Transformer and blade plants have not caught up with the orders

A wind blade is a composite aircraft wing the length of a football pitch, made largely by hand. The energy transition depends on objects like this — blades, nacelles, HV transformers, breakers, busbars — whose factories look nothing like a semiconductor bay and very little like the software-defined plants in vendor brochures. Labour content is high. Cycle times are long. Scrap is expensive and often visible from the mezzanine.

That is not an insult. It is a map of where industrial AI and better process control would actually move the needle. A 2 percent yield gain on a blade line is a different economic event from a 2 percent gain on a phone. Grid-equipment lead times have been a bottleneck on factory interconnection; some of that is copper and grain-oriented steel. Some of it is plants that cannot add a shift because they cannot find people who will do the work.

The shortage is in the factories that make the hardware: curing ovens, winding machines, and supervisors who have a reason to stay.