ENERGY

Engineers
Transform
Transformers
to Save the
Power Grid
A global shortage of this es∑∑sential
grid tech bottlenecks energy projects

By Andrew Moseman

20 SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG FEBRUARY 2025

 To Nick de Vries, chief technology officer at the solar-energy developer
At a solar
Silicon Ranch, a transformer is like an interstate on-ramp: It boosts the facility in
voltage of the electricity that his solar plants generate to match the voltage Georgia, Silicon
Ranch stores
of grid transmission lines. “They’re your ticket to ride,” says de Vries. “If you substation
don’t have your high-voltage transformer, you don’t have a project.” transformers it
Recently, this ticket has grown much harder to come by. The demand expects to deploy
in the region in
for transformers has spiked worldwide, and so the wait time to get a new one to two years.
transformer has doubled from 50 weeks in 2021 to nearly two years now,
according to a report from Wood MacKenzie, an energy-analytics firm.
SILICON RANCH

The wait for the more specialized large power transformers (LPTs), which
step up voltage from power stations to transmission lines, is up to four
years. Costs have also climbed by 60 to 80 percent since 2020.

FEBRUARY 2025 SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG 21

 About five years ago, de Vries grew worried that Researchers easy conversion between AC and DC, and to be more
transformer shortages would postpone his solar at Oak Ridge standardized and less customized than the trans-
National
projects from coming online, so he began ordering Laboratory’s
formers of today. Their innovations could make this
transformers years before they’d actually be needed. GRID-C developed critical piece of infrastructure not only more resis-
Silicon Ranch, based in Nashville, now has a pipeline a next-generation tant to supply chain weaknesses, but also better
of custom transformers to make sure supply chain transformer that suited to the power grids of the future.
problems don’t stall its solar projects. is much smaller
than previous

A
The company isn’t alone in its quandary. A quar- generations and
transformer is a simple thing—and an old
ter of the world’s renewable-energy projects may be has the same one, too, invented in the 1880s. A typical
delayed while awaiting transformers to connect capabilities. one has a two-sided core made of iron or
them to local grids, according to the report from steel with copper wire wrapped around
Wood MacKenzie. In India, the wait for 220-kilovolt each side. The sets of wires, called windings, aren’t
transformers has leaped from 8 to 14 months, poten- connected, but through electromagnetic induction
tially holding up nearly 150 gigawatts of new solar across the core, current transfers from one coil to
development. the other. By changing the number of times the wire
And it’s not just renewable-energy projects. The wraps around each side of the core, engineers can
transformer shortage touches utilities, homeowners, change the voltage that emerges from the device so
businesses, rail systems, EV charging stations— that it is higher or lower than what entered.
anyone needing a grid connection. In Clallam This basic setup underlies transformers in a
County, the part of Washington state where the wide range of sizes. An LPT can weigh as much as
Twilight movies are set, officials in May 2022 began two blue whales and might be used to step up the
to deny new home-construction requests because electricity that emerges from a fossil-fuel or nuclear
they couldn’t get enough pad-mounted transformers power plant—typically in the thousands of volts—
to step down voltage to homes. To address the back- to match the hundreds of thousands of volts run-
log of customers who had already paid for new elec- ning through transmission lines. When the
trical service, the utility scrounged up refurbished electricity on those lines arrives at a city, it meets
transformers, or “ranch runners,” which helped but a power substation, which has transformers that
likely won’t last as long as new ones. step down the voltage to tens of thousands of volts
The ripple effects of the shortage touch both for local distribution. Distribution transformers,
public policy and safety. When a transformer fails which are smaller, decrease the voltage further,
from wear and tear, gets hit by a storm, or is damaged eventually to the hundreds of volts that can be used
ALONDA HINES/ORNL/U.S. DEPT. OF ENERGY

by war or sabotage, the inability to quickly replace safely in homes and businesses.
it increases the risk of a power outage. The European The simplicity of the design has been its strength,
Green Deal, which plans for an enormous build-out says Deepak Divan, an electrical engineer and direc-
of Europe’s transmission network by 2030 to accel- tor of the Georgia Tech Center for Distributed
erate electrification, is imperiled by the protracted Energy. Transformers are big, bulky devices built to
wait times for transformers, says Joannes Laveyne, endure for decades. Their very durability shoulders
an electrical engineer and energy-systems expert at the grid.
Ghent University, in Belgium. But they’re a little like the gears and chain of a
For power engineers, this crisis is also an oppor- bicycle—adept at their simple conversion task, and
tunity. They’re now reworking transformer designs little else. For example, traditional transformers that
to use different or less sought-after materials, to last work only with AC can’t switch to DC without extra
longer, to include power electronics that allow the components. That AC-DC conversion is important

22 SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG FEBRUARY 2025

 because a host of technologies that aim to be a part lines. At present, operators must do that voltage
of the cleaner energy future all require lots of trans- regulation constantly because of the variable nature
formers, and they all need DC power. This includes of the sun’s energy—and that task wears down
the electrolyzers for hydrogen fuel, EV charging inverters, capacitors, and other components.
stations, and energy storage. Solid-state power elec-

