March 25, 2025 (EIRNS)—The electrical substation for London’s Heathrow Airport went down when the cooling oil for a transformer caught fire on March 21. It highlighted just one of the chokepoints as the Western world has been deindustrializing for decades.
An article published today by Bloomberg, “The Device Throttling the World’s Electrified Future,” reports on the scarcity of electrical transformers in the U.S. and Europe that is hampering the economy. In the 12 quarters from 2022 through 2024, the delivery time in the U.S. for generation step-up transformers has tripled, going from around 55 weeks to over 160 weeks. (That of power transformers increased from around 80 weeks to around 105 weeks.) Also, the cost has doubled since 2018.
