> At the end of the 19th century, when electricity was just starting to become a commercial source of energy, two businessmen fought to control its future in what came to be known as “the war of the currents.” Thomas Edison promoted the use of direct current (DC) and George Westinghouse, inventor and industrialist, was convinced that alternating current (AC) would prove more practical.
> In a clash of personality, finance and some genuine technical advantages, Westinghouse won out and the world has been mostly stuck with using AC as a means of generating and transmitting electricity. Transformers are necessary to make the AC system work.
This entire section is a glaring load of nonsense and needs to be removed. We had to start with AC for a variety of technical reasons, the main one being that boosting DC voltage pre-switching technology was impossible. DC cant pass through a transformer unless it is converted to some form of AC, usually in the form of PWM square waves these days. Before the invention of the mercury arc rectifier (And later valve) in 1902 you had boost DC using mechanical methods: generators. The problem there is physical, they did not have the ability to insulate the generator windings at high voltage potentials. They also had problems with DC voltages over 2000 volts on commutators [1] citing excessive arcing. Commutators are also a limiting factor in machine size as beyond several MW they dissipate too much power. So with all this the highest practical voltage for a DC grid using early electrical machinery is around 2 kV. Now imagine all that mechanical complexity on the distribution end. Meanwhile, early AC transmission was already in the tens of kilovolts: 11/22/33 kV (multiples of the early Edison 110 volt standard.)
As for the whole war of currents, I feel it is vastly overstated and was more a public spectacle than serious scientific dispute. It was already known from early on that AC was the future thanks to its ability to easily be transformed to higher voltages for transmission and back again with no moving parts. The "war" was likely Edison marketing to sell off the remaining inventory less desirable DC machinery.
Well, big as in car engine big, not as in power a city big.
What is a current (pun!) practical limit?
If a 100MW PV farm and a data center are separated by 1km (20 Olympic pools) - is there a way to avoid AC?
I know there are future solutions [1]
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/07/former-tesla-exec-drew-bag...
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.
Consider also that there is nothing existing in transmission and switching gear certified for HVDC it being rare one-off projects so far, while AC is ubiquitious, more-or-less mass-produced and many people are trained in its maintenance.
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...
Which have days worth of backup generator power
> refrigerated food distribution
Do you think refrigerated trucks trail big long extension leads to a socket somewhere?
Maybe the grid needs a multi-source agreement for equipment like the network industry has for optics.
I challenge you to name one that cannot and that also makes it into high school curricula or How Things Work.
https://mst3k.fandom.com/wiki/A_Case_of_Spring_Fever_(short)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vzKfAFsbRSk
If you are not ready to lock yourself in a bunker after reading the article and watching that short, I strongly suggest you consider the inclined plane.
You’d better do it now. Very few locks work in the absence of transformers, springs and inclined planes.
The build teams aren't that big - 30-50 people. The main barrier to entry is that it takes people who know how to hand-build big transformers. Utility buyers want a supplier who's going to be around half a century from now, since these things last that long.
Here's a summary of the market, from a transformer maker in China.[1]
Here's an AI-generated fake video of large transformer manufacturing. It's about half wrong.[2] But right enough to be worth watching. I'd like to see the prompts for this.
Virginia Transformer is the US's biggest maker of large transformers.[3] They advertise their "short lead times" of two years. The margins are low, and makers don't want to go idle between orders. This is a problem with much heavy machinery. It could be built faster, but when you catch up, everybody gets laid off and the factory sits idle. There goes your profit margin.
[1] https://energypowertransformer.com/2025-u-s-power-transforme...
That means that eventually the factory goes idle, when all the demand is serviced by the spares.
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 this 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. 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 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 largely 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?
Transformers are made in specialized factories and use specialized components made in even more specialized factories. Expanding production requires not just immediate demand but commitment to future demand because a factory is a very expensive thing. The big thing is that increased demand often involves a demand that won't continue for a long period of time.
You could see the same thing with both masks and vaccines during covid - ramping up ten factories to meet a temporary demand would be very expensive.
This is a problem in strategic reserve territory.
toomuchtodo•3d ago
joe_the_user•2h ago