D
tronics, on the other hand, can seamlessly handle riving the transformer shortage are
AC-DC conversions. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a market forces stemming from electricity
power-electronic replacement for the transformer?” demand and material supply chains. For
Divan says. “It gives you control. And, in principle, example, nearly all transformer cores are
it could become smaller if you really do it right.” made of grain-oriented electrical steel, or GOES—
The idea of a solid-state transformer has been a material also used in electric motors and EV char-
kicking around in academia and industry for years. gers. The expansion of those adjacent industries
Divan and his team call their version a modular con- has intensified the demand for GOES and diverted
trollable transformer (MCT). It uses semiconduc- much of the supply.
tors and active electronic components to not only On top of this, transformer manufacturing gen-
transform electricity to other voltages but also invert erally slowed after a boom period about 20 years
the current between DC and AC in a single stage. It’s ago. Hitachi Energy, Siemens Energy, and Virginia
also built with novel insulations and other measures Transformers have announced plans to scale up
to protect it from lightning strikes and power surges. production with new facilities in Australia, China,
Divan and his team received an award in 2023 from Colombia, Finland, Germany, Mexico, the United
IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics for one of States, and Vietnam. But those efforts won’t ease
their designs. the logjam soon.
Divan’s modular transformer doesn’t have to be At the same time, the demand for transformers
custom-built for each application, which could ease has skyrocketed over the last two years by as much
manufacturing bottlenecks. But as an emerging GE Vernova as 70 percent for some U.S. manufacturers. Global
Advanced
technology, it’s more expensive and fragile than a Research
demand for LPTs with voltages over 100 kV has
conventional transformer. For example, today’s developed a grown more than 47 percent since 2020 and is
semiconductors can’t survive electrical loads greater flexible large expected to increase another 30 percent by 2030,
than about 1.7 kV. A device connected to the grid power transformer according to research by Wilfried Breuer, managing
would need to endure at minimum 13 kV, which that it has been director of German electrical equipment manufac-
field-testing at
would mean stacking these transformer modules a substation in
turer Maschinenfabrik Reinhausen, in Regensburg.
and hoping the whole group can withstand whatever Columbia, Miss., Aging grid infrastructure, new renewable-energy
the real world throws its way, Divan says. since 2021. generation, expanding electrification, increased EV
“If I have 10 converter modules stacked in series
to withstand the high voltage, what happens if one
fails? What happens if one of them gets a signal that
is delayed by 200 nanoseconds? Does the whole
thing collapse on you? These are all very interesting,
challenging problems,” Divan says.
At Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Grid Research
Integration and Deployment Center, or GRID-C,
Madhu Chinthavali is also evaluating new technolo-
gies for next-gen transformers. Adding power elec-
tronics could enable transformers to manage power
flow in ways that conventional ones cannot, which
could in turn aid in adding more solar and wind
power. It could also enable transformers to put infor-
mation into action, such as instantaneously respond-
ing to an outage or failure on the grid. Such advanced
transformers aren’t the right solution everywhere,
but using them in key places will help add more loads
to the grid. Equipping them with smart devices that
relay data would give grid operators better real-time
information and increase overall grid resilience and
COOPERATIVE ENERGY

durability, says Chinthavali, who directs GRID-C.

New kinds of power-electronic transformers, if
they can be made affordable and reliable, would be
a breakthrough for solar energy, says Silicon Ranch’s
de Vries. They would simplify the chore of regulating
the voltage going from solar plants to transmission
Global demand for LPTs Ibrahima Ndiaye, a senior principal engineer at
GEVAR who led the project, says the breakthrough
with voltages over 100 kV was figuring out how to give a conventional trans-
has grown more than former the capability to change its impedance (that
is, its resistance to electricity flow) without changing
47 percent since 2020 any other feature in the transformer, including its
and is expected to increase voltage ratio.
Impedance and voltage ratio are both critical fea-
another 30 percent by tures of a transformer that ordinarily must be tailored
2030. to each use case. If you can tweak both factors inde-
pendently, then you can modify the transformer for
various uses. But altering the impedance without also
changing the transformer’s voltage ratio initially
charging stations, and new data centers all contrib- seemed impossible, Ndiaye says.
ute to the rising demand for these machines. The solution turned out to be surprisingly
Compounding the problem is that a typical LPT straightforward. The engineer added the same
doesn’t just roll off an assembly line. Each is a bespoke amount of windings to both sides of the transform-
creation, says Bjorn Vaagensmith, a p ­ ower-systems er’s core, but in opposite directions, canceling out
researcher at Idaho National Laboratory. In this the voltage increase and thereby allowing him to
low-volume industry, “a factory will make maybe 50 tweak one factor without automatically changing the
of these things a year,” he says. other. “There is no [other] transformer in the world
The LPT’s design is dictated by the layout of the that has a capability of that today,” Ndiaye says.
substation or power plant it serves, as well as the The flexible LPT could work like a universal
voltage needs and the orientation of the incoming spare, filling in for LPTs that fail, and negating the
and outgoing power lines. For example, the bush- need to keep a custom spare for every transformer,
ings, which are upward-extending arms that connect Ndiaye says. This in turn would reduce the demand
the transformer to power lines, must be built in a for these types of transformers and crucial materials
particular position to intercept the lines. such as GOES. The flexible LPT also lets the grid
Such customization slows manufacturing and operate reliably even when there are variable renew-
increases the difficulty of replacing a failed trans- able resources, or large variable loads such as a bank
former. It’s also the reason why many energy com- of EV charging stations.
panies don’t order LPTs ahead of time, says Laveyne Similarly, Siemens Energy has been developing
at Ghent. “Imagine you get the transformer delivered what it calls “rapid response transformers”—plug-
but the permitting process ends up in a stall, or delay, and-play backups that could replace busted trans-
or even a cancellation [of the project]. Then you’re formers within weeks. And the renewable-energy
stuck with a transformer you can’t really use.” company Avangrid this year introduced a mobile
Researchers
Less customized, more one-size-fits-all trans- at Oak Ridge transformer that can be trucked to any of its solar
formers could ease supply chain problems and National or wind projects within a couple of months.
reduce power outages. To that end, a team at GE Laboratory

