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The project is in final permitting stages. Construction will begin after the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission approves the project and DOE guaranteed funding is in place.

For electricity load stability, First Wind will use a 15 megawatt ampere battery storage system developed by Xtreme Power in Kyle, Texas, south of Austin. Plans call for using the system to store power and when wind speeds dip, to supply up to 10MW of power for at least an hour to grid operator Hawaiian Electric Company.

“This is a positive step toward a major addition to Oahu’s portfolio of renewable energy sources,” says Robbie Alm, executive vice president of Hawaiian Electric Company. “First Wind brings demonstrated wind farm experience to this project. We welcome the opportunity to work with them to help meet our state’s critical clean energy goals.” First Wind, based in Boston, built and operates the 30MW Kaheawa wind farm in Maui, which provides power to about 11,000 homes. The facility meets almost 9% of that island’s electricity requirements.

Makani Nui Associates, a company based in Hawaii, is a partner with First Wind in both wind projects.

Source: http://www.rechargenews.com/energy/wind/article208241.ece

In one section of the cavernous shop floor, machinists use powerful lasers to slice thick steel plates. They’re making parts for Humvees and Stryker combat vehicles destined for Afghanistan and Iraq.

Elsewhere, they are assembling a 60,000-pound apparatus for testing the Orion space module by simulating the violent vibrations of liftoff. Other workers are finishing a steel mold that will be used to make 70-foot-long roof sections of Airbus A350 passenger jets.

Dozens of Michigan manufacturers like W Industries are discovering there is indeed life beyond the auto industry. Over the last two years, multinationals and start-ups alike have been coming to the state to build, buy or design a hodgepodge of products, whether aircraft parts, solar cells, or batteries for electric cars.

In September, for instance, NTR, a solar energy company from Ireland, awarded contracts to two Detroit-area auto suppliers, including the race-car engine developer McLaren Performance Technologies, to make components for thousands of SunCatcher solar dishes.

“It should be no surprise we went to Detroit,” says Jim Barry, NTR’s chief executive. “The standard of manufacturing in the automotive industry is extraordinarily high, and that is the only place you can find such a concentration of skills.”

Of course, nobody expects Michigan to regain anytime soon all of the estimated 216,000 auto-related jobs lost in the past decade. Most of the new projects create 50 to 100 jobs at a time, while auto plant closures have shed tens of thousands.

“You could bring a whole new industry in here, and it may replace one auto plant,” says David E. Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor.

THE economic impact of the new industries is also hard to gauge: Michigan has few statistics on revenue from industries like clean technology and aerospace. Much of the new work, moreover, is limited to machining and developing prototypes. Mass production will most likely head elsewhere to save costs or to be closer to end customers. In short, the full payoff of the investments outside the auto industry is unlikely to be felt for several more years.

“What we really are talking about is R&D, pilot projects and early-stage production,” says Peter Adriaens, a University of Michigan entrepreneurship professor tracking the trend. “There is virtually nothing we can do to keep large-scale production here.”

Still, Mr. Cole and Mr. Adriaens say, the opportunities for auto suppliers are huge and could leave the state with a healthier, more diverse industrial base.

For example, virtually all of the $50 million in engineering projects at the Detroit campus of Ricardo Inc., a British engineering services firm, are for products like remotely piloted military aircraft, construction equipment and lithium-ion batteries. And Global Wind Systems, a developer of wind farms that is based in the Detroit suburb of Novi, says it is working with 18 local suppliers to design next-generation turbines to be assembled nearby in 2012.

General Electric, meanwhile, is investing $100 million in a 1,000-worker research and manufacturing facility for wind turbines outside Detroit, and Aernnova, a Spanish company that is a supplier to Boeing, Airbus and Bombardier, is planning an engineering center in Ann Arbor that will eventually employ 600. New plants to make lithium-ion batteries are in the pipeline from A123, Johnson Controls and LG Chemical.

“There is a lot of business out there that is really suited to Detroit’s automotive skills,” says Edward Walker, the chief executive of W Industries, a privately held company.

