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US Corps Want $1B From Gov't For Battery Factory
tristanreid writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that a consortium of 14 US technology companies will ask the Federal Government for up to $1 billion for a plant to make advanced battery technology, as a part of the broad fiscal stimulus package that Pres. Elect Obama is planning. The story quotes a report by Ralph Brodd, which suggests that while existing battery technology was developed in the US, the lead in development is now held in Asia. From the WSJ story: 'More than four dozen advanced battery factories are being built in China but none, currently, in the US.'"
Maybe Congress should take a look at why U.S. companies didn't choose to manufacture this technology domestically, and implement policy changes to fix the underlying problems. Otherwise it's just economic Whack-a-Mole.
And no, I'm not a supply-sider. I think the incentives are more complex than "high taxes drive jobs away." Maybe that's part of the answer, but only a part.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Instead we should invest that $1B into researching fundamentally new battery technologies.
Hopefully Obama realizes how many theoretical research salaries can be paid with $1B and chooses to spend the money on this kind of long-term project.
Um, say gents, you can feel free to pool your resources on your own to develop new battery technology. However, there's no need for the government to pony up my tax dollars on this endeavour, especially considering how eager you folks are to outsource jobs overseas left and right, mm-kay?
i say give it to them. it's a wise investment.
that is, of course, so long as:
we need improved/cheaper battery technology to boost the development & adoption of electric vehicles.
This should carry the requirement that batteries be interchangeable.
t
" 'More than four dozen advanced battery factories are being built in China but none, currently, in the U.S.'"
So what?
If we want advanced batteries, we will buy them from China. That's why we need them built in
China.
You give the peasants half a handful of rice over there, and they toil for 23 hours a day in an atmosphere of nickel and cadmium. Then we just print a few more dollars and buy the batteries for use over here.
That's the advantage of being the top country in the world, and running the reserve currency. We can just suit ourselves what we take from the rest of the world. What's not to like...?
Yeah, but China's natural environment is, to quote Zero Wing, "on the way to destruction." If a country takes absolutely zero environmental precautions (like China is doing currently,) then that country is going to get fucked six ways from Sunday eventually.
Nature has a way of squaring any debt you might have with her.
I think a battery design firm would be a good investment with those rules. I don't think a battery factory would be a good investment under any circumstances. What's the advantage to building them in the U.S.? It's not like it will create more than a dozen jobs---those sorts of plants are all pretty much automated anyway.
Besides, most manufacturers build their products in Asia, so a component plant in the U.S. is likely to have a hard time selling any products, particularly given China's stiff import restrictions.... You'd have to make the products a lot cheaper than they can be made in China, which seems dubious at best. Otherwise, no manufacturer in their right minds would go through all the hassle and expense of buying batteries from an American plant, shipping them to China to be assembled into a product, then shipping them back to the U.S. for consumption....
See why this is a silly idea?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Yes but the people in charge today will be dead when nature/Gaia/God-Almighty/FSM decides to smite them for abusive assholes.
It's their children—and quite possibly ours—that are getting shafted by it.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
not to mention (but I will!) the US environmental regulations are much more stringent. Batteries, advanced or otherwise, involve some nasty substances.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
If so... no battery stimulus for you. And BTW.. they can fuck off and die.
Telecom is a natural monopoly, because building multiple networks in parallel is economically inefficient. Hence the attempts to regulate the one existing network, often with poor success.
With batteries it is easier to start up a competing factory, if the technology is well documented.
So I think GP's point #1 would be sufficient, no need to regulate prices on top of the requirement to release the research into the public domain. That release, however, should be closely checked for completeness and correctness.
C - the footgun of programming languages
A manufacturer wouldn't ship batteries to Asia or anywhere else if it was for the purpose of assembly. Any battery would add many many pounds of weight to, say, a container of products, and that extra weight translates into dollars spent on shipping.
If the batteries stay in this country and be assembled into the products here, the wages and other fixed costs would be the deciding factor.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
How do you plan on changing the cost of living so you can pay workers $1/hour?
