General ElectricA new GE wind turbine comes with battery included.

By John Upton

SolidarityEconomy.net via Grist.org

If you want to use solar power at night or wind power on calm days, you need batteries that can store energy after it’s produced. But why bother with two pieces of equipment when you could have one?

Engineers are now beginning to build batteries directly into wind and solar systems.

Combined renewable generation-storage systems are just starting to be deployed in the wind sector. From a report last month in Quartz:

[W]hat if every wind turbine became a node in an energy internet, communicating with the grid and each other to adjust electricity production while storing and releasing electricity as needed? That’s the idea behind General Electric’s new “brilliant” turbine, the first three of which the company said … will be installed at a Texas wind farm operated by Invenergy.

The 2.5-MW windmill is something of a technological leap in an industry where turbines have gotten bigger and bigger but not necessarily smarter. The turbine’s software captures tens of thousands of data points each second on wind and grid conditions and then adjusts production, storing electricity in an attached 50 kilowatt-hour sodium nickel chloride battery. If, say, a wind farm is generating too much electricity to [be] absorbed by the grid—not an uncommon occurrence in gusty west Texas—it can store the electricity in the battery. When the wind dies down, the electricity can be released from the battery and put back on the grid.

“This provides a path for lowering the cost of energy even more,” Keith Longtin, general manager of GE’s wind product line, told Quartz. “We think by being able to integrate the storage into the turbine and by being able to provide predictable power it’s going to minimize a lot of the balancing the grid has to do today.”

And the solar industry is trying to catch up. A team of University of Wisconsin researchers describes a new invention in the journal Advanced Materials. From a press release:

In a quest for a smaller, more self-sustaining solar power source, a UW-Madison electrical engineer has proposed a design for solar panels that can simultaneously generate power from sunlight and store power reserves for later, all within a single device. …

The final design allows for a standard-size solar cell that can simultaneously power a device and store energy for later use, creating a closed-loop system for small-scale applications of solar energy. “We can have some energy set aside locally, right in the panel, so that when you need it, you can get it,” says [engineer Hongrui] Jiang. …

Other such solar panels — referred to as photovoltaic self-charging cells — have been around for a while, but the ability to provide energy continuously, rain or shine, sets Jiang’s apart. …

Since the design scales up easily, says Jiang, microgrids — small scale power grids used to balance renewable power sources in energy-efficient buildings — would be another ideal application, since self-contained solar panels would limit the need for battery management and would allow engineers to design buildings that rely on the outside power grid even less than current systems.

And there are futuristic applications: picture lighting systems that can be installed in remote areas — without running expensive power lines. “You could have one solar panel installed that will store the energy the system might need through nights and cloudy days,” says Jiang.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

By JOHN KOTEN

Wall St Journal via SolidarityEconomy.net

June 11, 2013 - On a dark and stormy night two weeks ago in Schenectady, N.Y., Ken Hislop was relaxing at home when his cellphone suddenly began buzzing in his pocket. It was an urgent text message—from the General Electric Co. factory where he works.

Soon, a second message arrived. And then another, and another. The texts were being sent by tiny sensors embedded inside a series of machines, some of which look like enormous upside-down cement mixers. A violent thunderstorm passing through the area had caused something to go wrong.

"I knew right away we'd lost power at the plant," says Mr. Hislop, a manufacturing engineer. He quickly switched on his iPad and accessed animated schematic maps that signaled everything happening at the $170 million facility, which makes massive batteries for things like cellphone towers and power plants. Though the outage had been momentary, much of the equipment at the factory had to, in effect, reboot, and any blip could mean costly lost production time.

"I was getting a first-person, real-time account," says Mr. Hislop, who also could watch video of the storm from the plant's roof. The information allowed him to ensure that the machinery restarted in proper sequence and that the sensitive battery material hadn't been damaged.

Welcome to the New Industrial Revolution—a wave of technologies and ideas that are creating a computer-driven manufacturing environment that bears little resemblance to the gritty and grimy shop floors of the past. The revolution threatens to shatter long-standing business models, upend global trade patterns and revive American industry.

Impacts Big and Small

For big companies, it means a swath of new tools to build smarter, leaner factories and explore innovative new products, materials and techniques that weren't possible before. And thanks to plummeting prices, small companies have access to better, cheaper manufacturing equipment and design tools—giving even one-person startups the chance to create market-shaking innovations. Many people liken the era we're in to the early days of computing, where upstart hobbyists in their garages came up with huge advances that changed the industry. (See "Build a Better Mousetrap—Fast."

"Manufacturing is undergoing a change that is every bit as significant as the introduction of interchangeable parts or the production line, maybe even more so," says Michael Idelchik, who heads up advanced technologies at GE's global research lab, located about 15 minutes away from the battery plant. "The future is not going to be about stretched-out global supply chains connected to a web of distant giant factories. It's about small, nimble manufacturing operations using highly sophisticated new tools and new materials."

There's no question that a coinage like the New Industrial Revolution sounds magisterial, given the profound impact that the original Industrial Revolution had not just on business but on living standards around the world. And there's also no question that for all the big talk and big forecasts, many things will go on being produced using techniques that were all but perfected long ago.

