After 23 years at Southern California Edison and eight as a consultant at ICF International, Gene Rodrigues was four months into retirement in 2022 when he got a call from the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity.

The U.S. Department of Energy finalized energy efficiency standards for distribution transformers to increase grid efficiency and save $824 million annually. 

The New York Power Authority and the New York University Tandon School of Engineering announced a partnership that could help utilities prevent costly and time-consuming large power transformer outages through a novel monitoring technique.

DOE's proposal to update efficiency standards for distribution transformers would make supply shortages of the key grid equipment worse, industry argued.