There are a lot of people who could be working for the betterment of humanity on research. Because there is no profit in research(unless you make a breakthrough), it is basically a field where you can't support yourself. Research is something that could be funded by the government like public roads.
God spoke to me.
What's the advantage to building them in the U.S.?
Comes time to build electric (or hybrid) replacements for Humvees and the like, (as well as various robotic systems), you really don't want to be beholden to other countries for your battery supply. (Even if the manufacturing company is an ally, you have to worry about supply-line disruption.)
For that reason alone (and there are others), this is worth some government up-front money.
-- Alastair
Oil closed at ~$36/bbl today. The electric car is dead. Again. Gasoline is about $1.50 per gallon. Consumers are broke. Nobody wants to buy an electric car these days. Its funny how we think that electric cars would save Detroit. Detroit isn't very tech savy. They are savy at building big hulking SUVs and pickup trucks. They can't compete in the small car market. How will they ever compete in the electric car market. Do we really think that US made batteries, managed by the likes of Rick Wagner (sp?) and assembled by Joe Detroit Autoworker at a cost of $75/hour are going to be competitive with batteries built in China ? Its funny how just a couple years ago we had billions and billions of dollars for home mortgages. Now we have to go to the government to finance something that our future may depend on.
But products are usually not destined exclusively for the U.S. market, so if you do the assembly here, that means you're shipping products back to the U.S. to add the batteries to them, only to then turn around and ship a bunch of them to Australia or Europe. That makes even less sense than shipping the batteries. The alternative is to have battery plants around the globe, which is just not particularly efficient.
If we really wanted to have tech manufacturing in the U.S., we needed to have beefed up American component manufacturing twenty or thirty years ago when the Asian component market was still nascent. At this point, it's pretty much like trying to put the cat back in the bag. As far as the global economy is concerned, we're better off having the component manufacturing and finished goods manufacturing in the same place, much as we'd be better off with more car parts manufacturing in the U.S. (Cars can't be shipped cost-effectively once assembled, so it makes economic sense to move production closer to the point assembly even if that means automating more of the manufacturing to keep labor costs down.)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
My perpetual motion machine factory will provide every benefit that battery factory does, and more. My perpetual motion machines will allow water to flow downhill a la traditional hydropower, but with some of that generated electricity used to pump the water back up the hill again, to be used over and over in a never-ending cycle of very cheap electricity. And I can do all that for half what those battery dipsticks want!
Seriously, a trend that has been evident in the US that will probably aid in our demise is that we, as a society, value ignorance and a good line of bullshit over well-thought-out positions and opinions. The sad part is that with the right PR people and lobbyists, my perpetual motion idea might actually find support in Congress.
The saddest part of all is that such a scheme is no longer morally repugnant to too many Americans. See "Wall Street and the Banking Industry, 2008" for truly mind boggling fraud. Now see Paulson and Bernanke rip off the taxpayers to enrich their friends and get away with it.
My perpetual motion machine venture pales beside those corruptions in moral turptitude. It's going to be either that or start my own religion.
China is for a large part a kind of capitalism gone wild, uncontrolled and unregulated. Corporations there build factories without looking at how their workers fare, without looking at the environment, without looking at anything else than profits.
If you want to work for $1/h or less while living on the streets and travelling all over the land looking for work, without any health insurance or any protection against work-related accidents (lost a hand? You're fired!), look to China and its capitalism.
And that nothing will ever be made, ever again.
Fine, but don't complain about Starbucks and MickeyD's as being the only job you can get.
And if you buy a computer, with parts made in China, rest assure, you're just as much of the problem as anyone, as you don't care enough about the environment as long as it is someone else's back yard that pays for it.
It is like all those Kennedy Liberals wanting "clean renewable engegy" but don't want windmills blocking their view of Martha's Vineyard.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
No free market has just imploded. What you are seeing is the failure of central planning. Even in western societies the results come from lack of transparency and government intervention (ridiculously low interest rates, mandatory lending to unfit borrowers, etc.), both are toxic to a free market (if you don't have informed parties or you have government intervention you don't have a free market by definition.)