But the big label is far from unwarranted. The upheaval, still in an early stage, is accelerating now thanks to the convergence of a number of trends: the low cost and accessibility of Big Data associated with cloud computing; the plummeting cost of electronic sensors, microprocessors and other components that can be used to make machines more adept; and advances in software and communications technology that make it possible to manage manufacturing with a whole new level of precision and enable new forms of collaboration.

A new wave of supercheap electronic sensors, microprocessors and other components means that facilities like Mr. Hislop's need almost no human help to do their jobs and can collect huge amounts of data along the way. Managers can get instant alerts about potential problems or study the numbers to find ways to boost efficiency and improve performance.

Flexible Fabricating

At the same time, technological advances now allow manufacturers to invent new ways of fabricating things that represent an extreme departure from the classic production-line model. By far the most significant of these steps forward is additive manufacturing—a process of making a three-dimensional object of virtually any shape from a digital model.

These exotic machines can use a range of materials—everything from wood pulp to cobalt—and create things as varied as sneakers, fuel nozzles for airplanes and, ultimately, even human organs. And a single piece of manufacturing equipment, rather than being custom-designed to perform a single function, can be programed to fabricate a virtually limitless array of objects.

And, of course, that includes making more machines. On a tour of a laboratory of advanced manufacturing equipment that Autodesk Inc. is building on a pier in downtown San Francisco, Chief Executive Carl Bass points to some masking tape on the ground that marks the spot where a sophisticated computer-controlled milling machine will be housed.

"The Japanese company Mori Seiki is making that in Sacramento in an automated factory," says Mr. Bass, whose company creates computer-aided-design software. "The factory is so advanced that you almost don't need to turn on the lights because the machines are doing everything, and what they are making is other machines." In fact, a 3-D printer has replicated itself at a university in England.

Still, manufacturers will have to navigate big new challenges in this era, too. For one thing, because additive manufacturing works from digital models of objects, companies are much more vulnerable to intellectual-property theft—the same way that easily copied music and movies have shaken the entertainment business.

The Sole of a New Machine

To get an up-close look at how the new technologies are already disrupting the old ways of doing things, consider Nike Inc.'s Flyknit shoe.

Nike

An upper for Nike's Flyknit shoe.

As high tech as some sneakers may be in materials and appearance, almost all of them are still made on assembly lines that put a shockingly heavy emphasis on human labor. Workers sit side by side in enormous facilities, cutting material and stitching and gluing shoe components together. But, starting last year, Nike began making the Flyknit a whole new way.

The company's engineers modified a machine used to make sweaters into a shoe-making contraption that knits the entire upper portion of the shoe in a single cocoon-like piece that is then attached to the tongue and to the sole. As the shoe is stitched, proprietary software instructs the machine to alter the materials being used—a bit more polyester thread here, a bit more there—to add strength or flexibility where needed.

Bespoke Products

A Bespoke Products leg.

Most important, it makes all these refinements at no added cost. The technology allowed Nike to make a shoe with just a few parts instead of dozens and with up to 80% less waste. "The Nike Flyknit is the world's first mass-produced consumer product made using additive manufacturing," says Maurice Conti, director of strategic innovation at Autodesk, which worked with Nike on the Flyknit project. "It's a hugely significant advance, not the least because, once you start doing things this way it obviously takes a lot of the labor cost out of the equation."

The implications for this are as obvious as they are profound: Almost seemingly out of the blue, the reason for making shoes in low-wage countries begins to evaporate and the advantages of locating the machine closer to the customer—in part for faster delivery—begin to loom much larger. Already, Adidas AG is knitting a shoe, the Primeknit, in its home country, Germany.

Last year, Boston Consulting Group published a report predicting that as much as 30% of America's exports from China could be domestically produced by 2020. President Obama gave a nod to this hope in his State of the Union address in February when he said that the popular additive-manufacturing technique called 3-D printing "has the potential to revolutionize the way we make just about everything."

Last year the president proposed a $1 billion addition to his fiscal 2013 budget to create a network of as many as 15 manufacturing-innovation institutes around the country. One is already up and running in Youngstown, Ohio, the setting of the Bruce Springsteen song about the rise and fall of the steel industry. Three more are in the works under the supervision of the Department of Energy and the Defense Department. Congress has yet to approve spending for the others.

Not So Fast

But the jury is out on whether a boost in manufacturing will create a resurgence in U.S. manufacturing employment, which peaked at around 19.5 million in 1979 and today totals around 12 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Economists attribute the recent modest increase in U.S. manufacturing employment to a rebound in the business cycle, and have found no evidence yet of an employment rebound connected to advanced manufacturing or the return of jobs from overseas.)

Almost certainly, it won't mean creating jobs the old way—building large factories that employ thousands of people. The real opportunity is in the growth of highly specialized, highly advanced microfactories and in legions of small entrepreneurial ventures making old things in new ways, as well as producing new products and custom-made items. An important sign of the times: the largest U.S. maker of 3-D printers, 3D Systems Corp., introduced a slick push-button model for $1,299 last year—putting it within range of the smallest businesses and home users. Kits to make a printer powered by software from the open-source RepRap project run as low as $400.

