“All this is going to do is slow down” the expansion and maintenance of the electricity grid, he said. And it doesn’t move the needle ,” David Tudor, CEO of the power supplier Associated Electric Cooperative Inc., said in Senate testimony this month. “It’s a horrible idea, let me just state that. DOE says the efficiency proposal is a big win for climate change, but critics challenge that assertion. “That right there is an example of just how small a footprint we require,” he said.īut Metglas is fighting most of the power industry and legacy steel companies in the United States, which say Reed’s technology could actually exacerbate the crippling transformer supply chain crisis - and stall the Biden administration’s push to electrify more of the country.Īt issue is a Department of Energy proposed regulation that could force transformer producers to use amorphous cores, benefiting Metglas, the nation’s only producer of the technology. need for distribution transformer cores,” said Reed at the plant late last month, pointing to a mass of barely distinguishable moving metal beyond a restricted passageway on the factory floor. “That one little machine right there could produce nearly 10 percent of the entire U.S. Reed, the president of Metglas, also argues that his steel can help solve a persistent transformer shortage at a time when the United States needs much more of the equipment to rapidly expand the electricity grid. The South Carolina native says amorphous cores waste far less electricity than the traditional steel industry competition, making his product more environmentally friendly. The non-traditional steel is used to form the cores of distribution transformers, which are the ubiquitous electrical equipment typically fixed on electricity poles or platforms that transfer power from higher-voltage transmission lines to residential and business lines. Reed’s company, which was founded in the 1970s under a different name, is creating what is called amorphous metal. But the Biden administration thinks its product will help expand the electricity grid and curb greenhouse gas emissions at the same time. The Metglas plant is also a world away technologically. are making thousands of tons of ultra-thin steel a year in an industrial facility here, far from the hulking plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania that have churned out traditional steel for a century and more. Reed and his 150-plus employees at Metglas Inc. On the outskirts of this sleepy coastal town, where Spanish moss festoons oaks and the Waccamaw River snakes its way to the Atlantic Ocean, 52-year-old Rob Reed is waging a war against the entire U.S.
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