Even the price of iron is rising rapidly. The Chinese are buying all they can get to feed their exploding steel industry. (The industry is exploding, the steel is just steel.)

More costly copper & more costly iron - maybe transformers will indeed become an economic choke point...

 

Might be a good time to invest in scrap metal recycling.

I can hardly wait to go back to aluminum building wire. My father lived in an apartment building with aluminum wiring. His breaker panel was almost hot enough to discolor the paint.

 

I suspect before we go to aluminum we'll end up using conductive plastice, or something better. Almost every day new ways of conducting electricity is discovered, with the ultimate goal being a room temperature superconductor. I suspect, though, that transformers will always have their place. They are very efficient at what they do, and converting AC to DC is easy. Even modern high temp superconductors have severe limitiations with current though, which argues that even if they are discovered/invented we'll use high tension lines.