Experts envision bike shops that print custom frames and assemble bikes on demand; made-to-order shops or websites that offer one-off or personally designed jewelry; and more sophisticated production shops that crank out all manner of high-end products. Already, a company called Bespoke Products, a unit of 3D Systems, is making artificial limbs. Another, Organovo Holdings Inc., is using 3-D printing to create human tissue for use in medical labs. At a recent conference, the company showed off a piece of raw meat it had made in a printer. Over time, this "democratization of manufacturing," as some refer to it, is expected to accelerate, and one day could mean that your local auto dealer or maybe even your neighbor (or you) will be able print out a replacement part for your car or make you a new cup holder sized perfectly for that enormous thermos you carry around.

New Ways of Making

Additive manufacturing may bring other changes that are just as dramatic as "factories" run out of somebody's garage. Additive manufacturing makes it possible to create designs or structures that weren't feasible using the two traditional ways of making things: milling (sculpting material out of a solid block) and casting (pouring liquid material that hardens into a mold). Both of these techniques are greatly enhanced by mass production because quality typically rises and costs fall as volume increases. Making a lot of something also means it's not so painful to discard defective units.

Advanced Architecture with Joris Laarman Lab

Mataerial, a prototype 3-D printer that can make curved objects.

But additive manufacturing enables the creation of materials with multiple parts and moving components without assembly. And because the process is entirely controlled by computers, following precise digital instructions, the very first piece that's manufactured is just as good as the last one. The incremental cost of producing a part becomes strictly a function of time and materials.

All of which means manufacturers can scan further afield for inspiration. Designers and engineers at General Electric have begun looking at ancient objects and prehistoric bird skeletons, and delving anew into topology, for inspiration on new forms of design. Their thinking: Centuries of making things under the constraints of old methods may have caused their predecessors to discard innovative structures simply because there was no practical way to produce them through milling or casting. But what was impractical in the past may be quite feasible today.

There's another big change playing out that isn't so obvious but could have a huge impact on the world of manufacturing. The rise of the 3-D printer has coincided with the digitization of the physical world through the use of 3-D scanners and, increasingly, two-dimensional photos that can be stitched together digitally using software to create precise 3-D renditions of anything made of atoms.

That affects everyone who works with manufacturers and who participates in the creative process: designers, engineers, materials specialists, machine makers and supply managers, among others. It's much easier to collaborate on a model if it is stored on a computer, because lots of digital hands can be working on it at the same time.

"The big untold story in all of this is the way the digitization of manufacturing compresses everything—from the early design of a product to its final assembly," says Ping Fu, who founded a company called Geomagic that makes 3-D modeling software and is now in charge of strategy at 3D Systems. "Everyone can now work together simultaneously. The software makes it possible, and you get much better results than when all of these activities were being done in different silos."

Still, this new environment leaves manufacturers facing big new challenges, as digital files of physical objects show up in huge numbers on websites like Thingiverse and Physibles, and manufacturing instructions appear online, too.

"I give a lot of speeches about this topic to manufacturing groups, and people are usually quiet during the Q&A," says Christine Furstoss, who oversees a staff of 450 engineers and scientists working on materials, energy strategy and processing technology at GE's research center. "But afterward, they come up to me in private and want to talk about how frightened they are. People get a glimpse of how this could change the game in their business, and they are just not sure what to do about it."

The Road Forward

For an idea of how the New Industrial Revolution might play out on a large scale, look at GE. Its footprints are everywhere in the advanced-manufacturing community. It is a highly visible participant in the federal government's efforts to boost additive manufacturing, as well as university programs focusing on the topic. Partners include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Amazon.com's Web-services department and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which are collaborating with GE on a new crowdsourcing platform for product design and development.

General Electric

High-tech batteries from GE.

The company also is latching onto the technique in-house. For instance, it is making a big bet on additive manufacturing as a way to create engine parts that weigh less, cost less and employ more intricate designs. Last year, it bought one of the largest additive manufacturers in the U.S., Morris Technologies, and plans to use the company to make the sophisticated fuel nozzle for its next-generation jet engine, the LEAP. (The Morris family has a long industrial pedigree: It once supplied steel tubing to the Wright Brothers' bicycle shop.)

The new nozzle will be 3-D printed as a single part rather than assembled from 18 pieces, and it will be up to five times more durable. GE is also running its own 3-D metal printers, testing the procedure out on as many parts as possible for both the LEAP and the GE 9x, its next-generation 777 engine. This week, GE plans to announce a major investment in an another new additive-manufacturing factory that will mass-produce ceramic engine shrouds.

All told, the company projects it will spend $3.5 billion on aviation-related advanced manufacturing in the next five years and will produce 100,000 end-use parts for its engines annually by 2020 using additive techniques.

One of GE's most creative initiatives is an arrangement that will begin to make its more than 30,000 patents available to inventors and entrepreneurs who use the website Quirky—which employs crowdsourcing to evaluate ideas for products. "It's a whole new paradigm for innovation," says Ben Kaufman, the founder of Quirky, an industrial-design company in New York.

