Stealth U.S. Industrial Policy: Lithium Ion Batteries

[amborin]

.Does America Need Manufacturing?

snip

Over the last two years, the federal government has doled out nearly $2.5 billion in stimulus dollars to roughly 30 companies involved in advanced battery technology. Many of these might seem less like viable businesses than scenery for political photo ops — places President Obama can repeatedly visit (as he did early this month) to demonstrate his efforts at job creation. But in fact, the battery start-ups are more legitimate, and also more controversial, than that. They represent “the far edge,” as one White House official put it, of where the president or Congress might go to create jobs.

For decades, the federal government has generally resisted throwing its weight —and its money — behind particular industries. If the market was killing manufacturing jobs, it was pointless to fight it. The government wasn’t in the business of picking winners. Many economic theorists have long held that countries inevitably pursue their natural or unique advantages. Some advantages might arise from fertile farmland or gifts of vast mineral resources; others might be rooted in the high education rates of their citizenry. As the former White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers put it, America’s role is to feed a global economy that’s increasingly based on knowledge and services rather than on making stuff. So even as governments in China and Japan offered aid to industries they deemed important, factories in the United States closed or moved abroad. The conviction in Washington was that manufacturing deserved no special dispensation. Even now, as unemployment ravages the country, so-called industrial policy remains politically toxic. Legislators will not debate it; most will not even speak its name.

By almost any account, the White House has fallen woefully short on job creation during the past two and a half years. But galvanized by the potential double payoff of skilled, blue-collar jobs and a dynamic clean-energy industry — the administration has tried to buck the tide with lithium-ion batteries. It had to start almost from scratch. In 2009, the U.S. made less than 2 percent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries. By 2015, the Department of Energy projects that, thanks mostly to the government’s recent largess, the United States will have the capacity to produce 40 percent of them. Whichever country figures out how to lead in the production of lithium-ion batteries will be well positioned to capture “a large piece of the world’s future economic prosperity,” says Arun Majumdar, the head of the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). The batteries, he stressed, are essential to the future of the global-transportation business and to a variety of clean-energy industries.

We may marvel at the hardware and software of mobile phones and laptops, but batteries don’t get the credit they deserve. Without a lithium-ion battery, your iPad would be a kludge. The new Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf rely on big racks of lithium-ion battery cells to hold their electric charges, and a number of new models — including those from Ford and Toyota, which use similar battery technology — are on their way to showrooms within the next 18 months. ....

snip

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/magazine/does-america-need-manufacturing.html?ref=business

[orpupilofnature57]

1. " If you take a walk I'll tax your feet "

[NYC_SKP]

2. We need to do some of everything, information and services, but also manufacturing...

From the article:

"If the battery stimulus ultimately succeeds, does it demonstrate that expanding the United States’ economy only through knowledge and services is no longer a viable strategy? “All of the great new American companies of the past few decades,” says Suzanne Berger, a chairwoman of M.I.T.’s panel on the future of American manufacturing, “have focused on research and development and product definition — Apple, Qualcomm, Cisco.” These were technology companies that could take full advantage of what she calls the “modularity” of the global economy. Their genius resided in the design of their gadgets and information systems; offshoring the industrial work did not leave them at a disadvantage. It did the opposite, greatly reducing costs and raising profits.

“Now I think we’re at a really different moment,” Berger says. “We’re seeing a wave of new technologies, in energy, biotechnology, batteries, where there has to be a closer integration between research, development, design, product definition and production.” "

We should never had believed that we didn't need maintain an edge in manufacturing.

And we've lost all respect for the crafts and trades...

Please visit: http://www.mikeroweworks.com/mikes-office/

Mike Rowe tells it: http://www.mikeroweworks.com/?p=7183

:patriot:

Here's where I hope the future lay:

[Fumesucker]

3. The kid in your cartoon grew up...

This is him..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX-ki3pP8YU&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

[NYC_SKP]

5. Well THAT was very cool, well worth watching! Thanks!

I could relate to the way he wanted to pass those bigger bikes.

Very impressive speeds, I'd love to know what his parts list looks like.

I've got students who are going to electrify an MG Midget this school year.

Thanks again!

:hi:

[Fumesucker]

6. There's a long thread hashing out all the design decisions ...

http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=28921&sid=7e100a78caa0d185659776878dc33308

I've been following the endless sphere electric vehicle forum for years, a really great bunch of hackers in the positive sense..

Your students could get a graduate level course on e-vehicle technology with a hands on bent there.

ETA: Here's another video that shows the bike a bit better, Cedric Lynch is a brilliant but rather eccentric Brit who has designed the most efficient brushed motor available in the size necessary for e-bikes, he made his first prototype in part from tin cans.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKuU6JahL5w

[NYC_SKP]

7. Much obliged!

I'll share these with Kris and Duncan tomorrow, they're the lead students on the project.

Then we'll post something about their progress...

That cartoon I posted is from the Santa Clara Maker Faire a couple months ago. Love the maker movement!

:thumbsup:

[Fumesucker]

8. I've been in the maker movement since maybe even before it started..

Although my makers are subtractive ones rather than additive, CNC milling machines and routers.

My latest is a Bridgeport Series I from 1983 that's been retrofitted to a PC running Mach 3, it weighs about as much as a largish SUV and we played hell getting it in the shop then spent about ten months tearing it apart and totally rewiring it with new electronics and motion motors.

This is the fourth maker type machine I've built and/or retrofitted in about thirteen years and I'm finally starting to really get the hang of it, much magic smoke has been released and much midnight oil burned..

[brentspeak]

4. Not a single thing will change for the better until trade policy is dramatically revamped

The US will not be able to support any large-scale, mass-manufactured industry if US corporations simply ship manufacturing over to cheap-labor nations like China, Mexico, Vietnam, etc., to reimport back to the US' consumer market. Either the race-to-the-bottom ends, or the United States' tenure as a stable and prosperous nation will eventually come to an end.