High Voltage Transformer

The icon, in miniature

The transformer is the most recognizable thing in a substation, so my main worry with this one was keeping it readable after shrinking it down. The small scale meant my old way of doing the insulators wouldn't work, so I came up with a different approach, and those ended up being the part I was happiest with. For how compact it is, it still reads clearly as a transformer, which is really all I wanted.

This is the one I think of as the flagship of the Grid of the Future collection, a set of four kits I designed in one sprint for the Grid of the Future conference in Richmond this fall, where they are meant to be handed out as swag. That is what drove the whole sprint: to work as giveaway swag, each kit had to have a low enough per-unit cost to produce in real quantity. A lot of my earlier substation models run well over a hundred dollars in parts, which rules them out for anything like this. The transformer is my favorite of the four, and probably the one most people will go for, since it is the most iconic. It is also my third, after the padmount and the bigger high-voltage one, so I like having the same machine at a few different scales now. To hit that cost target I had to cut a lot. The first version had a full oil containment around it, and that was the first thing to go.

Unimpressed by the future

BEPCO assembled the Grid of the Future collection to show what was coming: new generation, new controls, a system remade. The transformer is the piece that spoils the theme. Whatever the collection imagines around it (offshore wind, digital protection, a control room full of screens), the machine in the middle does exactly what its mid-century predecessor did, indifferent to the revolution the rest of the exhibit is busy predicting. Its Instruction Booklet could, with a change of date, have been filed fifty years earlier.