The ongoing transformer shortage continues to increase and gain attention, albeit only intermittently publicized.
Utility operators have shared that lead times have gone "off the charts", and prices are escalating for this imperative distribution grid asset. The serious issues this shortage creates are intuitive for the readers of this post; reliability risk, increased costs, and possibly even service delivery risk.
There is already mention of utilities sharing their stockyard inventory to help other operators in need of replacement transformers. While that is not a surprise given the cooperative relationships that our valued operators maintain, it is worthy of noting that we are depleting finite asset supplies that are less able to be backfilled with new inventory.
As tornadoes and severe storms are already proving, large areas of destruction are once again occurring; "more of the same" is virtually inevitable, if weather-related challenges throughout the last few years is any indication. And, we also need to factor in the risk of wildfires. While there has been historic moisture accumulation in certain areas such as California and Nevada, there still remains a mega-drought in the southwestern US.
The point is simple...given just a few of these severe weather and/or wildfire events unfolding this year, large quantities of existing, increasingly-precious transformer assets will be pulled from stockyards, thereby further depleting our now-finite supply.
While more transformers will eventually be shipped to operators by the suppliers, the concern is really about timing. Will the long lead time transformers be delivered by suppliers to our operators 'in time'? Or, will there be times when obtaining sufficient quantities of transformers for necessary service fulfillment will become difficult or impossible to address? Will the new product shipments actually fulfill the entire backlog demand, or just service a portion of the growing need thereby leaving ongoing backorders and an ongoing shortage?
These risks are legitimate concerns that are quietly gaining momentum.
The transformer shortage reality is a problem that needs to be aggressively addressed before we truly have a crisis on our hands.
A solution to this present problem already exists; it is time-proven, it is field-proven, and it is available to the utility operators.
Advanced Transformer Infrastructure (ATI) enables operators to remotely view transformer asset conditions. Operators can empirically know which transformer assets are overloaded, and which assets are underloaded; among many other data points being made available to operators.
The value difference between ATI and most AMI platforms is that ATI data is actually gathered precisely at the source; aka, the ATI empirical data associated with each transformer and its nearby conditions is accurate, reliable, granular and timely. The ATI data does not suffer from erroneous GIS mapping issues that can misrepresent actual transformer conditions, and ATI does not use algorithms to make determinations of under/overload conditions.
Therefore, ATI data is indeed reliable and it allows operators to identify several key items, such as but not limited to:
a) overload locations within the grid, and
b) manifesting load/overload conditions and related problems within the grid, and
c) underutilized transformers located within the grid.
Through ATI, this combination of empirically reported situations noted above allows operators to proactively address today's transformer shortage problem. There may be no need to obtain transformers from peer utilities. The situation might be addressed by repurposing under-utilized transformers where burdensome overload is occurring. And, there might be other remedies that operators can implement once they have this ATI empirical visibility into their transformer asset load conditions.
Advanced Transformer Infrastructure (ATI) is an available, time-proven/field-proven, cost-effective, fast-to-install technology that can help to alleviate the ongoing transformer shortage dilemma, and help to alleviate the developing risks that this shortage is fostering.