Among all the projects, the biggest is in Wixom, Mich., just northwest of Detroit. There, a mothballed Ford plant that had turned out millions of Thunderbirds, Town Cars and GTs is getting a $1.5 billion facelift. Two investors — Xtreme Power of Austin, Tex., and Clairvoyant Energy of Santa Barbara, Calif. — plan to hire 4,000 workers by late 2011 to make solar panels and battery systems for utilities.

“As the alternative-energy space builds out, we expect these plants will create a lot of opportunities for Michigan suppliers,” says Greg Main, the chief executive of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, the state’s investment promotion agency. Mr. Main estimates that at least 100 auto suppliers already have secured contracts in other industries and that at least 250 have bid for work.

Federal and state tax credits, loan guarantees and grants certainly help stimulate investment. But the main allure of the Detroit area is its ability to quickly turn designs into workable products that can be economically mass-produced. The region remains the country’s premier precision manufacturing base, with 2,500 auto suppliers and tens of thousands of highly skilled, underemployed mechanical engineers, machinists and factory managers.

“We have the best manufacturing resources on the planet here in Michigan,” says Chris Long, the founder and chief executive of Global Wind Systems. “We just need to get aligned.”

IN 1981, W Industries was founded by Robert Walker, Edward’s father, to make wooden crates used to ship car windshields and windows. It eventually expanded into a wide range of machine tools and metal parts for car frames and bodies.

The younger Mr. Walker, a 42-year-old with a fondness for wearing black, started working on the shop floor as a teenager and took the helm in 1993. To give the company a distinctive look, he adopted a bold red “W” logo and had all the buildings redone in red and black.

The only way W Industries could grow, Mr. Walker soon concluded, was to diversify. He started with military contracts. By law, most of the work must be done on American soil. And by manufacturing within Detroit’s city limits, W Industries benefits from federal policies requiring that a certain portion of military contracts be given to companies in depressed areas.

Another lure is abundant and cheap industrial space. Mr. Walker says he spent around $20 a square foot to buy and upgrade factories from bankrupt auto suppliers, about one-fifth of the cost of new buildings.

Since landing its first military contract in 2004, the company has secured jobs to make hundreds of heavy steel parts for the frames, bodies and gun mounts of vehicles like the Stryker and the mine-resistant Cougar, both made by General Dynamics. Demand for such vehicles surged as the military sought to replace Humvees, which proved vulnerable to roadside bombs.

Such work “requires a different mind-set and an entirely different way of operating your business,” Mr. Walker says.

Rather than cranking out high volumes of parts for years, jobs come in small batches and are highly customized. Each month, for example, W Industries builds a dozen 25,000-pound frames for rough-terrain military vehicles that the Kalmar Corporation, based in San Antonio, builds for the Army.

To win such business, W Industries has spent $50 million on modern machinery since 2006. The mold for the Airbus sections, which it is building for Spirit AeroSystems of Kansas, is being made with one of the world’s largest computer-controlled machine tools. It moves along a 200-foot-long rail shaving steel to create a super-polished surface. Spirit selected W Industries largely because it offered “an attractive combination of fabrication and expertise,” says Ken Evans, a Spirit spokesman.

W Industries also got the Orion simulator project in part because it was one of the few companies in the United States with the right equipment. The Orion space program aims to send human explorers to the moon by 2020 and then to Mars and beyond. But NASA hasn’t built a space capsule since the Apollo program ended in 1975.

Five years ago, W Industries had $15 million in annual sales. This year, it expects at least $150 million, two-thirds of it from military and aerospace contractors. It has bought three old factories in the area and is looking for more, and it plans to double its work force to 500 by 2011.

Dowding Industries, a family-owned company in Eaton Rapids, is also wagering its future on diversification. It was founded in 1965 as a tool-and-die shop for Oldsmobile and later expanded into metal auto parts. The company branched out into tractor and rail car parts in the 1990s, as the Big Three pinched costs to compete with overseas rivals and “started getting real brutal” on suppliers, says Jeff Metts, Dowding’s president.

He said that after Dowding had invested in new machine tools and perfected a part, the work was often shifted to China six months later. “There seemed to be a real effort to remove our profit,” Mr. Metts recalls.