Starting this month, inventors and their ilk will be able to sift through the first 200 of GE's patents posted on Quirky, with more than 1,000 expected to be available by the end of the year. People who think they can use the technology without infringing on GE's own use will be able to click a button and begin a process enabling them to license use of the patent for whatever application they've dreamed up.

GE's efforts also offer a look at how data can be leveraged in this new era. One of the take-aways from a visit to GE's battery plant back in Schenectady, located adjacent to a parcel that housed Thomas Edison's machine works, is the sheer volume of data it generates—information that allows plant engineers to continually improve the production process and head off problems before they become serious.

The company can trace a product's entire genealogy, from containers of dirt, sand and salt to a bank of high-tech batteries supporting a nation's electric grid. The data not only improve quality control—if a defect shows up at any point, GE can trace it back to its original source—but in the end give GE a powerful competitive weapon that's virtually impossible to duplicate.

The Schenectady plant, nestled in a valley alongside the Mohawk River, is so extensively networked and connected, in fact, that it might just as easily be thought of as a single machine rather than a collection of them. And, of course, because it is so automated, it doesn't require a whole lot of human assistance. GE's Schenectady campus once had so many employees it was given its own ZIP Code, 12345. Yet even when it reaches full production—GE expects its output to exceed $1 billion in annual sales by 2020—the showcase battery plant won't employ more than 450 people.

Mr. Hislop, who confesses to using his iPad to check in on the factory during a recent camping trip, describes his experience on the night of the storm in the tones of an anxious parent. Yet in the midst of the howling winds and thunderclaps, the technology meant he could remain intimately in touch with everything that was happening across town. Despite the beating the plant was taking, he says he felt "reassured."

Mr. Koten is a columnist for WSJ.Money magazine in New York. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

A version of this article appeared June 11, 2013, on page R1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Revolution In the Making.

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It’s Time to Talk about the Burgeoning Robot Middle Class

By Illah Nourbakhsh

SolidarityEconomy.net via MIT Tech Review

In the book Race Against the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT’s Sloan School of Management present a chart showing U.S. productivity, GDP, employment, and income from 1953 to 2011. The chart looks as you would expect from 1953 until the mid-1980s, with every one of the measures rising together: employees work more productively, companies make more money, and more hires occur as the middle class swells.

Then, during Reagan’s tenure, the bad news begins to show its face. First, even though productivity and GDP continue their upward arc, median household income starts to level off. That is unsettling, since it suggests that companies can get richer and yet employees can stop benefiting from increasing GDP: what happened to trickle-down? A decade later, in the mid-1990s, more trouble crops up: employment flattens as GDP and productivity continue even faster growth.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that these are signs of a true sea change in the dynamics of productivity and employment. Contrary to popular conceptions that all we need is more technological innovation to increase employment, they argue, technological innovation is itself among the forces behind the change.

The elephant in the room is how robotics will play out for human employment in the long term.

New robots will take on advanced manufacturing, tutoring, scheduling, and customer relations. They operate equipment, manage construction, operate backhoes, and yes, even drive tomorrow’s cars.

It is time for not just economists but roboticists, like me, to ask, “How will robotic advances transform society in potentially dystopian ways?” My concern is that without serious discourse and explicit policy changes, the current path will lead to an ever more polarized economic world, with robotic technologies replacing the middle class and further distancing our society from authentic opportunity and economic justice.

So how do we deal with the impending mass migration of robots into our middle class? Perhaps we should start by talking about it over dinner (robots don’t eat with us yet). I submit to you four dinnertime conversation starters, each of which I believe captures something essential to understanding why the impending Robot Revolution may be nothing like the Industrial Revolution.

Robots won’t have to be as good as the humans they replace.

Consider the automated checkout line at your local grocery store. It makes more mistakes than a human clerk, it is harder to use, and it is slower because of the rotating error light that loves to interrupt the whole process every few minutes. Is it better than a human? Of course not. It is simply good enough. And so begins the march of mediocre robots that can defensibly replace humans, not because they advantage the customer, but because they save money for a corporation. Robots will be able to fix your car poorly before they can fix it well. They will cook food that is bland and mealy before they garner a Michelin star. But they will take on middle-class jobs and win, not because of their qualitative merits, but because they look good in the antiseptic light of financial balance sheets.

Take a look at the new robot Baxter, from Rethink Robotics. It is Baxter’s price tag—$20,000—that makes it potentially revolutionary. The return on investment for a company that replaces a single human employee is realized before year’s end. Does Baxter need to do everything the laid-off human could have done? Not quite. It just has to do enough to justify the replacement: one machine for one warm body’s fractional salary.

Some robots will be better than the humans they replace.

Then there is a more threatening issue: robots are improving in performance far faster than humans. We are stuck with an evolutionary timetable that is glacial, whereas computer vision is rapidly moving from amoeba to insect. We face a future in which robots will be better than humans in entire job categories—that is simply a matter of time. The Atlantic’s Adam Davidson writes about a uniquely specific example of robo-specialization in “Making It in America.” The question is, as this frontier collides with the reality of massive employment numbers in particular categories, do we justify machine replacement and presume to conduct a great deal of retraining? The frontier is ever-moving, and the retraining will be never-ending. This is an even harder question of identity for our civilization: is chronic underemployment a fact that cannot be changed because robots will be demonstrably better than we are, or do we have a responsibility to influence the advance of automation for the sake of some greater good?

