
| 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
| lazide wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| kortex wrote:
| Not an EE, but if transformers are at all like smaller
| scale power supplies, the issue with using multiple
| smaller components is it works right up until it doesn't.
| If you lose one or it gets overloaded, it puts more
| strain the rest, increasing the failure risk. Then
| another one pops, and the load shifts to the smaller
| pool, in a cascade failure.
|
| To an extent, you _can_ do this, as long as you have
| systems in place to shed load and prevent the components
| from failing in quick succession by circuit breaking.
|
| Also i believe transformers are much more graceful
| handling overcurrent than silicon. But everything has its
| limits.
| lazide wrote:
| Why can't we mass manufacture aircraft carriers by making a
| lot of small boats and joining them up?
|
| It's the same kind of problem.
|
| (And notably, it's not that it's actually completely
| impossible to do it that way - just impractical compared to
| the alternative. You could actually make something that kind
| of sorta worked for an aircraft carrier by joining tens of
| thousands of small pontoons and support ships. Operationally,
| it would just suck compared to the alternative.)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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.
| 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.
| leonidasrup wrote:
| Maybe few manufacturers of specialized components colluded to
| not increase much production capacity, even with increased
| demand, so that prices don't collapse.
| 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.
| nimish wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| elihu wrote:
| Or, alternatively, you switch to DC to get more current
| capacity over existing wires. (At a given voltage, a wire
| can generally carry more DC current because it doesn't have
| the same "skin effect" that AC has.) Even if the hardware
| at the substation is more expensive, it might be cheaper
| than upgrading the transmission lines.
| bob1029 wrote:
| A big problem with solid state electronics is fault current
| handling. The grid would become extremely brittle if it was
| purely a DC conversion setup. Semiconductors don't do too well
| outside their happy zone. All it takes is some wind and tree to
| fire up a very large arc welder. If you can't momentarily
| handle 10x+ the rated system capacity, you are gonna have a
| really bad time. Ordinary transformers in oil bath can take a
| hammering for many cycles. A semiconductor wouldn't make it
| through one.
| 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
| loglog wrote:
| On a national scale, keeping a stock of transformers is
| peanuts. For this to be viable, they only need to be
| interchangeable, not identical.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| If they are to be interchangeable while also being
| paralleled they have to have very nearly exactly the same
| reactance or they won't share power evenly and there will
| be circulating currents between the transformers wasting
| energy.
|
| Keeping a stock of million dollar items in case one fails
| once in fifty years is pretty poor use of capital. By the
| time you get to use it the standards will have changed. And
| how many different transformers will you keep in stock> You
| can't reasonably use 500 MVA transformers everywhere, some
| places only need a 250 MVA unit and might not have space
| for anything larger. Which voltages will you choose and
| what will you do with your 500 kV transformer when the
| backbone gets upgraded to 650 kV or 750 kV or 1 MV?
|
| Do you think that the people who run electricity
| distribution systems don't think of these things?
| 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.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| >>You can't stick a solar panel in your backyard and sell
| the output.
|
| Sure you can. To everyone you run power lines to. Or did
| you mean you wanted a distribution system designed to
| profit you instead operate efficiently for everyone else?
| 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.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Maybe.
|
| 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 wrote:
| And yet somehow the biggest electric grid in the world is
| running on them just fine.
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| 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.
| stinkbeetle wrote:
| China's energy generation mix is not uniquely high in
| renewables! Where on earth did you get that idea from?
| China has about the same % renewable generation as
| Australia, about 1/3rd. Brazil has 80%, Norway 90%, some
| have near 100%.
|
| What China does have is a very high carbon emission
| intensity of electricity generation thanks to over half
| capacity coming from coal.
| ggm wrote:
| How does the carbon intensity affect transformer
| operation or are you just adding non sequiteurs?
| stinkbeetle wrote:
| I was replying to a comment that brought up renewables. I
| can be of further assistance to help you follow the chain
| of comments if you let me know what part you're
| struggling with exactly.
| themafia wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| 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/
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