The electrical equipment shortage looms over Helene recovery

On Sunday, the lawmaker representing Asheville, North Carolina, offered a grim update in the wake of Hurricane Helene: alongside the disastrous food and drinking water shortages, road blockages, and cell service outages, Western North Carolina is also weathering 360 electrical substation outages.

“The flooding provides a unique challenge not previously faced by substations in Western North Carolina,” said the press release from Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.). “There is a high likelihood that the substations are not repairable, and replacement of the substation equipment will be necessary.”

Many substations are reportedly completely flooded, leaving Duke Energy, the investor-owned utility that serves the region, unable to accurately assess the damage until the waters recede and the bulky equipment can be dried. 

Replacement, however, is a tall order. The disaster is coming in the midst of a shortage of electrical equipment, and especially of the transformers that substations use to switch power voltage from direct current to alternating current, or vice versa. 

As electricity demand across the U.S. increases, so does demand for the equipment that renewable projects, electric vehicle chargers, and countless other things depend upon.  And manufacturers are already at capacity — and expanding it further is made challenging by a tight labor market. Transformer prices have risen over 60% since 2020.

“In order to change your output, it's not a flip of switch,” said Tim Mills, CEO at transformer manufacturer ERMCO, on an episode of the Catalyst podcast. “It's a tremendous amount of work or a tremendous amount of investment in order to make that happen.” In 2018, Mills continued, the wait for a transformer was just 12 to 14 weeks — since then, storms have been one of several factors that have caused waits for certain types of equipment to balloon to at least a year, if not longer. 

It’s a calamitous intersection of crises: the hurricane that has already killed more than 100 people, running headlong into the ongoing equipment supply problems. The grid infrastructure could take a long time — on the order of months, not days — to replace. 

As Jesse Jenkins, professor and researcher with Princeton University’s ZERO Lab, put on X, “we do NOT have 360 substations worth of transformers and other electrical equipment sitting in stockpiles waiting to be deployed.”

And it’s not like the utility has capacity to spare — Duke is also at the center of the country’s load growth challenge, given the concentration of new data centers and manufacturing facilities in its service area.

Quantifying the power crisis

As of yesterday afternoon, 630,000 customers in the Asheville area that suffered the brunt of the hurricane’s impact remained without power; 544,000 impacted customers had had power restored. Of those, 3,400 are considered “critical customers,” such as hospitals, fire stations, and water treatment facilities. 

Across the wider Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions, 2.1 million customers were without power on Sunday, according to a statement from the trade group the Edison Electric Institute. 

A statement from Duke Energy echoed the Rep. Harris’ dire outlook. “Based on what we can see on the ground, from helicopter and by drone, there are lots of areas across the South Carolina Upstate and North Carolina mountains where we’re going to have to completely rebuild parts of our system, not just repair it,” said Jason Hollifield, Duke Energy storm director for the Carolinas.

Other equipment damages, the utility added, include both downed utility poles and transmission towers. “All of these have been or will need to be replaced, repaired or rebuilt before power can be restored to individual homes and businesses,” the utility said. Restoring electricity access in certain areas is “projected to take several days or longer.” But unless Duke has access to some unknown backstock of electrical equipment, it’s unlikely to be able to rebuild those systems even in the neighborhood of a few days.

In 2022, a group of House Democrats pushed to use the Defense Production Act to spend $2.1 billion to develop a domestic supply chain for transformers, an effort that ultimately went nowhere. It remains to be seen whether Hurricane Helene recovery will reawaken those conversations.