Consider the transformer and a world with bigger power needs
Mention a transformer to people of a certain age, and they’re likely to conjure a Volkswagen Beetle turning into a big scary robot. Mention it to a utility company executive, and the scary image is the supply chain crisis.
One is a Hasbro creation; the other very real.
So real, in fact, construction industry trade associations joined with utility trade groups to ask Congress to trigger the Defense Production Act and spend a billion dollars to address a national shortage of electrical distribution transformers.
The crisis is not mere inconvenience. Without transformers, development of new residential subdivisions stops in its tracks. That is happening in some parts of the country. Fortunately, for most of New Mexico reliant on electric power from PNM, the problem is less severe.
Transformers are something the public takes for granted. Employing a technology virtually unchanged since British inventor Michael Faraday’s prototype fashioned in 1831, they are ubiquitous. They range in size from those you can hold in the palm of your hand that reduce power for your home’s doorbell to ones as big as semi-trailers, often seen inside chain-link fences under transmission lines.
The two most common are gray, garbage-can-looking — hanging on telephone poles in rural areas and older neighborhoods, and green metal boxes next to roads in virtually every Santa Fe subdivision built in the past 30 years.
Both kinds have identical technology: insulated copper wires wrapped around a steel core. They’re so simple, one wonders why there’s an international shortage. Turns out, wrapping the wires around the steel, a very particular kind of steel, is done by hand to very exacting standards by workers who are considered craftspeople.
Their training is rigorous and is almost exclusively provided by seasoned workers in the handful of factories
scattered around the country.
It is not something learned in a community college. One ask of Congress is subsidizing increased wages of workers to attract new employees to factories.
Another component of the shortage is the lack of a specialty product for the core of the transformers called grain-oriented electrical steel. Only one factory makes it in America, and it can’t keep up with demand or compete with imports from China and India, even with the 25 percent tariff imposed on those products.
Transformers have life spans because components degrade. Being jolted, like when high winds blow over poles, puts them out of commission.
Extreme heat from fire renders them useless, and global warming shortens their lives everywhere.
Increased frequency and severity of hurricanes, tornadoes and fires have reduced emergency stockpiles. The inexorable electrification of the world with electric vehicles and solar panels means newer and bigger transformers in existing neighborhoods. As India, China and the rest of the world exponentially increase their electrical demand, it’s clear the transformer crisis won’t abate anytime soon.
One bright spot on the horizon is the possibility of future subdivisions employing microgrids with homes powered by direct current rather than alternating current. AC/DC was not just a rock band, it was something Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison argued about in the 1880s. Edison was a DC guy and Tesla an AC guy. AC needed transformers, DC did not. Tesla won and the Western Hemisphere runs on AC.
But it doesn’t have to. Solar panels, LED lights, electric vehicles, your computer and many other devices run on DC power after being “inverted” to or from AC power. Everything else can, too.
Switching the world to DC power wouldn’t be simple, but engineers at PNM are closely following discussions, even without ownership by an international electrical utility conglomerate.
Contact Kim Shanahan at kimboshanahan@gmail.com.