T
Vernova Advanced Research (GEVAR) helped used additive here is room to improve, rather than replace,
develop a “flexible LPT.” In 2021, the team began manufacturing the century-old design of the traditional
to build hollow
field-testing a 165-kV version at a substation oper- transformer
transformer, says Stefan Tenbohlen, an
ated by Cooperative Energy in Mississippi, where it cores out of energy researcher at the University of
remains active. electrical steel. Stuttgart, in Germany. He cofounded the University
ALEX PLOTKOWSKI/ORNL

24 SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG FEBRUARY 2025

 Transformer Research Alliance, to connect inter- Avangrid’s of grid security, technical, and operations services
national researchers who are tinkering with con- mobile for the American Public Power Association, in
transformer has
ventional designs. A chief goal is to make sure new multivoltage
Arlington, Va. She sums up their attitude: “If the
transformers last even longer than the older gen- capabilities and demand is again going to simply fall off, why invest
eration did. can be trucked to millions of dollars’ worth of capital into your man-
One approach is to try different insulation tech- any of Avangrid’s ufacturing facility?”
niques. Copper windings are typically insulated by onshore solar or But greater demand for electricity is coming. The
wind projects
paper and mineral oil to protect them from over- recent book Energy 2040 (Springer), coauthored by
within a couple
heating. New approaches replace the mineral oil of months. Georgia Tech’s Divan, lays out some of the staggering
with natural esters to allow the interior of the trans- numbers. The capacity of all the energy projects wait-
former to safely reach higher temperatures, prolong- ing to connect to the U.S. grid amounts to 2,600 GW—
ing the device’s lifespan in the process. Vaagensmith more than double the nation’s entire generation
at Idaho National Lab has experimented with capacity currently. An average estimate of U.S. EV
ceramic paper—a thin, lightweight, ultra-heat-­ adoption suggests the country will have 125 million
resistant material made of alumina silicate fibers— EVs by 2040. The electricity demands of U.S. data
as insulation. “We cooked it up to a thousand centers may double by the end of this decade because
degrees Celsius, which is ridiculously high for a of the boom in artificial intelligence. The National
transformer, and it was fine,” he says. Renewable Energy Lab found that U.S. transformer
Changing other materials used in LPTs could capacity will need to increase by as much as 260 per-
also help. Hollow-core transformers, for example, cent by 2050 to handle all the extra load.
use far less steel. Scientists at Oak Ridge, in Tennes- Globally, electricity supplied 20 percent of the
see, have been testing 3D printing of hollow cores world’s energy needs in 2023, and may reach 30 per-
made of electrical steel. Switching to hollow cores cent by 2030 as countries turn to electrification as a
and being able to 3D print them would ease demand way to decarbonize, according to the International
for the material in the United States, where there’s Energy Agency. India and China are expected to see
just one company that produces GOES steel for the fastest demand growth in that time. India installed
transformers, according to a 2022 report from the more solar capacity in the first quarter of 2024 than
U.S. Department of Energy. in any quarter previously, and yet, as mentioned, the
wait time to get those solar projects running is grow-

T
HITACHI ENERGY AND AVANGRID

ransformer manufacturing used to be a ing because of the transformer shortage.

cyclical business where demand ebbed The world’s power systems are not accustomed
and flowed—a longstanding pattern that to such upheaval, Divan says. Because longstanding
created an ingrained way of thinking. technologies like the transformer change so slowly,
Consequently, despite clear signs that electrical utilities spend very little—perhaps 0.1 percent of
infrastructure is set for a sustained boom and that their budgets—on R&D. But they must prepare for
the old days aren’t coming back, many transformer a sea change, Divan says. “Utilities are not going to
manufacturers have been hesitant to increase be able to stop this tsunami that’s coming. And the
capacity, says Adrienne Lotto, senior vice president pressure is on.” 

FEBRUARY 2025 SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG 25