Merging human and robot abilities is another employment threat.

One truism of robotics is that not all aspects of human ability are being copied equally. However, so long as artificial intelligence is so artificial, maybe our natural intelligence provides us with a special station that robots cannot overcome. Sadly, such reasoning does not really improve the prospect of chronic underemployment. Outstanding research in telepresence promises to enable robots to act with guidance from humans. They can phone home when facing a tough decision, and humans can provide the eyes and brains while a robot wields the brute strength. As we research human-robot control systems, not least of all for robotic war-fighting drones, we learn how to patch a single person’s brains and problem-solving powers into many robots at once. A whole factory of thinking humans could be replaced by unthinking robots so long as they had that drone interface, asking for just-in-time problem-solving help from a human supervisor when needed. Give companies a great human-robot interface and a whole pallet of dumb robots, and you still have an underemployment crisis.

Imagining the possible future scenarios for middle-class unemployment is a first step to considering ways in which we can preserve our quality of life given the robotic future that will meet us. Without doubt, robots can greatly improve many lives, offering everything from smart prosthetics to home care for the aging. But for humans, the robot future is a mixed bag. It is up to us to formulate a conversation about how the employment impact of robotic technologies will inform the cycle of innovation and business change that we will witness. If we actually pay attention, then we just might have a chance to future-proof the middle class.

Illah Nourbakhsh is a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. His latest book is Robot Futures, published by MIT Press.

Work proceeding on world's largest solar bridge at Blackfriars

By Paul Ridden

SolidarityEconomy.net via GizMag

The new Blackfriars railway station, being built on the foundations of a Victorian bridge spanning the River Thames in London, has started to have the first of over 4,400 solar panels installed on its roof (All photos: Solarcentury/Network Rail)

Blackfriars Bridge, a Victorian rail bridge in the heart of London, is now well on its way to becoming the biggest solar array in the city and the world's largest solar bridge. When the installation is complete, the roof of the new Blackfriars railway station will be home to over 6,000 square meters (64,583 sq.ft.) of solar panels, satisfying half of the station's power needs.

We recently featured a two mile stretch of rail tunnel with 16,000 solar panels on the roof, providing power to signaling, lighting, and heating of railway stations, and also to some of the trains using the Belgian rail network.

Now, Blackfriars Bridge has started to have over 4,400 high-efficiency Sanyo HIT photovoltaic panels installed on its newly-built roof by London-based Solarcentury and engineers from Jacobs. Blackfriars spans the River Thames, and was originally built during the age of steam in 1886.

The new Blackfriars Station is currently being redeveloped as part of a Network Rail Thameslink program upgrade (with funding from the Department for Transport's safety and environment fund), which aims to have longer trains - meaning more seats for commuters - running from Bedford to Brighton via London. The solar installation will generate a claimed 900,000kWh of electricity every year, and will be joined by other energy-saving measures such as rain harvesting systems and sun pipes for natural lighting.

About the Author

While Paul is loath to reveal his age, he will admit to cutting his IT teeth on a TRS-80 (although he won't say which version). An obsessive fascination with computer technology blossomed from hobby into career before the desire for sunnier climes saw him wave a fond farewell to his native Blighty in favor of Bordeaux, France. He's now a dedicated newshound pursuing the latest bleeding edge tech for Gizmag.   All articles by Paul Ridden

The new train, designed by Central Japan Railway Co (JR Tokai), will initially link central Tokyo with Nagoya station

By Danielle Demetriou, Tokyo

SolidarityEconomy.net via Telegraph, UK

The new generation L0 Series trains, which employ the latest magnetic levitation technology instead of conventional wheels, will begin commercial services in 2027.

The first five cars of the new train, which has a distinct aerodynamic "nose" at the front, were displayed on a test track in Yamanashi Prefecture.

The carriages, which are propelled by magnetic forces, were pulled along the track by a special maintenance vehicle as part of preliminary trials, with wide-scale tests due to commence in September.

The new train, designed by Central Japan Railway Co (JR Tokai), will initially link central Tokyo with Nagoya station, cutting current bullet train journey times by more than half, from 90 to 40 minutes.

The final train will consist of 16 carriages carrying up to 1,000 passengers at a time, with plans under way to extend the line to Osaka by 2045. The plan is ultimately to create a high-speed mass transit maglev network across the country.

It was in 1964 that Japan was propelled to the forefront of transport technology after it unveiled its first bullet train – known as "shinkansen" – to coincide with its hosting of the Olympic Games.

Since then, Japan has become famous as home to the world's most sophisticated rail network system, with bullet trains travelling at speeds of up to 199mph across more than 1,400 miles of tracks.

Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, is currently pushing for a surge in sales of Japanese road, railway and power station technology to emerging nations such as India, which is expected to use Japan's bullet train technology for a new Mumbai to Ahmedabad line.