In 2006, he attended a wind-power trade show in Los Angeles. “We were really shocked at how big this industry was becoming,” he says. That year, Dowding won a $5 million contract from Clipper Turbine Works of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Other wind customers followed.

After the recent recession, in which it laid off 130 of its 280 workers, Dowding made a bigger bet on wind, forming a venture with MAG Industrial Automation Systems in Sterling Heights to develop tools for turbine components.

MAG also makes machines used to fabricate carbon-composite airframes for planes like the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. In October, the venture will introduce a system that Mr. Metts says can make better-performing wind turbine hubs in one-fifth the time of current methods.

The next goal is a machine for carbon-composite blades that, he says, will be 30 percent lighter than fiberglass blades and last 20 years or longer. Mr. Metts says Dowding has commitments from several turbine makers, and he sees opportunities to use similar machines and technologies for bridges, expressways and ships — for which production methods and materials haven’t changed much in decades.

“This will be as big as the shift from metal to plastics,” Mr. Metts says.

The need to turn prototypes into real products is what lured NTR to the Detroit area. The company, based in Dublin, is installing the first 60 of its SunCatcher dishes, which cost $50,000 to $60,000 each, in Phoenix. If all of its solar-plant deals with California and Texas utilities are completed, it expects to sell 65,000 of them over the next two years.

In 2008, NTR’s manufacturing arm, Stirling Energy Systems, hired Tower Automotive in Novi to develop modules with mirrors that will reflect the sun’s energy. It also enlisted McLaren in Livonia to help design and build the motorized units that will convert concentrated sunlight into electricity. Founded in 1969 by Bruce McLaren, the New Zealand-born auto racer, and bought in 2003 by Linamar of Canada, the firm is best known for developing turbocharged engines for race cars.

Five years ago, all of McLaren’s business was with carmakers. Now, nearly a third is in developing motorized devices for the solar and wind industries. McLaren’s engineering team redesigned the SunCatcher engine and each of its 100 parts to make them more efficient, less expensive and easier to mass-produce.

“We put everything on a wall,” recalls Phil Guys, McLaren’s president. “We got 500 suggestions from engineers.”

McLaren has shipped its first batch of power-conversion units to Stirling and is developing new prototypes.

A BIG question is whether the new work will sustain Detroit’s manufacturing ecosystem if auto assembly keeps migrating elsewhere. As suppliers close, more managers and engineers could move away.

To illustrate how difficult that talent would be to replace, Bud Kimmel, vice president for business development at W Industries, points out Jason Sobieck. A 30-year-old machining whiz sporting a green tattoo, gray T-shirt and jeans, Mr. Sobieck manages the Spirit and Orion projects.

“Jason is like an artist,” Mr. Kimmel says. “We built our whole program around him.”

Mr. Sobieck began work at 17 at a small Detroit welding shop. He then worked for tooling companies, where he learned to program automated systems and manage projects. “These skills really aren’t taught in school,” Mr. Sobieck says, dragging on a cigarette. “This is a trade you learn on the shop floor.”

That’s one reason that W Industries wants to snap up as many good machinists and engineers as it can afford.

“If we don’t re-engage the automotive workers soon in major programs,” Mr. Kimmel says, “this set of skills will be lost.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/business/economy/14revive.html

“Darrell’s extensive knowledge of both renewable energy markets and utility-scale power will be invaluable as we strive to bring our utility scale technology to the market,” Xtreme CEO Carlos Coe said. Previous to joining E.ON, Hayslip held executive and leadership roles with Calpine Corp., Dynegy Inc., Destec Energy and Westinghouse Electric Co.

He earned his bachelor's in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas.

Source: http://austin.bizjournals.com/austin/stories/2010/02/08/daily15.html

“Effective implementation of the smart grid is paramount to our clean energy future, and Xtreme Power is working to provide equally smart storage technologies necessary to seamlessly deliver predictable, clean power on demand,” said Carlos Coe, president and CEO of Xtreme Power. “It is an honor to be recognized by VentureBeat as a company poised to bring the smart grid to life.”

