“What if America Went Completely Dark?”
August 18th, 2026The New York Times Magazine… Preparing the terrain?
Via: New York Times Magazine:
Since 2021, the average wait time for a large power transformer — the kind you’d find at a major substation, capable of handling tens or hundreds of thousands of volts — has climbed from less than a year to 128 weeks, with some lead times growing as long as five years. “The transformer shortage is bad,” Ajey Pandey, an energy analyst and a former municipal resource planner, told ChinaTalk, a tech-focused media outlet. “It’s like hair-on-fire, biting-my-nails, losing-sleep levels of bad.”
Tim Holt, who oversees grid technologies for Siemens Energy, one of the world’s biggest transformer producers, says the acute phase of the shortage began during the coronavirus pandemic. Supply chains broke down, at least temporarily, and utilities reacted to longer delivery times by engaging in the industrial version of panic-buying toilet paper. “You see delivery times getting longer,” he told me. “And of course, then people say, Oh, now I have to make sure I secure my supply.” The war in Ukraine strained manufacturers even further; one of Siemens Energy’s vendors was bombed on the third day of the war.
