Grain-oriented electrical steel, or GOES, is the material at the heart of every large transformer core. It is a silicon-iron alloy at roughly 3% silicon, rolled into sheets 0.18 to 0.35 millimeters thick, with the crystalline grains forced into a specific orientation called the Goss texture, named after Norman Goss, who patented the process in 1934. The trick is that every grain aligns its magnetic easy axis along the rolling direction. Hence, the steel conducts flux along one axis with extraordinary efficiency and resists it along every other. A premium GOES sheet reduces core losses by roughly 20% compared with conventional grades, which, in a 500 MVA transformer, translates into megawatts of electricity not wasted as heat over 40 years of service.