Today, with close to 60 years passing since the first bullet train was launched, Japan is investing heavily in maglev technology in order to remain at the forefront of rail engineering.

Competition with China is already strong, with the Shanghai maglev train capable of travelling at a top speed of 268mph – although its average speed is 152.5mph due to the limited length of the track.

Pony up ratepayers: nuclear plants need $6 billion from you now or more later

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By Paul Dvorak

SolidarityEconomy.net via Windpower Engineering

May 20, 2013 - A report from an economic analyst with the Vermont Law School Institute for Energy and the Environment says ratepayers in South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia must either pay for $6 billion in money already invested in current nuclear power projects or face paying even more as the projects face excess costs of $20 billion or more.

The report, authored by Mark Cooper, looks at the economics of the V.C. Summer nuclear project in South Carolina and the proposed Levy nuclear project in Florida and concludes ratepayers of the utilities involved will end up paying for $10 billion or more in excess costs for each project.

Cooper said the projects are being driven not by marketplace economics, but by advanced cost recovery financing models.

“In the face of escalating nuclear construction costs, cheap natural gas, rising competition from increasingly inexpensive wind and other renewable, falling consumer demand and a heightened focus on energy efficiency, the economics of these new nuclear projects could not be more abysmal for ratepayers,” Cooper stated in a release. “The fact that advance cost recovery for nuclear reactors shifts the risk of construction from stockholders to ratepayers is the one and only thing that is keeping these uneconomical reactor projects alive today.”

The report is available online at http://www.vermontlaw.edu/Documents/PublicRiskPrivateProfit_Cooper.pdf

MEDILL/Andrea Mayeux

Passengers hustle to catch their train at Chicago's Union Station. The station will soon be home to high-speed service shuttling passengers toward St. Louis at 110 miles per hour.

By Andrea Mayeux

SolidarityEconomy.net via Medill Reports

May 29, 2013 - New high-speed rail lines are credited with sparking a real estate and housing boom, among other economic benefits, in smaller cities in China. Now experts are debating whether rail modernization can have the same effects in the U.S.

A study by researchers at the University of California-Los Angeles and China’s Tsinghua University found that by connecting “second tier” cities to global hubs, more people move to the smaller cities where housing costs are lower, creating a real-estate boom, among other unplanned benefits.

In 2007 China built new, 185-miles-per-hour bullet train lines to connect Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou to nearby cities, some of the construction coinciding with the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Based on the real estate appreciation recorded between 2006 and 2010, the researchers estimated that when "market potential," defined as access to goods, services and labor, is boosted 10 percent by a new bullet train line, housing prices rise 4.5 percent.

Matthew Kahn, co-author of the study, believes the same could apply in California where high-speed rail is planned, more specifically smaller communities becoming connected to “superstar cities”, as he calls them, like San Francisco.
“The bullet train offers the possibility,” Kahn said, “that they effectively become suburbs of those communities. And become desirable to a subset of people who live there.”

Uptown Station in Normal, Ill., is ready for high-speed Amtrak service. City Manager Mark Peterson says the widespread anticipation of coming Amtrak upgrades helped attract private investment around the transportation hub.

Small cities need to be too far to drive to but too close to fly to the nearest “megacity.” Kahn used Philadelphia as an example. Right now, he said, a trip to New York City takes 80 minutes by high-speed Amtrak, which averages 150 miles per hour.
“If that became a half hour away because of the high-speed rail, I think Philadelphia home prices would jump sharply,” Kahn said. “There’d be much more demand to live there.”

Kahn and his co-author Siqi Zheng found bullet trains unintentionally created new suburbs called “sweet spots” about 60 to 470 miles from mega cities. Bullet trains provide big-city benefits despite the distance without “downsides like high housing costs, overcrowding, or air and water pollution,” Kahn said.

“It really comes down to," Kahn said, "is there a train that moves at 150 miles per hour" and are there good local connections to it? "Then there's certainly some potential there."

For instance, he added, “if the train moved fast enough between Cleveland and Chicago, I think there’d be similar gentrification in Cleveland.”
Some experts question the theory. Comparing China and the U.S. is like comparing “apples and oranges,” said Stephen Schlickman, executive director of the Urban Transportation Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"We have a much better interstate system and a robust aviation system,” Schlickman said. “That discounts any comparison between the two."
Kahn acknowledged the differences in transportation systems, citing it as a potential reason why high-speed rail hasn’t taken off here. Some question whether ridership can recoup the billions of dollars required to build high-speed rail.
“In China there’s already the density in their cities to support such investments,” Kahn said.

In Illinois a portion of Amtrak’s 284-mile corridor linking Chicago and St. Louis is undergoing a $1.1 billion overhaul to bring train speeds up to 110 miles an hour. The Federal Railroad Administration is funding the project. Instead of five-and-a-half hours, passengers will make the trip in four hours.
Given the Chicago-St. Louis corridor’s speed, Kahn expects cities along the line could experience revitalization of downtowns and add multi-family units near Amtrak stations.