A few weeks ago, President Obama announced more than $3 billion in stimulus grants to improve and “smarten” the national grid—pushing the concept of a modernized electricity network into the limelight. At the same time, the Innovation Competition invited organizations with products that promised to wield significant impact on the power grid’s ability to become smarter to pitch their ideas in front of a world-class group of industry influencers at GreenBeat 2009. Xtreme Power was selected from more than 50 applications as one of the top 10 innovations that will shape the future of the grid.

“Reflective of the growing public awareness for the smart grid, VentureBeat was impressed by the competitiveness of this year’s contest,” said Matt Marshall, founder and CEO of VentureBeat. “With Xtreme Power leading the way, we are confident that the technologies represented by these companies will drive the way to an efficient, carbon-reduced super grid with enormous potential to increase reliability of power delivery and reduce our carbon footprint worldwide.”

GreenBeat 2009 took place November 18-19, 2009, in San Mateo, California. More information on the GreenBeat 2009 Innovation Competition, along with this year’s winners, is available at http://events.venturebeat.com/greenbeat2009/.

About GreenBeat 2009

The seminal conference on the Smart Grid, GreenBeat 2009 will bring together leading entrepreneurs, investors, utilities, technology executives and policymakers to accelerate the development of a leaner, more efficient electrical grid. With a laser focus on new technology offerings, GreenBeat 2009 is the must-attend event in the space for discussion, debate and power networking. For more information about this event, hosted by VentureBeat, please visit http://events.venturebeat.com/greenbeat2009/.

About Xtreme Power

Xtreme Power is a developer and manufacturer of integrated power management and energy storage systems that offer compelling smart solutions to the many challenges and opportunities facing the electricity industry. Our integrated smart power management solutions range from 500 kW to 100 MW and opens new doors to the rapidly expanding potential of the electric industry for all stakeholders: utilities, independent power producers, alternative energy companies, and customers. With proprietary solid-state power management and integrated storage, we enable efficient and available power for an environmentally sound 21st century electricity industry.

About VentureBeat

VentureBeat, founded in 2006 to cover news and perspective about innovation for forward-thinking executives, has emerged to become one of the “best blogs on the Web.” according to the New York Times. It was recently called the most “influential business blog” by Text100, a public relations company that surveyed citations by mainstream news publications. VentureBeat runs several conferences, including GamesBeat, MobileBeat and GreenBeat. It also produces www.DEMO.com, the leading conference for emerging technology product launches.

In 2007, clean tech was responsible for 770,000 U.S. jobs. While that number is still relatively small, the trend is heading in the right direction — the number of clean tech jobs increased by 9.1 percent from 1998 to 2007, at a time when overall U.S. job growth was just 3.7 percent, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. And as federal recovery act funds are invested over the coming year, those numbers will continue to rise.

Across the country, multinational corporations like GE Energy, Sharp, BP and Siemens are investing in developing clean tech sectors, while manufacturing facilities that had closed are being repurposed for clean tech production.

Where Are These Clean Tech Jobs?

In its recently released Clean Tech Job Trends 2009 report, the clean tech research firm Clean Edge identifies the leading regions for clean tech development and jobs right now, particularly in the top five clean tech sectors: solar, biofuels, efficiency, smart grid and wind power.

The top 15 U.S. metro areas: San Francisco; Los Angeles; New York; Boston; Washington, D.C., and Baltimore; Denver, Boulder and Greeley, Colo.; Seattle, Tacoma and Bremerton, Wash.; Portland and Salem, Ore.; Chicago; Sacramento, Calif.; San Diego; Austin and San Marcos, Texas; Phoenix; Detroit and Ann Arbor, Mich.; and Houston.

California is currently the No. 1 job-creating state for wind, solar PV and geothermal, but other states are well situated to take advantage of the growing market.

The states with the greatest potential for clean tech jobs development are Texas, Illinois, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina, according to a study of patterns of renewable energy demand, manufacturing capability and needed supply chains conducted for the Blue Green Alliance. That should be welcome news for a group of states that includes some of the highest unemployment rates in the nation, and for the nation itself, which reached 10.2 percent unemployment in October.

