How Trump’s Steel Tariffs Could Mess Up His AI Plans | The grid needs transformers, and transformers need foreign steel.

https://heatmap.news/energy/steel-tariffs-transformers

by captainquirk

46 comments

  1. Oops, maybe he’ll learn to think before he acts. /s

  2. Project 2025 and Elon have no care for hurting the people.

  3. Turn off the juice to the wasteful and inefficient houses. Done.

  4. *How Chairman Mao’s Machinery Import Bans Could Mess Up His Agricultural Reform*

    If there’s one guarantee about morons it is that they never learn from past mistakes. And they’re always guaranteed to repeat the same mistake

  5. It’s already 12+mo lead for substation gear. I’m waiting 20 weeks for a refurb 750kva

  7. Most of the production is already within the USA, look into the nations who export to the USA, most had tariffs in place already prior to Trump’s first mandate.

    It’s largely political optics and will not do much.

  8. Really need emp resistant transformers without back door access

  9. “I hate this thing,.I dunno why” – orange dimwit

    “But we need this thing for the other thing you like” – normal people

    “Ok, I take it back. That makes me a genius” – the dimwit

    “Wow, he’s a genius, no one ever thought of this, it must be a negotiation tactic” – cultists

    “Oh I just pooped my diaper.” – the dimwit 

  10. The grid definitely needs transformers, and it has been widely reported that transformers are already a bottleneck for infrastructure projects. But the datacenter industry may be willing to pay the extra cost caused by the tariffs.

    The bigger issue as it relates to steel is the uncertainty about tariffs, companies do not want to make big investment if they do not know what tariffs will be in the future.

  12. Global trade is how you build a nation, making allies is how you make good deals; Frump doesn’t know how to do either of these and yet wants to claim he’s going to accomplish both.

  13. Drill rod and casings for oil wells are another …………our company’s sales have stopped supposedly car dealers can’t sell cars so the “orange ranga” made us great again

  14. Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum shows how little he understands about economics. He says he want to help American manufacturing but then he puts tariffs on their raw materials which will make their products more expensive.

  15. Um we don’t need “foreign steel”. We have several steel plants that can decimated over the decades with non tariffed foreign steel dumped on our doorstep by foreign companies subsidized by totalitarian regimes.

    Absolutely idiotic take by this article writer.

  16. The plan is to isolate and destroy the United States of America 🇺🇸 

  17. The United States has a high capacity to make steel. The argument from the media isn’t if we will run out of steel it’s the fact that we have automated steel so it won’t produce any sizable amount of jobs to ramp up steel production.

  19. trump’s 2018 steel tariffs devastated U.S. manufacturing… These people have the memory of a gnat.

  22. Because the pain will be “temporary” as demand outstrips supply. This will cause steel prices to go up high enough domestically that we will then be willing to pay for the tariff steel.

    Got to hand it to this group, they refuse at all costs to simply “temporarily” raise income taxes on the 1%. They would rather “temporarily” raise it across the board which includes a multi-decade eroding middle class and exploding lower class.

    F•ck these people. F•ck the middle class dimwits who also didn’t want to take on increased taxation even though most of the increases would have happened to the 1%, not them.

  24. Trump’s tariffs will mess up everyone’s plans for everything.

  25. The US produces around 20% of their transformers domeatically and they need 5 years from order to delivery.

    Yeah, only the steel is going to be a problem…

  27. My neighbor is a 30 year old janitor. His front yard is full of Tr*mp signs. He lives in fear, blames others, and does nothing. Bring on the tariffs.

  28. At this point expecting any kind of second order thinking from this tinpot tyrant is expecting too much

  30. Tariffs will only work if there is enough domestic supply. Good luck with your inflation…..

  31. It’s not just steel but copper, aluminum and the mineral oil commonly used in transformers comes from Canada.

  32. US business is going to charge the same price for an item whether it comes with a tariff or is produced in the US. Of course when you only graduated from business school because your daddy bought the University a library might explain why you know so little about business.

  34. Funny thing is if you ask any AI if Putting tariffs on everything will help the country, it tells you it won’t haha

  35. Dude really putting carriages before horses. I understand his desire to make America self reliant. But self reliance doesn’t mean isolationism. And, to be self reliant, you need the means to be so. Where are the plants needed to make things in America first BEFORE telling other countries we don’t need your stuff? Did just doing without thinking.

  36. Fake news, we have plenty of steel right here in the US.

  38. I’m all in favor of stalling these plans to build huge power plants to run the AI that will replace humans with the ultimate enshittification of everything

  39. Transformers need steel, they don’t discriminate where the steel comes from.

  40. Transformers were very hard to get before tariffs came into effect. Basically a 1 year wait. Tariffs on steel are going to make things a lot worse. Transformer steel isn’t any plain old steel either.

  42. Don’t worry it’ll only take a few years to retool/rebuild factories. I think ford estimated their cost at $50-100 billion and 10+ years.
    Things don’t happen overnight nor over a single year for most large businesses. They also need stability and the ability to plan for investment, they aren’t going to dump out untold billions on a whim. Which likely just means the continuation of importing goods and just passing the cost onto the consumer.

  43. It looks like they are completely skipping grid power and just building natural gas power plants right next to data centers. This is the only way to provide enough stable power quickly to power these massive GPU clusters that are coming online in the next year.

  44. As someone who literally worked in the industry for decades on large power transformers I am comfortable saying that there is nothing about steel in Asia, South America, or Europe that makes it better suited than that from the U.S.

    I have been involved with specifications, purchase, installation, monitoring and scraping these multi million dollar purchases. The limiting factor is availability and reliability. If a vendor has a strong quality control program and a history of low failures that is worth a significant amount in the evaluation. Steel is a commodity and can be purchased from anywhere in the world. The same is true for copper, wood, stainless steel and mineral oil.

    Of all of these components the only one I personally have seen only purchased close to the installation site is the mineral oil. These transformers are shipped dry and a detailed inspection occurs on site both internally and externally prior to oil fill and commission testing.

    I know at least 7 or 8 transformer manufacturers who are working flat out. The US electric grid is massively constrained by these transformers. It takes 12-18 months to build 1 if everything goes well and 2 years if there are no issues. Skilled manpower and production space not raw materials is the limiting factor.

  46. We’re working on buying transformers now for a solar substation and it’s over two year out.

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