Some of those cities are already seeing benefits.
Normal, Ill., which is about 130 miles from Chicago and 170 miles from St. Louis, received $22 million from the federal government to build a transportation center as a result of plans to upgrade the line. Since then, City Manager Mark Peterson said, development in the uptown area has taken off. A new $80 million conference center sits across the street. A $30 million development near construction will include a hotel, luxury apartments and retail shops.

Peterson said that just “the possibility of high speed rail helped us attract private investment to our central business district. We think we have just scratched the surface on what is the potential economic development implications of being right on that high-speed rail corridor.”

Peterson said corporations may not move in and real estate prices won’t grow until high-speed rail service starts. He predicts Normal will become an attractive place to live for people who work in Chicago but like the “downstate lifestyle.” Or perhaps the high-speed service will attract Chicagoans to commute to work in Normal.
“If I could, I would be buying anything I could get along the corridor,” Peterson said. “There is no question in my mind that property values are going up once this service is up and running.”
In Lincoln, Ill., about 167 miles from Chicago, 20,000 passengers get on and off every year, according to Mayor Keith Snyder.
In preparation for additional traffic, Lincoln is partnering with the Illinois Department of Transportation to buy and renovate the city’s historic depot.

“It’s going to be a great gateway for people who are coming into town,” Snyder said. With added streetscaping, Snyder hopes it draws passengers downtown to do some shopping or dining or enjoy local entertainment.

Lincoln hasn’t seen a spike in housing construction but Snyder thinks that could happen down the road. On-time performance and better departure times are key in making the line a more reliable form of transportation.

Chicago-St. Louis corridor construction is expected to end in 2017. In November 2012 trains started running at faster speeds – 110 miles an hour – along a small portion of the line, about 20 miles between Dwight and Pontiac.

More people are opting for train travel than ever before. Amtrak's March ridership set a record for the single best month ever with more than 2.8 million passengers, a 1.9 percent increase. In the first sixth months of Amtrak’s 2013 fiscal year, October to March, ridership grew 0.9 percent compared with the same period in 2012 even though Hurricane Sandy and other severe weather-related events caused significant service disruptions.

For the full fiscal year, Amtrak expects ridership to hit or surpass 2012’s record 31.2 million passengers.

Although Schlickman doesn’t necessarily think China’s data will be duplicated here in the U.S., he expects “very good local and positive economic effects” in cities outside Chicago. If high-speed rail lines radiated in every direction from Chicago, connecting to cities like Cleveland, Milwaukee and Minneapolis, Schlickman predicted, it could create another transportation hub.

“If we had that type of service coming into Union Station, you’re talking about a possibility of seeing a level of activity similar to Midway [International Airport],“ Schlickman said.

Brad Basham Photography

High-speed rail passengers are expected to fill the seats at the new Uptown Station in Normal, Ill.

International Union of Railways/Andrea Mayeux, Medill

While Amtrak trains in the U.S. hit 241 kilometers per hour, or 150 miles per hour, many other countries' trains are running faster or soon will be.

By Darren Quick

SolidarityEconomy.net via Gizmag

Makani Power's Wing 7 prototype Airborne Wind Turbine (AWT) will now benefit from the backing of Google XHaving already put its Google Wallet where its mouth by backing a solar power tower plant in California to the tune of US$168 million, Google has now turned to wind power. According to a report from Bloomberg Businessweek, the search giant has acquired Makani Power, a California-based startup whose Airborne Wind Turbine (AWT) technology first caught our interest in 2011.

The Makani Power acquisition comes from Google X, Google’s not-so-secret research and development arm that focuses on "moonshot" technologies, such as the Google driverless car and Google Glass. This is apparently the first time Google has acquired a company for Google X, but it’s not the first time it has invested in the wind power company. Google was a primary investor providing $10 million in funding to Makani Power in 2006, following up with another $5 million the following year.

Makani Power also received a grant in 2010 from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) to help in development of its Wing 7 prototype. This is a 30 kW scale model of Makani’s planned 600 kW utility-scale devices that are designed to fly at altitudes of between 250 and 600 m (800 and 1,950 ft) and transmit electricity to the ground via a tether.

The tethered wings are outfitted with turbines that operate like conventional wind turbines, with air moving across the blades forcing them to rotate and drive a generator to produce electricity. However, Makani says fitting them to a flying wing provides increased performance in low winds, allowing the turbines to produce about twice the power of a traditional wind turbine of the same size, while requiring less materials to build.

Makani says their superior low wind performance means its AWTs would be economically viable in areas where conventional wind turbines aren’t. While the technology would by slightly cheaper to run than conventional wind turbines in good wind areas, Makami says their cost of energy would be half that of conventional turbines in typical onshore or offshore sites. The AWTs are intended to be installed in arrays over large areas, flying in a circular path and spaced approximately one tether-length apart to ensure they don’t become tangled.

On its website, Makani says it recently completed the first-ever autonomous flight demonstrating all flight modes, including launch, hover and landing. It also confirmed the Google acquisition, saying the extra resources provided by the deal will help them accelerate development of the technology with the goal of making wind energy cost competitive with fossil fuels.

Video of the recent fully autonomous flight of the Wing 7 prototype can be seen in the following videos. The first shows the flight at 5x normal speed from a distance, while the second provides a closer view.

