Comment Re: Coming soon... (Score 2) 67
The issue isnt the components, those are simple. The issue is a huge amount of this equipment is bespoke, and the facilities and expertise are gone in the US to make them (GE has a facility theyve tried to rapidly grow, but itll be nowhere near enough for quite a while). With the explosion in datacenter growth and accompanying power infrastructure the lead time on equipment is five to ten years. Theres alternatives being developed domestically that are mass-producable that use some clever new techniques to remove the bespoke aspects of the equipment, but it'll be probably another 10 years before that tech is proved out in grid trials and starts scaling.
As someone who's job is deep in the thick of grid planning, id say the concern here is legitimate but the ship has sailed. This is one of the many things that never should have been allowed to be offshored, but since it was the realities on the ground just dont support an executive order in this form. The kind of targeted, government subsidized intervention Biden did with chips and transformers and all kinds of other infrastructure is the smart way to handle these issues. This is the dumb way. We should give the half dozen companies working on the next generation of this technology government funding to accelerate, while sucking up as much foreign production of the current generation as we can. What trump is doing is instantly kneecapping growth while aiming our sights backwards instead of forwards.