Don't be ashamed! Just stick your head in there eat as much of the tax-payers money as you can!
No, the problem is that now that making the batteries here could actually be profitable, all the experienced workers, materials, manufacturing plants are elsewhere. Without the government stimulus, the as-yet unborn US battery industry would never become profitable simply because it wouldn't exist.
The idea that private industry could survive without ever receiving help from the government is ridiculous.
I highly recommend not believing everything you read.
Paging Captain Obvious! People ingest lithium when they want to feel better!
Sigh. So much misguided thinking to correct, so few mod points.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
When you drink a 64 oz glass of your own urine each day, spend an hour each day in a room filled with nothing but your exhalations and flatulations, and have your feces sprinkled over your food, then you can make the demand you made in your original post. Until then, you're totally unreasonable. Any useful process creates waste, and the process of "cleaning up" that waste is both unlikely to make that waste actually consumable, and generates waste of its own.
it's pretty simple:
if you institute environmental regulations that force each company to minimize their environmental impact--using scrubbers, wastewater treatment, dust collection, etc.--then the cost of producing the product (material costs, manufacturing costs, and environmental costs) will all be paid for by the manufacturer and product consumers.
but if you don't employ any such regulations, then most industrial corporations will simply ignore their environmental responsibilities to save money. and in this situation the environmental cost of producing the product is being paid for by everyone in terms of the environmental degradation caused by the industrial pollution.
Sounds just like every single western country from 1800-1930.
My grandfather was telling me about his father many years ago...
"He was working in a quarry and a hundred men were swinging pickaxes, my old father included. Up on the ridge there was a hundred unemployed men sitting down watching. If you stopped swinging your pick, even for a moment, even to stretch your back the foreman would nod his head in your direction, his offsider would yell at you to drop your pick, give you money owed and that was it, you were replaced.
Part of a rock wall fell on a man while he was working and a group of men quickly ran over to help. They pulled him out and took him off to the nearest hospital, when they came back a few hours later they all no longer had a job. The company didn't pay the injured man a red-cent, his kids ended up in the poor-house"
What's funny is there's a bunch of unfit, lazy, socially inept middle class boys here on the internet, who for some insane reason, think that those times were better and strangely believe that it wouldn't be them who would be sitting up on there on the ridge.
Which is why the "socialist" Canada and EU seem to be doing much better in this crisis than the Land of the Free, right? Oh...
I was talking about beef from McDonald's, not all that other stuff. Nothing you said made any sense. I'm not a fan of food from McDonald's but if you're looking to argue against them you should stick to the facts (insanely high sodium and saturated fat levels to start) and avoid bullshit FUD composed of half-truths and urban legends. 1) The FSIS inspects meat, not the FDA. This is a binary pass/fall system. 2) USDA grading of meat is a VOLUNTARY process, there's no reason to get "their own grade of meat". 3) McDonald's ground beef is made from a mixture of fatty domestic beef and lean, mostly imported beef. I think this is done mainly for the sake of consistency but the fact that it's cheaper this way doesn't hurt.
I think you underestimate the way the automobile industry works. And having a standard cell size does not mean you will organize it into a standard battery size. Automobile manufacturers design and order expensive parts that often are only used on a narrow range of models.
It is certainly *simple* to base a new car design on some standardized large battery system. But I don't see this happening with the Big Three. And I also don't think it is even that important, you rarely replace the batteries today in EVs and in the future the rate the operable life of a battery will likely improve. Who cares if you have to special order a pack from the dealer after 100k miles? How many other model specific parts did you have to replace during that 5-7 year period that it took to get to 100k? For me it's usually around 6-10 specialized parts. As stupid as it seems, I can't bolt any old heater core in my car. It has to be one that fits about a half dozen different GM models. Nothing magical about a twisty pipe with fins on it, all people had to do is agree on where to put the holes from the bolts. But they didn't bother.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire