I think the article has things backwards. It's the shortage of stable demand that is holding back the building of transformers. A transformer factory that can make reliable, efficient, large transformers takes a long time to create because a lot of it relies on institutional memory. But it can be destroyed much more quickly by adverse market conditions and impatient investors.
Remember that the product has a typical lifetime measured in decades, there are huge numbers of large power transformers that have been in near continuous operation for over half a century. When one of those fails it is often more economical to repair it than replace it with a new one but that depends on there being institutions that understand what was done fifty years ago. All this requires the opposite of modern move fast and break things investing.
We had a decent domestic transformer manufacturing ecosystem for decades, and all the major manufacturers shut down their NA plants and moved them to South America to make a little bit more money. The problem is, as it often is, the perverse incentives of the religion of quarterly earning reports.
Capitalism is a fire - if you tend it well and regulate it, it serves a useful function. Let it burn out of control and it will consume everything.
We should learn something from the Cuban heavy transformer manufacturing enterprise. I mean I get that critical theory is that easy, but the step everyone always seem to
miss is a credible explanation how a centrally managed command economy is better. There is also basically no free market mechanisms functioning in power delivery in the United States. You can’t stick a solar panel in your backyard and sell the output.
> You can’t stick a solar panel in your backyard and sell the output.
While the actual economics of it may have been kneecapped, selling solar power back to the grid is very much a thing in 33 states. It's in the form of a credit and not cash. I'm not trying to nitpick, but I'm not sure what you're getting at.
>>You can’t stick a solar panel in your backyard and sell the output.
Sure you can. To everyone you run power lines to. Or did you mean you wanted a distribution system designed to profit you instead operate efficiently for everyone else?
> There is also basically no free market mechanisms functioning in power delivery in the United States. You can’t stick a solar panel in your backyard and sell the output.
Part of that is because most of the world's power grids are extremely dumb. There's no visibility anywhere, certainly not in real time - if you're lucky, there is some sort of alert monitor for overtemperature in local transformers, but no voltage/current monitoring on an individual consumer level and no current monitoring on both sides of a transformer.
Imagine a small pole transformer plus secondary-side distribution lines rated and fused for 100 kVA. Enough for a few farms. Now farm A and B each install an 80 kVAp solar panel set - and farm C, D and E consume 50 kVA each. Without the decentralized solar, the pole transformer fuse would have been triggered - but now, there's 150 kVA of consumption going on, fed by the 160 kVA solar panels, on a distribution line only supporting 100 kVA, that's now acting as a fuse. An immediate risk of damage, if not outright fire.
That is why large scale solar/wind or large consumers all need permits, plannings and sometimes dedicated lines and transformers.
The only other way to run a system without creating tons of new infra but still able to catch such dangerous situations is a detailed (!) network map on the utility side plus realtime monitoring of the transformer and all five farms input/output currents.
Remember that the product has a typical lifetime measured in decades, there are huge numbers of large power transformers that have been in near continuous operation for over half a century. When one of those fails it is often more economical to repair it than replace it with a new one but that depends on there being institutions that understand what was done fifty years ago. All this requires the opposite of modern move fast and break things investing.