In the Blue Green Alliance report, Building the Clean Energy Assembly Line, the Renewable Energy Policy Project estimates the renewable energy manufacturing job potential of all 50 states at over 850,000 jobs based on standards requiring 25 percent of power to come from renewable energy by 2025. All five of the leading clean tech sectors are showing strong signs of growth.

Solar

The five states with the most potential for solar PV potential manufacturing are California, Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania and New York, according to the Blue Green Alliance report.

SunPower in San Jose, Calif., is one of the top 10 clean tech employers in the country, with 5,400 employees.

In the Midwest's industrial belt, some retired plants are being reborn as clean tech operations. The Ford Motor Co. plant in Wixom, Mich., for example, laid off 1,500 employees when it closed in 2007; today the 320-acre facility is becoming a renewable energy business park where Xtreme Power will produce systems for wind and solar, and Clairvoyant Energy will manufacture solar panels.

Multinationals expanding into solar include BP, with 2,200 solar employees, and The Sharp Manufacturing Company of America in Memphis, Tenn., which employs 300 workers producing solar modules.

SCHOTT Solar, part of the German SCHOTT Group, established its Albuquerque, N.M., solar manufacturing plant in 2009 with an investment of over $1 million. It has 300 employees.

“If the market develops the way we hope it does, the facility will quadruple in size,” said James Stein, vice president for government affairs at SCHOTT Solar North America.

It will soon have even more competition: China’s largest solar panel manufacturer, Suntech Power, just announced plans to open its first American plant near Phoenix in 2010, hiring 75 people initially with plans to expand to 200.

Biofuels and Biomaterials

The top five states with potential for biomass manufacturing, according to the Blue Green Alliance study, are Texas, New York, California, Ohio and Oklahoma.

In Ohio, FirstEnergy initially planned to shut down the R.E. Burger Power Plant in Akron rather than spend $380 million to bring it into compliance with new air quality regulations. Instead, the company invested $200 million to convert the plant to burn biomass. The repurposed plant will come on-line in 2013, employing its original 105 workers and creating 200 new jobs.

Technology Review’s latest Top 10 Private Companies to Watch list includes three biofuel companies: Range Fuels, which will open the first U.S. commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plant in Georgia next year; Qteros, which is building a pilot plant in Chicopee, Mass.; and Mascoma, which will soon open a plant in Kinross, Mich.

Conservation and Efficiency

The recovery act’s $5 billion investment in the Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP) is projected to create over 100,000 new jobs in manufacturing, distribution and installation of insulation. (Building retrofits create eight times as many jobs per million dollars invested as coal production.)

In Ohio, where a $266.8 million grant from the Department of Energy’s Weatherization Program is retrofitting 32,000 homes, it’s estimated that the program will have created 590 new jobs and retained 487 by March 2012.

Serious Materials in Sunnyvale, Calif., which produces super-insulating windows, purchased two shuttered factories to meet demand for Illinois’ Weatherization Assistance Program.

“We’re small, but ... the opportunity now for things like low-income housing weatherization, is staggering. We will grow four times from last year to this year,” said Chuck Wetmore, who headed one of the factories, Kensington Windows in Vandergrift, Pa., and will now run the Serious Materials operation.

In addition, the green building industry will likely create or support 7.9 million jobs over the next four years, according to a report by the U.S. Green Building Council and Booz Allen Hamilton.

Smart Grid

The energy consulting firm KEMA estimates that smart grid development could create 280,000 U.S. jobs by 2012. Those jobs will involve grid monitoring, renewable energy integration, smart meter networking, consumer energy management and, most importantly, digital data management.

Clean Edge found that many high-level information technology executives are already making the move to smart grid companies.

Benefiting from the recovery act’s $3.3 billion Smart Grid Investment Grant Program, smart grid developer Silver Spring Network, based in Redwood City, Calif., is partnering with GE, Florida Power and Light, and Cisco Systems to develop a smart grid network for Miami businesses and residences that will enable the utility to manage power more efficiently. Already in contract with utilities serving 25 percent of the U.S. population, Google-backed Silver Spring currently has approximately 50 job openings listed in business development, customer operations, hardware and software engineering, IT, and other areas.

