alt Hacker NewsI think the article has things backwards. It's the shortage of stable demand that is holding back the building of transformers. A transformer factory that can make reliable, efficient, large transformers takes a long time to create because a lot of it relies on institutional memory. But it can be destroyed much more quickly by adverse market conditions and impatient investors.
Remember that the product has a typical lifetime measured in decades, there are huge numbers of large power transformers that have been in near continuous operation for over half a century. When one of those fails it is often more economical to repair it than replace it with a new one but that depends on there being institutions that understand what was done fifty years ago. All this requires the opposite of modern move fast and break things investing.
We had a decent domestic transformer manufacturing ecosystem for decades, and all the major manufacturers shut down their NA plants and moved them to South America to make a little bit more money. The problem is, as it often is, the perverse incentives of the religion of quarterly earning reports.
Capitalism is a fire - if you tend it well and regulate it, it serves a useful function. Let it burn out of control and it will consume everything.