Materials to get lights on are getting scarce | Hacker News Reader

Materials to get lights on are getting scarce

reddit.com

I never thought I’d see the day when HN starts posting random conjecture from Reddit…

You thought that masses of people can freely assemble on a pseudonymous internet platform without belief manipulation taking place?

Time to wake up and smell the ashes.

Not a terrible thing to have happen. From a consumer perspective, it’ll be another factor for those who choose to buy rooftop solar and batteries. From a nation state perspective, it’s signal to ramp domestic manufacturing capacity for critical infra. 80 week lead times for high end transformers isn’t a terrible deviation from the norm (usually a year), but with the electrification of everything, it’s no longer acceptable for these lead times to be the norm (or not have strategic stockpiles of backups).

You say buy rooftop solar and batteries like it's an option most people have. Depending on who's numbers you go by most American households would be bankrupted by a multi-thousand dollar emergency, they don't have the disposable income for solar and batteries.

That's without even considering legalities regarding grid connection (some utilities don't allow independent operation of solar panels that are also connected to the grid) and the simple fact that most of the country doesn't get enough sun to completely power a house with AC/furnace/fridge/computers 24/7.

Best bet for independent power generation is a propane generator with a healthy stockpile of filled tanks. (propane because it has indefinite shelf life, as opposed to diesel or gasoline).

Good ideas don’t become bad ideas simply because the poor can’t afford it. If 10% or 20% of the country had independent sources of electricity, that would still be much better for our civilization than 0%

Isn't rooftop solar usually something you can finance, unlike most emergency expenses?

Yes, and payback period in many places is less than 10 years, while the equipment will typically last well past its 25 year warranty.

There’s also a 26% federal tax credit, and in some cases state, local, and utility incentives. Generators and fuel don’t receive those financial incentives.

I'm always baffled when seemingly smart people, mostly from the USA, go on the World Wide Web and make general/universal statements as if their people represented 100% instead of 4.25% of the world population. Don't forget half of the world population lives with less than $5.50 per day.

We’re not talking about developing countries though. We’re talking about electrical infrastructure in a developed country. The developing world poor are still poor, and these discussions in particular are immaterial to them.

I just noticed the original post mentioned "middle TN", so sorry for my first comment. Still, I have to be a little pedantic here, do you mean to imply that developing countries do not have electrical infrastructure? Or that somehow the issues that affect developed countries electrical infrastructure do not affect developing ones? I'm genuinely interested in your line of thinking.

Edit: Let me attempt to be clearer here. Lets assume the reddit post is true. Imagine someone living in Brazil or India, they currently do have electrical power. Imagine the electric grid(or parts of) goes down due to the lack of hardware. Now they don't have electricity nor money to invest in solar power. How is that discussion "immaterial" to them?

On your...rented home?

So what is actually going on? Supply issues everywhere while at the same time a booming stock market?

Is quantitative easing and unemployment protection turning our economy inside out?

It seems like prime time to deploy capital to build manufacturing and raw material capacity, is it all getting sucked into markets too abstracted from reality?

I’m getting a gut feeling that we’re running towards an entirely new kind of crash, worse but much weirder than have been experienced so far.

I suspect it’s that we’ve underestimated how long it takes to increase capacity by removing bottlenecks. “Deploying capital” means building factories and stuff like that. When forecasts are good we don’t notice the lag, but during the pandemic, forecasts are usually bad.

But the problem with these macroeconomic abstractions is that they’re abstractions, and the actual problems are specific.

Probably just temporary. New Orleans is having to rebuild their electric infrastructure. Over 2600 transformers destroyed in one day from one storm.

> Supply issues everywhere while at the same time a booming stock market?

Why is this surprising? They are both caused by high demand. Shortages suck, but completely selling out your products is one of the better problems to have for a company, because it means you are making a lot of money.

But it seems like the amount of stuff produced is going way down, not just selling or normal production runs.

At least in the US, GDP is at an all time high: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP

Companies are making a lot and selling a lot, which is one of the drivers of stock market gains.

You can’t just look at an aggregate statistic and expect it to tell you something.

You need to analyse what all goes into it and how that has changed.

The knowledge currently exists on how to manufacture all this from minerals to final output- probably a good idea to spend some of those trillions in infrastructure spending tempting some retirees to come and help us re-establish a full chain of manufacturing in critical areas.

How It's Made Electric Pole Transformers : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7E6wJ7h30c ABB making them in the US (all signs in English, lbs label on crane), but I would guess the video is from last century.

Also Siemens make Electric Pole transformers (I think) in Colombia - shown for a short segment at the start of this more recent video montage on making a variety of different transformers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MHoiNnv3ZE

If current institutions possessed such competence we wouldn’t be facing such a dilemma.

It's completely possible to have the knowledge/competence to do something but be thwarted by resource constraints / management / social/economic issues.

Recently I installed a fan in my living room. While I was at it I expanded the gang box from 3 to 4 and decided to replace the toggle switches with rocker switches. I was shocked when I went to the electrical aisle of my local Home Depot. They were out of so many components. I ended up having to go to 3 different Home Depots, 2 different Lowes, and 1 Ace Hardware to find all the parts I was looking for. I asked various electrical section employees and they just said they can't get anything in and have no idea if they will ever get replacements. If you have a project in mind for sometime in the future, you might want to scrounge up all the parts right now.

I think your experience may have more to do with looking in brick and mortar locations that have probably permanently lost foot traffic in the last year. It looks like (in the US) there are plenty of rocker-style switches on Amazon available for delivery in 1 or 2 days, or homedepot.com in 4 or 5 days.

The last time I was in a big box hardware store, it looked like they had kind of given up on front-of-house organization or cleanliness.

That's probably very regional considering the different reactions to COVID everywhere

Have they lost foot traffic? Every time I’ve been there, it has been crowded.

The trade war is going to be long and painful. Furnaces that can’t be replaced in the winter… brown outs that can’t be fixed for a year…

I think it’s been well known that an attack on the US electric grid that damaged substations was a big risk as the large transformers have a long lead time and there is only a limited number of spares available.

I also don’t expect a 24 year old payment processor for a utility company to have perfect access to information about the operations and capex side of the business so take with appropriate salt grains.

Bottom line is yes we should worry about securing the national infrastructure but not because of this Reddit post.

Who calls power supply maintenance "get lights on"? Wtf.

Also /r/PrepperIntel? This is pretty deep down the rabbit hole.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com