A transformer supply crisis bottlenecks energy projects

https://spectrum.ieee.org/transformer-shortage

by TaurenHunter • 2 years ago

115 102 2 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

kwerk• 2 years ago

And an energy shortage bottlenecking Transformer projects

ggm3• 2 years ago

Everybody wants them.

They are semi bespoke.

Ramping up supply chain takes time.

Something novel we want to sell you in ieee space.

justahuman74• 2 years ago

They are semi bespoke.

Thats interesting, surely there are millions of them deployed out there. Was there something that prevented standardization onto few types/sizes?

ggm3• 2 years ago

It's said in the article, I think it's because the exact boundaries of operation depend so strongly on local conditions the specification space has too many parameters in variable space: easier to make them for the situation to spec than build to a standard?

Down at the domestic supply level I am sure they buy thousands of mostly identical units.

Mountain_Skies2• 2 years ago

Over my lifetime they seem to have both shrunk and become much more reliable so someone is iterating and improving the designs, just not at a high speed we are accustomed to in the IT world.

My dream for the power grid would be for every home connected to it to have at minimum a battery that could handle two hours of peak load. The operation and maintenance of the grid would be so much easier if parts of it could be disconnected for an hour or two when necessary. The end users wouldn't need to know a disruption even happened. Even better would be capacity for two days, but even just two hours should get us several sigma of improvement.

thephyber2• 2 years ago

The “Ramping up the supply chain takes time” has an interesting back story:

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/563786/why-d...

Gud3• 2 years ago

There are a few standardised sizes.

I don’t do transformer installations (anymore), but generally only energy producers use bespoke transformers.

ggm3• 2 years ago

That's what the ieee say is in short supply

billfor• 2 years ago

Can you imagine what would happen if we had another carrington effect (which we will eventually) and were suddenly faced with having to build thousands of transformers....

someothherguyy2• 2 years ago

carrington effect

Event*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

mschuster913• 2 years ago

Or on a smaller scale, hybrid and open warfare, domestic terrorism [1] or just rednecks shooting at power lines [2] and transformers [3] already cause a lot of damage to power infrastructure.

An AR-15 or Kalashnikov is enough to cause serious damage, a hit squad or two can take out unprotected infrastructure on a wide scale in a very short time - and most substations consist of barely more than a fence and barbed wire to deter wildlife from entering, not a concrete wall that would thwart attackers.

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/01/military_styl...

[2] https://newtoncountytimes.com/stories/shooting-power-and-fib...

[3] https://www.sasktoday.ca/southeast/local-news/carlyle-rcmp-s...

csunbird• 2 years ago

One would expect the electrocution risk would be enough to deter the human attackers.

ttoinou• 2 years ago

    They’re now reworking transformer designs to use different or less sought-after materials, to last longer, to include power electronics that allow the easy conversion between AC and DC, and to be more standardized and less customized than the transformers of today.

Or maybe they need to work out a new design that is not patent encumbered yet ?

nine_k2• 2 years ago

They mention a bunch of new designs: hollow cores, high-temperature insulation, adjustable impedance.

It's sort of hard to replace a grid-frequency transformer (mammoth-sized because of the low frequency) with something like a switched power supply that uses much higher frequencies and thus much smaller coils. The semiconductors required for that barely handle a couple of kV, while the grid uses tens and hundreds of kV.

But a crisis like this is a good thing for the progress of technology. Demand by far outstrips supply, there's obviously good money to be made. Many new approaches are going to be researched and tried.

namibj• 2 years ago

We know well how to, and we have ways that allow for making very efficient DC/DC converters for the voltage levels that the grid utilizes.

catlifeonmars2• 2 years ago

Or maybe the power grid is the problem.

trhway• 2 years ago

Russia specifically targets transformers in Ukraine. 3 years of bombing gets to cause a supply shortage in such a slow capex heavy industry.

WorkerBee284742• 2 years ago

An LPT can weigh as much as two blue whales

I'm sure glad they used such a commonly understood unit of weight. It really helps me understand the size of the item better than pounds or tons.

jimmaswell• 2 years ago

Gave me a much better frame of reference than some huge scalar, personally.

teruakohatu• 2 years ago

Pounds is so imperial. I prefer measuring using Loaves of Bread (lb) to communicate mass.

2 * bw ≈ 630,000 lb

teddyh• 2 years ago

Unleavened bread?

dagss4• 2 years ago

As a metric European, blue whales give me a lot more intuition to work on than pounds.

Tons would be nice though.

mgiampapa• 2 years ago

I'm sorry, only long tons or short tons. Why have one unit when you can have two? In metric it's a Tonne.

vasco2• 2 years ago

How do you go through life without once deciding to learn the rough conversion between kgs and pounds (just double it, 1kg~=2lbs) or miles and kms (~1.5x it, 1mi~=1.5km) and so on?

