Comment by Animats

Governments keep making contracts with megacorp prime contractors, who stiff their suppliers at the first opportunity, instead of the SMEs that are essential to reliable long term capability. It's the bean counter obsession with counting delivered parts as the only basis for payment.

Agreed, it takes decades to build manufacturing expertise.. lose demand for a few years and all is lost

Throwing more money at it does not work either, you need skilled workforse

Same is happening in EU with shipbuilding

The head of Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock, which builds the US aircraft carriers, once ran a full page ad announcing that if Congress would order two carriers at once, instead of one at a time, they'd throw in a third carrier for free. The total shutdown between jobs was that expensive for them.

The US Government selling off the helium reserve at cost over two decades effectively capped the global price, even while exploration costs got higher. So exploration was killed, no investments made in better extraction, processing or recycling.

Now that it's gone we're ultra dependent on a by-product of methane extraction and liquification for LNG transport. But most of the helium we extract as natural gas is not separated, as it just gets piped as gas. Helium is getting very very expensive.

You can have the government buy the equipment with the economy goes down, or you can have the government manufacturing it and letting the factory go idle when demand dries down.

But amplifying the orders just makes the problem worse.

> Put the spares in a strategic repository and sell them at “cost” to whoever wants them.

That means that eventually the factory goes idle, when all the demand is serviced by the spares.

The Biden administration invoked the Defense Production Act and used $250m of IRA funds to increase production of grid transformers. Guess what happened when Trump took office.

> This would be a great opportunity for the government to get involved

They have been:

https://www.energy.gov/oe/transformer-resilience-and-advance...

I'm not sure that this helps.

The problem expressed, I think, that it is not useful to scale up production quickly (or perhaps at all), because a factory catching up on all of their orders means that the factory goes idle. Idle factories can't afford to pay wages, so they lay off some or all of the workers -- and those folks go and find different jobs.

And when they leave, they take their institutional knowledge with them.

So the sustainable goal is to never be idle, and the way to accomplish this is to never catch up.

For an example of how idle factories can go sideways, look at the Polaroid film story: Polaroid closed. Everyone left. Some investors with a big dream eventually bought many of the physical assets that remained.

But owning some manufacturing equipment didn't help them much because the institutional knowledge of producing Polaroid film had already evaporated. They had to largely re-invent the process. (And they've done a great job of that, but it's still not the same film as the OG Polaroid was.)

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So anyway, suppose the government steps in and simply artificially multiplies transformer orders x2, and pays them fairly for this doubled production. Since transformers are tangible things and we can't just spin up more AWS instances to cover demand, the immediate result is that the "short" lead time on new orders has increased from 2 years, to 4.

That's not seeming to be very ideal. It seems to amplify the problem instead of resolve it.

I suppose that the government could also offer safeguards that would help protect the businesses (including suppliers for parts) once they eventually catch up on orders, and that this might motivate them to scale production sooner instead of later (or never).

Which -- you know -- that isn't unprecedented. As an example: The Lima Army Tank Plant, in Lima, Ohio, is place where I've spent a fair bit of quality time. It still exists and continuously has employees largely because the institutional knowledge of how to build tanks (and a few other war machines) is considered to be too important to lose. During lulls, it mostly just sits there on its expansive site, loafing along repairing stuff that comes in, and waiting for the day when things to turn bad enough that we need to start increasing our number of tanks again.

It needs to keep operating (at any expense), and so with the magic of the government money-printing machine: It does. But it's one of the most actively depressing industrial sites I've ever been to; like the life just gets sucked right out of you before even getting past the entrance gate.

We can certainly extend that kind of thing to transformer production. But should we?

It's liquid cooling. Even ordinary pole transformers are immersed in oil.[1] As transformers get larger, cooling fins appear, then active pumped cooling.

It's the usual cube-square scaling problem. Heat generation increases with the volume, while heat dissipation increases more slowly, with the surface area. For small animals, life is a struggle to keep warm. For large animals, life is a struggle to cool off.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_transformer

Eh, kinda….

If you’re really careful you could have parallel sets of series transformers feeding into a common feed.

At a much larger scale, that is exactly what the grid is, actually.

It just sucks dramatically from an operational perspective compared to having one correctly sized transformer.

> You could actually make something that kind of sorta worked for an aircraft carrier by joining tens of thousands of small pontoons and support ships.

In fiction: "Tom Swift and his Ocean Airport" (1934) [1] In reality, a floating pontoon airport, with over 10,000 pontoons, was built during WWII, as "Project Sock".[2] It worked OK in a protected bay. Once large planes could cross the Atlantic, and small carriers with small planes were built for convoy protection, there was no military need. Floating airports have been tried a few times since, but it's never been worth the trouble.

Prefabricated pontoons were a big thing in WWII. Used for bridges, barges, docks, etc. Useful when you really need a temporary structure in a hurry, and aren't too concerned about its long term lifespan.

Putting multiple transformers in series is quite possible, but it's rarely done because it's less efficient than a larger transformer and takes up more space.

[1] https://www.tomswift.info/homepage/oceanair.html

[2] https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2024/f...