Summarizer

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

On a national scale, keeping a stock of transformers is peanuts. For this to be viable, they only need to be interchangeable, not identical.

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...

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.