Do you consume american media and just shrug every time you see a number and go "oops there's no way I can understand this now" unless you use Google?

Also european here.

marcosdumay2• 2 years ago

2 pounds = 1 kg

Just like 3 feet = 1 m and 4" = 10 cm.

Those are not "good enough for XKCD" approximations, but they are good enough to understand what people are saying.

Now, if I had something similar for Fahrenheit! One could use the hash of the temperature number and it would mean the same to me.

catlifeonmars2• 2 years ago

Does 2.8 billion honeybees help?

croisillon• 2 years ago

i miss a banana for scale

dgan• 2 years ago

The article was interesting until thar line, now reads like a joke..

Maken• 2 years ago

They should have used Olympic swimming pools.

rob74• 2 years ago

How many olympic swimming pools do you need to accommodate a blue whale?

imranhou• 2 years ago

A blue whale floats in water, does the LPT?

brookst• 2 years ago

Unfortunately blue whales are a terrible, archaic measure. There’s too much variability in mass, and then you’ve got the buoyancy problem and different salinity, plus pressure at depth.

Any modern scientific discussion should be done exclusively using standardized measures, like 747’s or 10-story office buildings.

jaredklewis• 2 years ago

Don’t forget the standardized unit for volume: Olympic swimming pools.

euroderf• 2 years ago

An iconic (and widely-known) skyscraper with a mass in a usable range (because it is not SO huge) might be the Flatiron building.

cma• 2 years ago

So Transformers caused a shortage of transformers.

nine_k2• 2 years ago

Only partly. Also sun, cars, and wars.

8bitsrule• 2 years ago

Not to mention AI and coin-mining of course.

cavisne• 2 years ago

This seems like exactly the sort of problem Elon is good at solving (or more accurately incentivizing engineers to solve).

xAIs cluster buildout (powered by generators while the grid was being ramped up) would’ve had a lot of lessons.

SideQuark• 2 years ago

It seems like the kind of thing Musk would say he’d do but never deliver.

https://elonmusk.today/

Mountain_Skies2• 2 years ago

Time blindness is a well known common symptom of autism, which he has openly disclosed having. Anyone dealing with time estimates from someone with autism and time blindness should simply adjust for this known attribute of their being instead of relying on or attacking them for their disability.

jeroenhd• 2 years ago

That website needs an update. He did deliver a pick-up truck (though that was neither a better truck than the F150, nor a better sports car than a standard 911, like he promised).

seventytwo• 2 years ago

Found the cyber truck owner

Buttons840• 2 years ago

I thought the same, especially Space X.

I think with space, there's a near infinite unrealized market. If you build a lot of cheap rockets, people will come and pay you to put things on them.

If you build cheaper transformers, will anyone buy them? They will buy some, but is there enough market demand to buy 2 or 3 times the number of transformers over a long period?

jojobas• 2 years ago

Yeah right, but who needs transformers when there are solar roofs, and hyperloop is all solar-powered anyway?

hmmm-i-wonder• 2 years ago

From what I can tell, Elon's biggest impact is pushing aside traditional and conservative management and being willing to take larger business risks, allowing the already incentivized engineers who already know the problems they need to solve at paypal, tesla, spacex, solarwinds etc... tackle the problems they needed to to make a change.

In this case, the incentive is there, engineers are working on it, but businesses are hesitant to scale up manufacturing and supply if they can't predict the future demand. Musk might actually be able to help here, if only because his willingness to lose money to get things done.

quickthrowman2• 2 years ago

There are massive global multinational companies that have been working on engineering a better transformer for over a hundred years. ABB/GE, Siemens, Schneider Electric, Eaton.. you really think Elon has a fresh take on something that thousands of engineers have been working on for hundreds of thousands of man years?

I realize that SpaceX solved problems that massive companies had been working on for a long time, but electrical transformers are dead ass simple. It’s a bunch of iron/steel and copper/aluminum submersed in oil. The principles of electromagnetism and induction are extremely well understood and have been for a couple hundred years.

Animats2• 2 years ago

The business is tiny in terms of number of units built, and they're basically hand-built. Some of the interior components are laminated wood. The number of people with the skills to make these things is small, and, since they're expected to last 30 to 50 years, nobody wants to buy from a startup. You want to be able to get replacement parts in 2050.

Plus, General Electric broke up, and GE Vernova now has the transformer business.[1]

[1] https://www.gevernova.com/grid-solutions/hvmv_equipment/cata...

quickthrowman2• 2 years ago

Plus, General Electric broke up, and GE Vernova now has the transformer business.

Slight clarification, GE Vernova has the (most of) the medium and high voltage transformer business. ABB bought GE Industrial Solutions which includes all of GE’s low-voltage (under 1000 volts) transformers (plus all other sub-1000 volt GE switchgear, breakers, panel boards, etc) plus some 5-15kV medium voltage lines.

