Brian Tochman, founder and CEO of Fluxco, a U.S. company specializing in the procurement, logistics, and management of power transformers, warns Americans that the nation now must pay the price of its 20-year failure to invest in the electrical industry and the manufacturing of the machinery required for its expansion. In an August 7 opinion column in Fox News, “The Machines that Keep America Alive Are Failing. We Forgot How to Replace Them,” Tochman writes that while today Americans have finally recognized “that electricity is as essential as water,” we are no longer able “to avoid disruption,” because the U.S. is unable to produce its own power transformers, those machines required for electricity transmission. It now imports roughly 80% of the transformers being installed in the country.
EIR News warned at the end of May that the U.S. transformer crisis was upon us. We estimated that the United States needed enough capacity to produce some 15-20 million more high-voltage distribution transformers to maintain and expand its power grid, identifying several industrial bottlenecks to being able to do so.
Among the bottlenecks Tochman identifies, it is the “human” shortage on which he focused: We can stand up new transformer factories in a couple of years—but who will work there? He cites the shocking fact that “a person cannot, today, enroll anywhere in America to learn how to design or build a large power transformer. The handful of university power-engineering programs that survived the last two decades don’t teach it.”
