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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   666 thread views

Transnational Thursday for September 11, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Musks's Tesla now doing transformers

Dammit, I was really hoping he was merging the car and robot product lines!

Lol :).

But it's good news though. From an expanded brief I post on Mondays:

Tesla is aiming to produce its own (electrical) transformers. This could mitigate a possible bottleneck in the large-scale upgrade of the US electrical grid that would be needed to accommodate a large growth in demand due to AI datacenter buildout—but it might also increase resilience to large solar flares, a risk that we at Sentinel have been tracking in the background. However, we don’t see signs at this time that Tesla aims to produce any of the large power transformers (LPTs; or any newer designs, for that matter) that could fail in the event of a large solar event and are critical for grid operation; more than 80% of such transformers are imported, “with lead times of up to five years,” according to Siemens.

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