Just think - an electrified Detroit, pumping out the world's best electric cars and manufacturing the solar panels that will power them on top of it. That's the stuff that will get the American economy going.
By Rachel Barge, Breakthrough Generation FellowThis post is part of our week-long Special Issue exploring ways to sever the link between transportation and oil by electrifying transportation. Stay tuned for more...In a city known for hardcore rock and hardcore auto manufacturing,
some serious blues are the music of the week. Detroit, whose
top 3 automakers have been closing plants
left and
right in the face of
skyrocketing gas prices, is looking for a quick fix to a 10 year strategical failure. The NY Times grimly
reported:
"G.M. is temporarily halting the assembly lines at
seven truck factories in North America before closing four plants
permanently within the next three years... Sales were down 28 percent
at the Ford Motor Company, 18 percent at General Motors and Nissan. Hardest hit was Chrysler, whose sales fell 36 percent after it discontinued some models in a bid to increase profit margins. Ford
says it will build 25 percent fewer vehicles and that it now expects to
lose money in 2009, the year it had set as a deadline for returning to
profitability."
How did American automakers fail? To par it down to a simple answer: GM, Ford and Chrysler built cars that Americans wanted in the moment (when gas was cheap and abundant), while Japanese Toyota and Honda built cars based on what they knew consumers would want in the future (taking into account peak oil / inevitable gas price increases).
So now Toyota is selling Priuses at record rates and re-investing the
profits in continued R&D for more efficient batteries, and Detroit
automakers have gigantic SUV's gathering dust on the lot.
Unless the USA is content letting Japan beat us silly in the
global auto industry, we need a plan to re-charge Detroit, the hot seat
of American manufacturing jobs.
General Motors is taking a crack at task with the 2010 Chevy Volt (pictured above).
The Volt is heralded by some as having the potential to lead an
American shift to efficient, sexy PHEVs as a way to save Detroit from
mess it's in. A recent Washington Post blog,
however, claims that it's too little too late - that American
auto-makers are too far behind, and that a massive Japanese take-over
of Detroit auto companies is inevitable. And in a sense, they're right
- U.S. automakers, acting alone, have been (and will likely continue to be) too slow to take the visionary steps that will secure green
vehicle markets of future.
But is there any way to save Detroit Rock City? I think so. Strategic government investment
(like Australia is doing) and incentives for retooling manufacturing
plants could jump-start the U.S. auto industry, in the same way we
cranked out entirely new WWII manufacturing for tanks and planes in a
matter of months. These companies face adapting or dying out, and apparently require some financial pushing to see the light.
And what could be a more prudent investment? After all, these are the electric cars and trucks that all of us - all 300 million in the U.S. - will be driving in the future, not to mention China, India and Brazil's skyrocketing demand. America can save and actually expand our auto industry jobs if
we think strategically about the future - and put our federal money where our mouth is. It basically depends
how bad we want it.
Some may say the American auto industry is a lost cause, but I think it's fundamental to our economy and our culture. We are the inventors, the leaders, and the spreaders of great technology around the globe. Given our perch on the edge of a recession, I don't want to see
America make the unnecessary fall from innovative global leader to
mediocre trend follower, and more middle-class Midwest families losing their jobs. I know we can do better. What we need is
the visionary leadership and funds to help American automakers reach
their potential as global green vehicle futurists.
Just think - an electrified Detroit, pumping out the world's
best electric cars and manufacturing the solar panels that will power
them on top of it. That's the stuff that will get the American economy
going and thrust us back into the global auto sphere. So come on Detroit, get rockin!
A TOTALLY ELECTRIC AMERICA:
In introductory remarks to his first press conference, President-elect Barack Obama on November 7, 2008 said, “The auto industry is the backbone of American manufacturing.” Automobile manufacturing and the requisite system of busy roads are an essential part of the nation’s economic system, however the nation also needs a new and improved electrical transmission highway that is so packed full of electrons that the nation can go totally electric.
Today, more economic and social activity whizzes around our nation and the world via electrons bouncing around in computers, cell phones, HDTVs, and on the web than travel by car down the highways and byways of the nation. The automobile is as important today as footwear long has been, but it is of no more or less importance that flip-flops, uggs or old-fashioned lace-ups. They help us get around and get around we must---but not always.
Our major industry needs to turn a part of its production capacity to the manufacture of equipment that produces a plentiful supply of electrons, and thus enable the nation to go totally electric by capturing and utilizing the same energy that over the eons turned an accumulating biomass into fossil deposits. This is the sun, wind and gravity that are a free natural resource, which transports them selves for nothing and will provide electrical power for the nation’s largest consumption need: fixed-place facilities such as homes, factories and other public structures. It is far more economical to bounce electrons back and forth at 60 cycles than to find, fight over, mine, transport, refine, distribute, market, consume and dispose of the waste of fossil fuels.
To accommodate going totally electric, the nation needs a new energy grid that facilitates the dispersed production of electricity from wind turbines, parabolic-mirror solar concentrators, sea and surf displacement generators, and thermal wells. This system needs to have a peak-plus capacity; the plus power being used for the online electrolytic production of hydrogen for fuel cell and turbine electrical generation when the skies are cloudy or dark, and the wind and sea are still. Electricity from thermal wells is continuous and, when combined with heat captured as a byproduct of smelting ore, casting metals and disposing of waste, has an estimated capacity to generate up to a third of the nation’s current electrical needs.
The development of this infrastructure is essential if this nation is to once again provide American citizens with personally meaningful, financially rewarding and culturally beneficial jobs, management positions, and investment/ownership opportunities. Electric power inexpensively delivered to individuals and organization will provide the foundation of real wealth that underwrites value for some of the flimsy paper floating around in Wall Street’s house of cards. Regardless of how much money is poured into the investment funnel, value is not going to trickle down to give this nation’s citizens the opportunity to work at the American Dream and enjoy its bounty.
To right the current economic mess, we need to look beyond upping the seasonal sale of consumer goods and toying with the market. The nation needs to invest in what foundations the production of all goods and services---human and physical energy. Doing this will put money in the pockets of consuming workers and provide low cost power to the business and industrial community that will find it of great economic benefit to stay and produce within our shores.
How quickly must the nations go totally electric? Within the same time period that it took the Greatest Generation to turn America into the Arsenal of Democracy: one four-year term of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration. At the dawn of World War II, FDR called his war production advisors together and informed them that he want American industry to produce 4,000 airplanes per month. Some demurred and insisted that it would take a year, but FDR persisted and in a short time the nation was producing 4,000 a month and they made some of the older aircraft look like kites. In addition, the nation produced thousand of tons of trucks, tanks, ships, munitions, SPAM and two things that citizens had never even hear of before, atomic bombs.
With a supply of electrical power that is almost free, what might the future show us: overhead trolley cables above interstates that let semi-trucks secure long-haul power, home greenhouses that facilitate the growing of edibles, heat produced inexpensively enough to feasibly produce biofuels from non-edibles, plug-ins on parking meters to charge battery powered hybrid cars, and maybe a free power lunch on a National Electrification Day commemorating the capture of electricity from the sun, wind and gravity---natural resources as free as the air we breath.
The Army Corps of Engineers and Combat Engineers in the challenging times of World War II had a motto that well reflected the can-do-spirit that made the WW II arming of America possible, “The difficult we do today, the impossible will take a little longer.” Aside from deciding to take the nation totally electric, there is nothing about the task that is comparably difficult or close to impossible as was that faced at the dawn of World War II---yes we can.
Posted by: Sam Osborne at November 16, 2008 7:36 PM