Just Print Up Some Electrical Transformers

More correctly, install industrial battery packs able to support any community and also integrate it with industrial demand.  That is what the grid needs now.

The system works only when it is hot.  Make it work when it is not hot.  this can be done.

The true battery revolution has only begun and it will take decades to fully optimise.  just like the original grid.

Just Print Up Some Electrical Transformers

A Primer on the Electricity Grid in the US

John Hunt, MD

Oct 08, 2026

https://www.crisisinvesting.com/p/just-print-up-some-electrical-transformers

The Three Grids

There is no national electricity grid. There are three major interconnections: the Eastern, the Western, and then good ol’ Texas runs its own (ERCOT). Only a few links tie East to West. Together these grids hold more than 12,000 utility-scale power plants serving 164 million customers.

The Linemen

Electric utilities restore power fast. After Hurricane Helene in September 2024, Duke Energy had restored more than 1.1 million of about 2 million Carolinas customers in less than 48 hours. Less than two weeks later, Hurricane Milton darkened about a million Duke customers in Florida, and 95 percent were back in about 96 hours. Crews replaced 1,640 poles and 1,350 transformers to do it.

The linemen behind those numbers worked 18-hour shifts in flood and debris, often at night, on lines that can kill them. OSHA data count 122 electrical deaths among power line installers and repairers in the previous decade. Still, they heroically climb.

Restoration of power is where this system works. Spare inventory of transformers is where it can fail.

The Transformers

A large electrical transformer is a tank full of specialized electrical steel, copper coils and oil that weighs as much as a locomotive. If one is destroyed, the factory can deliver a replacement in … wait for it … three years. You can hope that your utility keeps a spare around. Hope is not a plan. After all, electric utilities are a regulated monopoly sector that has little in the way of market discipline. They are centrally planned and most of their customers are captive.

Getting power from the generator to your house takes many transformers

In sequence, from the generator to the house:

Generating station and step-up substation. The generator makes power at roughly 13 to 25 kV. A step-up transformer at the plant raises it to transmission voltage.

Transmission substations and switching stations. These are the nodes of the high-voltage grid, at roughly 115 to 765 kV.

Bulk-power or intertie step-down substations bring voltage to the subtransmission level.

Distribution substations are the ones near your town. A transformer steps subtransmission voltage down to primary distribution voltage, commonly around 12 kV. Several outgoing feeders radiate from each.

Distribution transformers are the gray cans on poles and the green pad-mount boxes. They step primary voltage down to 120/240 volts for the service line to your meter.

The Breakage Points

A pole transformer feeds a handful of homes. Lightning kills them regularly, and the utility keeps spares on trucks and in warehouses. Your street is usually back within a day.

A pad-mount unit, the green box, feeds a few buildings or a small subdivision. Bigger pad units feed a shopping center or small industrial area. From order to delivery of these larger pad transformers, it currently takes 40 to 65 weeks. Utilities keep a few spares and share some through pooled programs. The utilities’ existing spare inventory management fills the gap under normal situations of storms and ordinary failures. But not for wars or deliberately coordinated mass vandalism. Nor for an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon.

In Liberia, during the long civil wars, the people destroyed their country’s own hydroelectric dam to pull the copper out to sell. It’s like eating your own arm when you are hungry. The grid was off for a decade. We’ve seen similar behavior with various urban riots, mobs looting and burning their neighborhoods’ buildings and businesses. As Dilbert would say: people are idiots.

Substation transformer units in the 5 to 50 megavolt-ampere range run 75 to 110 weeks to receive after ordering. The large power transformers, 100 megavolt-amperes and up, each serve many thousands of customers. They average 128 weeks to receive after ordering, and generator step-up units run past 160 weeks (three years). Prices are up almost 80 percent since 2019.

For the US, roughly 80 percent of large power transformers are imported. Why is that not a shocker? Copper and grain-oriented electrical steel make up over half the cost. Cleveland-Cliffs (CLF) is the only US producer of that specialized grain-oriented steel. By the way, CLF has a lucrative options chain, but that is purely for premium chasing. I’ve sold options on it for more than a year and rarely hold a position in the underlying stock for more than a month.

The Bad Actors Can Cause Real Damage

In 2013, gunmen cut the phone lines to PG&E’s Metcalf substation near San Jose. Then, with gunfire, they disabled the transformers. Repairs took 27 days, but nobody lost power, because PG&E rerouted around the damage. No one was caught.

In 2022, gunfire hit two Duke Energy substations in North Carolina. About 45,000 customers lost power for four days. The hospital ran on generators. Both of the county’s links to the regional grid ran through a single substation.

The downtime extent was different because Metcalf had a second route for the power to take. Moore County didn’t.

How much territory can a few vandals (or terrorists) darken? Depends on how smart they are about what to target. Lose a pole transformer and a few houses go dark. Lose a pad-mount unit and a block or a shopping center goes dark. Lose a distribution substation and a town goes dark, and a spare, if one exists, can be trucked in within days. Lose a large transmission-level unit at a node with no alternate path and a county or a city goes dark for as long as it takes to find a spare, which can mean weeks or, if the spares have run out, years.

Think about months without the grid. Or even weeks. Those most prepared amongst us might have propane or diesel to run our home generators for a dozen days. Then it’s the Dark Ages.

Buying the Spares

In a market, the owner prices the risk of holding inventory, buys what he judges to be sufficient, and is accountable on the P and L and the balance sheet. A regulated utility’s owners face a different set of incentives. A commission is their primary customer and sets their return. A captive resident cannot reward them for being ready or punish them for not being ready.

At PJM, the grid operator for much of the East, spare purchases are decided based on a probabilistic model that left out risk of physical attacks (for lack of data).

The industry’s answer is pooling. More than 50 transmission companies, covering about 70 percent of the transmission grid, pledge spares to one another in a program called STEP, which activates only in a presidentially declared emergency.

So how long would the inventory last? Depends on the attack. No public number that I could find answers that, so let’s look at the incentives. I expect spares to cover the failures of an ordinary year and a bad storm season, because a commission can be competent enough to predict those. But I expect them to fall short in a war on our own soil, with drones and “terror cells” taking out many units at once. Remember Metcalf? Those attackers took out 17 of the substation’s 20 transformers in 19 minutes.

Meanwhile, the supply side is thin and slow, while AI data centers are increasing demand. The steel and copper arrive through a few factories and across trade barriers. Building a new transformer manufacturing facility takes many years.

We sound pretty weak and non-resilient.

So Just Print Up Some More Transformers?

The Fed’s printing press has pulled the US out of many a problem in the last few decades, most of them caused by the Fed’s printing press itself.

Power transformers cannot be printed by the Fed.

So if the Iranians (or whoever the next kinetic adversaries might be) blow up a few of the bigger ones, or hundreds of smaller ones, and inventories are burned through, what happens to you? To your refrigerated food? To your air conditioning, to your heat, to your well and septic pumps, to your computer and internet and security system, and your ability to stream the Kardashians on your boob tube; to your lights, to the electrically operated pump at the gas station, to grocery stores and their credit card processing machines.

You get the picture. It’s a giant disaster. Your wealth may protect you a tiny bit. But loss of electricity is the great equalizer, and not in any good way.

And on that happy note, remember to prepare somehow, some way, for such an event. Either have a vehicle with fuel enough to get to a functioning part of the grid, or a whole lot more ability to generate your own power and a whole lot more freeze-dried food and fuel than you already have.

Sometimes it is wise to invest in something other than gold and the stock markets.

Sincerely,

John Hunt, MD