Animats2• 2 years ago

Right, but it's the big semi-custom stuff that's hard to get. Distribution transformers (the things on poles) are a commodity.

Part of the problem with generator step-up transformers is that the input side generator specs are determined by the generator, and the output side transmission grid specs are determined by the grid operator. The transformer is the component stuck with the job of making those compatible. That's the kind of problem which leads to N x M variants being needed.

Hilift• 2 years ago

"Ibrahima Ndiaye, a senior principal engineer at GEVAR who led the project, says the breakthrough was figuring out how to give a conventional transformer the capability to change its impedance (that is, its resistance to electricity flow) without changing any other feature in the transformer, including its voltage ratio.

"Impedance and voltage ratio are both critical features of a transformer that ordinarily must be tailored to each use case. If you can tweak both factors independently, then you can modify the transformer for various uses. But altering the impedance without also changing the transformer’s voltage ratio initially seemed impossible, Ndiaye says.

"The solution turned out to be surprisingly straightforward. The engineer added the same amount of windings to both sides of the transformer’s core, but in opposite directions, cancelling out the voltage increase and thereby allowing him to tweak one factor without automatically changing the other. “There is no [other] transformer in the world that has a capability of that today,” Ndiaye says."

mycall• 2 years ago

It is hard to believe that no other transformer has used opposite directions in the past. It is such a big oversight.

svilen_dobrev• 2 years ago

i am not much into transformers, but isn't so-called zero-flux thing something similar?

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/511880/measu...

magicalhippo• 2 years ago

From what I can gather, this[1] is the research paper behind the described transformer, however it's not open access. However there is an available technical report here[2] with details.

The design is based on an autotransformer[3], where the primary and secondary windings are connected in series, so effectively one coil. Section 2 in the technical report has details on how the flexible impedance windings.

It's not as trivial as just adding some more windings, though perhaps in practice that's what it looks like.

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9959916

[2] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1527031

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotransformer

alenrozac• 2 years ago

EM said in one of the podcasts that chip shortage -> transformer shortage -> energy shortage. That was about a year ago or so. Asked Chat to make me a portfolio to target the transformer market. Have to say, it works.

bilsbie• 2 years ago

This would be a cool yc startup.

Gravityloss• 2 years ago

Semiconductors have advanced a lot in the last few decades so they also enable different transformers and transmission lines. Very low level materials science. China already has megavolt level UHVDC deployed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...

ocschwar• 2 years ago

Even before the crisis you had lead times of over a year.

Workaccount2• 2 years ago

This is the kind of thing that I sort of have the knowledge to jump into (I do power electronics by day) but have no will to actually pursue since hardware manufacturing in the US is very expensive to start, very hard to develop, very punishing to maintain, and very low margins even when you accomplish all that.

Trump talks a ton about "Bringing back manufacturing", but the dude is clearly using it purely for political points. Anyone in the industry knows the supply chains here are weak as hell, and anyone young with a brain is going to SWE or Finance. The industry today is held up by grey beards past retirement sticking with it because no else can do it.

bluGill4• 2 years ago

Don't be so pessimistic. There is a lot of manufacturing and supply chains in the US. However US manufacturing needs to be highly automated to compete and so it only make sense for products that are easy to manufacturing in a highly automated way. This implies high volumes, or something else that isn't always easy.

There are a lot of grey beards in industry, but that means there is room for a young person to learn what they know (they do know a lot of great things!) and then take over as their retire/die.

dgroshev• 2 years ago

It's unfortunate that the article doesn't point at the most obvious cause of the shortage: Russia deliberately and systematically destroying Ukrainian power grid for three years, and Western unwillingness to put a stop to that.

The scale of necessary repairs is mind boggling. Here's what just Europe alone shipped to Ukraine to repair the damage [1]:

- 8 827 power generators… with an estimated 1 258 590 kVA in power generators

- 3 597 transformers + 5 autotransformers

- 3 364 generators and 14 transformers from the rescEU stockpile

Then there is US support:

- 18 autotransformers "with more on the way" [2]

- 59 transformers just for Kharkiv [3]

…and that is just scratching the surface and is barely enough to keep the lights on, with Ukrainians installing private batteries and generation up and down the country.

Just last night Russia launched another massive attack at the energy infrastructure [4]. More expensive, rare, long lead time transformers getting blown up, and the raid doesn't even get any attention in the West.

[1] https://erccportal.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ECHO-Products/Maps#/maps...

[2] https://x.com/USAmbKyiv/status/1819094722754797600

[3] https://x.com/USAmbKyiv/status/1792791129513218539

[4] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-launches-large-s...

A transformer supply crisis bottlenecks energy projects

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