Another sign of the sector’s growth is the recent creation of the first smart grid and electric infrastructure exchange traded fund by NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc., Clean Edge, Inc. and First Trust Advisors L.P.

Wind

In 2008, the U.S. became the world leader in total wind power installed capacity with over 25,000 MW, creating 35,000 new jobs and bringing total employment in the sector to 85,000, according to the Environmental Defense Fund’s Manufacturing Climate Solutions report.

The North Carolina Wind Working Group found that every 100 MW of installed wind power capacity provides 310 full-time manufacturing jobs, 67 contracting and installation jobs, and 9.5 jobs in operation and maintenance. So if the U.S. achieves its 20 percent wind power by 2030 goal, the sector could support 500,000 jobs with three million additional jobs in construction and development.

Accordingly, the Department of Energy plans to invest approximately $118 million in wind energy with $93 million coming from recovery act funds.

The five states with the most potential for wind manufacturing, according to the Blue Green Alliance report are California, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin.

The Spanish company Gamesa, the second largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world, has four facilities in Pennsylvania providing jobs for over 900 employees.

The U.S. ”is where the growth is going to be," said Jim Buddelmeyer, vice president of purchasing for Gamesa. "That's why Gamesa has a big footprint here and we continue to invest money here."

Despite a lag in sales due to the economy, Danish Vestas Wind Systems is proceeding with a new factory in Brighton, Colo., that will employ 650 workers by 2010, a nacelle (wind turbine housing) factory for 700 workers, an R&D facility with 100 workers, and a wind tower facility in Pueblo, Colo., with 500 workers.

How Do the Salaries Compare?

According to Clean Edge, salaries for solar PV employees average $40,000 for an entry-level solar energy system installer, and $75,100 for a mid-level system integration engineer. In the biofuel sector, a recyclable material collector can earn $38,100 while a boiler operator makes $61,100.

Salaries for smart grid workers range from $46,400 for a network operations center technician to $87,700 for a mid-level hardware design engineer.

In the wind power sector, a mid-level sheet metal worker can make $50,300, and a field service engineer averages $62,400.

A U.S. Senate subcommittee report on green jobs maintains that green jobs pay relatively low wages, and Robert Pollin, professor of economics and founding co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, acknowledges that green job salaries average about 20 percent less than similar jobs in the fossil fuels industry. Comparing salaries side by side is misleading, though, Pollin said: Green investments will create three times as many good jobs — at all salary levels — as the same spending in the fossil fuel industry, and by raising overall employment, green jobs also provide many new opportunities for both the unemployed and the underemployed.

Clean Tech Down the Road

While clean tech is on the ascent, the nation still has a way to go before it fulfills the promise of robust job creation.

“Clean tech job growth is small scale relative to the economy,” said Dean Baker, an economist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

“ARRA has helped percentage-wise — with green sectors up by 30 to 40 percent from the stimulus — but it’s starting from a very small base. The absolute numbers are low. We’re talking tens of thousands of jobs when millions are out of work.” The national unemployment rate as of October was 10.2 percent.

The recovery act also has yet to have its full impact on the clean tech sector because, while federal money has been committed, most funding has yet to be released.

Pollin explained that the Congressional Budget Office estimated only 2 percent of the investment in renewable energy would occur in 2009; the rest would be spread over the next five years.

That infusion of money will not just stimulate, “it will be transformative, so that after the stimulus runs out, we will have a new system that can last for years,” Pollin said. “Although it may not be the best stimulus for the short-term labor market, the green component of ARRA is a pioneering effort, going way beyond any other environmental investment in this country.”

The recovery act coupled with federal climate legislation could generate approximately $150 billion a year in U.S. clean tech investments over the next decade, resulting in 1.7 million new jobs, according to PERI.

Encouraged by ARRA’s backing, clean tech investment is the No. 1 venture investment sector, with investments in North America, after a slump earlier in the year, totaling $1.1 billion in the third quarter of 2009.

Source: http://solveclimate.com/blog/20091129/clean-tech-jobs-spring-investment-pours-and-factories-are-transformed