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.

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.

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.

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.

It got reversed because executive action is a stupid way to make policy?

Yah it was an extremely foolish and short sighted EO by Trump, and the country will pay for it for a long time.

> This would be a great opportunity for the government to get involved They have been: https://www.energy.gov/oe/transformer-resilience-and-advance...

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?

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.

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.

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.