An Overlooked Vulnerability That Could Cripple America’s Power Grid

Authored by Kurt Cobb via OilPrice.com,

• U.S. transformer wait times have ballooned from 50 to 127 weeks, crippling grid resilience in the face of wildfires, storms, or attacks.

• The Build America, Buy America Act and global demand for transformers have limited supply, with domestic production covering only 20% of needs.

• Experts warn that the grid remains dangerously unshielded from electromagnetic pulses—natural or man-made—which could lead to catastrophic blackouts.

Electric transformers aren’t something most people think about unless one attached to the power lines serving their home or business is damaged, resulting in a power outage. Most of the time, power comes back on quickly, indicating that the transformers were not the problem. It takes longer to replace a transformer damaged beyond repair.

And that can be a problem if large numbers of transformers are damaged at once such as occurred in the recent California wildfires. That’s because the waiting time for new transformers is now 127 weeks.

In case you don’t know, transformers are typically used to bring down voltage. Utilities use high voltages to transfer electricity long distances because it’s more efficient. The electricity voltage must then be “stepped down” to the level that most homes and businesses use.

It turns out American trade policy is complicating matters for the American grid. The Build America, Buy America provisions of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed under the Biden administration require substantial and, in some cases, 100 percent domestic content for goods and services used in a wide range of federally funded infrastructure projects, including maintenance and expansion of the electrical grid. And, few infrastructure projects move forward without at least some federal contribution. Unfortunately, America only produces about 20 percent of the equipment it needs for its electrical power and transmission system.

Even if the United States were not restricting supply of these goods through Build America, Buy America requirements, there would still be long waiting times. In fairness to those who passed the infrastructure bill, the waiting time for a new transformer back then was 50 weeks—not particularly fast, but far better than today’s wait of over two years for most transformers and now even four years for specialized transformers.

What’s happened is a perfect storm for manufacturers in the form of quickly increasing demand. “Aging grid infrastructure, new renewable-energy generation, expanding electrification, increased EV charging stations, and new data centers all contribute to the rising demand for these machines,” according to the IEEE Spectrum. And that demand is coming from all over the world, including fast-growing Asia, a European Green New Deal, and America’s huge infrastructure spending that includes large sums for expanding green energy and readying the grid for that expansion.

The world’s largest makers of transformers are increasing production, but those increases will take years. In addition, many transformers are customized for a particular installation. Naturally, it tends to take longer to produce these more complicated transformers, and they cannot, by definition, be standardized for mass production.

One more danger lurks in the background. Transformers are vulnerable to electromagnetic pulses, whether produced by a solar storm or by an atomic weapon. The possibility of using an atomic weapon exploded high in the atmosphere to create a powerful electromagnetic pulse has forced militaries across the world to harden their warfare equipment, including aircraft and communication gear, to withstand what would otherwise be a crippling electronic blackout, one that could take aircraft out of the air and bring communications to a halt.

Nothing comparable has been done for civilian infrastructure, which means, even if we humans avoid a nuclear war, an intense solar storm could someday produce similar devastation by shutting down most of the grid. The need in that case will be new transformers. But there simply won’t be millions of spare ones sitting around to replace the damaged ones. A world without electricity would quickly become a death trap for most of its inhabitants.

In case you are wondering, the last solar storm capable of such devastation occurred in 1859, before the advent of our modern electrified civilization.

Even as we attempt to greatly expand our current grid to meet the presumed needs of artificial intelligence and green energy generation, we should ask ourselves whether taking some additional precautions to shield ourselves from the known catastrophic danger of electromagnetic pulses might be warranted.