Daily Caller Story: How The Biden Regulatory Agenda Could Make A Looming Crisis Much, Much Worse

[Note: This story is also published at the Daily Caller]

America has been fortunate this year to have thus far avoided the landfall of a highly disruptive major hurricane that knocks out power across vast geographic areas, like Hurricane Harvey did in 2017. The few storms that have made landfall in this hurricane season, like Hurricane Idalia, which hit Florida in late August, have had impacts comparatively limited in scope and scale.

With any luck, this fortunate trend will continue through the rest of this hurricane season since an ongoing supply chain crisis related to power transformers would dramatically complicate recovery efforts from a devastating storm like Harvey or 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. Transformers, whose primary function is to change line voltage in a transmission system up or down, are integral to every power transmission line in existence. They are especially vulnerable to being damaged during major storm events due to power surges, lightning, and other factors. (RELATED: DAVID BLACKMON: The Green Energy Breakthrough Is Always Just Around The Corner)

Transformers had already become difficult to source, resulting in lower-than-normal inventories prior to 2020, but the supply chain issues grew into a crisis during the Covid pandemic. The situation today is so dire that anticipated lead times to source some high-capacity transformers are expressed not in terms of weeks or months, but in years, with some now taking as long as four years to acquire.