I loved a Magazine called Business 2.0. Over the last year it folded and many of its writers and editors joined Fortune magazine. One of which is Todd Woody. Well the other day I stumbled across his blog called Green Wombat and an entry called From rustbelt to greenbelt. The premise of the entry is how the alternative energy industry is able to seize upon the availability of skilled manufacturing personnel. Here is a blurb:
Just in the past week, First Solar (FSLR)
announced an expansion of its Ohio plant that makes thin-film solar
panels. German company Flabeg will break ground on a factory outside
Pittsburgh that will manufacture parabolic solar mirrors for
large-scale solar power plants planned for the Southwest. Thin-film
solar company Energy Conversion Devices (ENER), meanwhile, operates three factories in Michigan and is currently doubling the production capacity of one of its plants.
In fact, nearly all the United States’ current solar manufacturing
capacity is in the Midwest, save for Silicon Valley company Ausra’s
factory in Las Vegas. (Thin-film startup Nanosolar is building a
factory in San Jose, Calif.)
“Our
processes really require high productivity, so what makes it
competitive here in the Midwest is that we have a great labor force
that is eager to work and well-trained already,” ECD chief executive
Mark Morelli told Green Wombat on Monday.
This is a just a small example of something I’ve written about several times – that eventually, globalization comes back to the US. We are simply in phase one and phase two will see many more opportunities for US workers to sell their expertise in services and products to all over the world rather than just to the US.
Other entries of mine on the subject:
Spinning Globalization the Other Way
Olympic Prediction
Working Thoughts 