To achieve any of these goals, the country will need a significant amount of equipment whose design was invented at the end of the 19th century: large power transformers. These giant metal structures are about the size of a two-story house and weigh up to 400 tons, roughly the equivalent of a fully loaded Boeing 747. They convert the high voltages used to transmit electricity into voltage levels that people can use in their homes and businesses. And they’re made largely the same way they were when they were invented 150 years ago.
Most large power transformers in service in the United States and around the world are aging beyond their expected service life. And there is not enough replacement to meet global needs. It can take more than three years for a company’s order to be fulfilled and delivered.
Transformers as transportation systems
Large power transformers are essential for transporting electricity over long distances. Power plants – whether coal or gas-fired, hydroelectric dams, or solar or wind farms – are often far from the customers who need the electricity produced.
Transmitting power through wires generates heat, which over a long distance significantly reduces the amount of power arriving at the end. To reduce energy losses, power companies use large transformers to step up the voltage. You can imagine this as freight being loaded onto large trucks and transported on interstate highways. They can transport a lot of energy more efficiently than smaller cars on smaller roads.
But immediate use of high-voltage power isn’t safe for a home or business, just as a tractor-trailer traveling at highway speeds shouldn’t try to drive into your driveway. So when electricity arrives near a group of customers, it must take an exit ramp and pass through another large transformer that lowers its voltage to levels that regular customers can use. The low-voltage lines then act as local urban streets, providing electricity to homes and businesses within the short distance of the highway exit.
Between 2019 and 2025, demand for step-up transformers for generators, those that connect power plants to the transmission grid, almost tripled. And over the same period, demand for transformers functioning as exit ramps has more than doubled, with costs increasing by 80%.
These devices are not mass-produced from automated assembly lines. They are tailor-made to meet the specific needs and demands of the intended destinations. If a specialized transformer fails during an extreme storm or heat wave, there aren’t just replacements waiting in a warehouse somewhere.
The Supply Chain Trap
The composition of these transformers constitutes a large part of the delay.
A key ingredient is something called grain-oriented electrical steel. This is not average steel at all. It is manufactured using precise thermal and mechanical processes that position the steel’s magnetic crystals in a single direction. Crystal alignment allows magnetic fields to pass through the metal with low energy loss, which is crucial for handling large amounts of electricity. However, only a handful of specialized steel mills around the world have the technology to produce it. Only one factory is in the United States
Copper is also rare because it is made into wires wrapped around the transformer core, usually steel, to achieve the correct voltage setting.
The workaround has its own problems
Because of the transformer shortage, utilities and power producers can take more than two years to obtain the equipment needed to connect new power plants to the grid, whether they are powered by nuclear power, fossil fuels, solar power or wind power.
To get around this delay, companies that operate data centers to power artificial intelligence systems have sought to bypass the grid altogether, installing dedicated natural gas power plants on site to run the data centers.
This decision caused another supply chain problem. Gas turbines burn at over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 C), which is hot enough to melt standard steel. Turbine blades are manufactured in a complex process from highly specialized combinations of metals and covered with ceramic heat shields.
As technology companies place larger and larger orders, the time between ordering a gas turbine and delivering it extends between three and seven years. And prices in 2027 are expected to almost triple compared to 2019, due to increased demand and still scarce materials.
What can we do?
A supply chain built in the 19th century struggles to reliably provide the energy needed for the 21st century economy.
Large power transformers are also essential for modernizing the existing grid and reducing its vulnerability to large storms or prolonged outages.
The solutions are both concrete and complicated.
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has recommended standardizing the design of transformers, rather than custom building them. This would allow manufacturers to produce more units more quickly, with an assembly line-style process. It would also allow utility companies to share emergency spare parts.
The U.S. Department of Energy has recommended deploying what are collectively called “grid enhancement technologies.” These methods include sensors that monitor in real time exactly how much energy can be transmitted over long-distance cables and advanced software that can find alternative routes to distribute electricity from power plants to maximize what is available to customers. Together, these types of systems can enable the transmission of 15 to 20 percent more electricity than without them, reducing bottlenecks while waiting for new transformers to be delivered.
In the longer term, the United States could produce more grain-oriented electrical steel, process more copper, and increase its capacity to build large power transformers.
Every way people want to adapt, improve, expand and modernize the power grid depends on this type of equipment. Without large power transformers, none of these efforts will go very far.
In a sense, executives face a choice: resolve these hardware shortages or accept the implicit consequences of network congestion, delayed projects and rising costs. Solving the transformer bottleneck would be what turns this passive reality into an active choice.
Jasmine Garland, Chancellors postdoctoral researcher in civil, environmental and architectural engineering, University of Colorado Boulder
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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