GoKawiilGreen The Device Throttling the World’s Electrified Future A shortage of transformers is causing delays to power projects everywhere, holding trillion-dollar industries hostage—and that was before tariffs.
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An explosion, a fireball and then darkness: Heathrow Airport uses as much energy as a small city, and when a major fire at a substation caused the power to fail late Thursday, the world learned how fragile our infrastructure can be. At the center of the chaos was a burning electrical transformer.
The transformer is rarely considered as a linchpin of today’s technologically interdependent world, let alone as a key to the even more electrified future. But it’s a device that’s essential to powering almost everything, and these days it’s not that easy to obtain. Replacing Heathrow’s charred transformer — or the countless others destroyed in storms, fire and floods on an increasingly volatile planet — will not see a quick fix. “There is a lead-time of over a year for a new transformer of this size,” says Conor Murphy, vice president of engineering at grid-technology firm Novogrid.
The astonishing Heathrow shutdown — leading to more than 1,000 canceled flights — traced back to a single point of failure is only the latest chapter of a story playing out all over the world. Without a transformer, projects of all kinds end up delayed with cascading consequences. In Europe, the shortage has throttled the buildout of cheap renewables, just as an energy crisis hit that caused electricity prices to spike.
■ On Mar 21, firefighters worked to extinguish the blaze at the North Hyde electricity substation that led to the Heathrow shutdown. Videographer: Leon Neal/Getty Images
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