Sources: Makani Power, Bloomberg Businessweek

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Ecology, Knowledge and Innovation in Creating Productive Forces for the 21st Century

Restructuring Cuba's Economy Creates Debate over Democracy and Socialism in the 21st Century

By ROGER BURBACH

SolidarityEconomy.net via CounterPunch

This is a fruitful period of experimentation and debate in Cuba. It is now almost seven years since Raúl Castro replaced his brother Fidel, first as interim president in 2006 and then as president in 2008. Under Raúl, the country is taking steps to transform the economy, and a critical discussion is erupting over the dismantling of the authoritarian Communist model. Julio Díaz Vázquez, an economist at the University of Havana, declares: “With the updating of the economic model, Cuba faces complex challenges . . . in its social and political institutions. . . . The heritage of the Soviet model makes it necessary to break with the barriers erected by inertia, intransigence, [and] a double standard.” He adds, “These imperfections have led to deficiencies in [Cuba’s] democracy, its creative liberties, and its citizens’ participation.”1

Among the most important changes that have echoed internationally is the decree that took effect January 14 allowing Cubans to travel abroad without securing a special exit permit. Also, homes and vehicles can now be bought and sold openly, recognizing private ownership for the first time since the state took control of virtually all private property in the early 1960s.

The government is distributing uncultivated land, which constitutes about half of the countryside’s agriculturally viable terrain, in usufruct for 10 years in 10-hectare parcels with the possibility of lease renewal. To date there are 172,000 new agricultural producers. Beyond agriculture, 181 occupations filled by self-employed or independent workers such as food vendors, hair stylists, taxi drivers, plumbers, and shoe repairmen can now be licensed as trabajo por cuenta propia—self-employment. As of late 2012, about 380,000 people are self-employed in a work force of 5 million.

The most dramatic move against the old economic order came in April 2011, when the Sixth Communist Party Congress issued 313 lineamientos, or guidelines. A potpourri of measures and recommendations, the document calls for autonomy for the state enterprises, an expansion of cooperatives, new taxing laws, and changes in the system of subsidies, including modification of the monthly food rationing system. The government established a committee of over 90 people, led by former minister of economy Marino Murillo, to implement the policy recommendations.

A major weakness of the lineamientos, according to Armando Nova of the Center for the Study of the Cuban Economy, is that they fail to tackle major macroeconomic challenges. While the lineamientos acknowledge the country’s low economic productivity, as well as large trade deficits, there is no analysis of how to overcome these systemic problems. Moreover, the lineamientos contain no overarching conceptualization of where the society is headed other than a general commitment to socialism. “What type of socialism is being referred to?” Nova asks.2 Is the new socialism akin to what Lenin outlined in the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, when Russia permitted small-scale peasant production and private businesses? What is the role of private property in Cuba, and how can a new economy curb the growth of inequality? These are all critical questions that the Sixth Party Congress failed to address.

There are, however, different schools of thought on how to move the economy forward. Camila Piñeiro Harnecker, in an essay titled “Visions of the Socialism That Guide Present-Day Changes in Cuba,” describes three different visions: (a) a statist position, largely reflecting the old guard, (b) a market socialist perspective, advanced by many economists, and (c) an autogestionario, or self-management, stance that calls for democratic and sustainable development primarily through the promotion of cooperatives.

The statists recognize that Cuba faces serious economic problems but argue that they can be corrected through a more efficient state, not through a dismantling of the state. They call for more discipline and greater efficiency among state industries and enterprises. A loosening of state control, they contend, would result in greater disorganization and even allow capitalist tendencies to emerge. This position points to the disaster that occurred in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s after an attempt to end central control over state enterprises.

The statist position is most deeply entrenched among midlevel bureaucrats and the party cadre, who fear a loss of status and income with the end of direct control over Cuba’s economy. Some heads of the Cuban military enterprises—which include food and clothing factories, as well as hotels, farms, and telecommunication stores—also manifest this tendency, although surprisingly many officers, including Raúl Castro, are in favor of decentralization and a greater use of market mechanisms.

Those committed to a socialist market economy contend that only the market can unleash Cuba’s productive forces. To increase productivity and efficiency, the state needs to grant more autonomy to enterprises and allow competitive forces to drive the market. In the short term, privatization is necessary, even if this means an increase in inequality, the exploitation of wage workers, and environmental degradation. As the country develops, the state can step in to level the differences and distribute the new surpluses to support social programs.

The economists who argue for market socialism tend to be located in what is referred to as academia—the research institutes and centers, many of which are affiliated with the University of Havana.4 Academia looks to the Chinese and Vietnamese experiences, particularly their appeal to foreign investment, although they believe that Cuba should do a better job of controlling corruption. This position also finds support among state technocrats and some managers who want to see their enterprises expand and become more profitable as they are privatized. There is also significant support for the market economy among self-employed and working people who feel that they can enjoy the material prosperity of China or the Western world only through more individual initiative and private enterprise via the market.

The autogestionario position, which Piñeiro advocates, has a fundamentally different view from the economists over how to break with the old statist model. Instead of relying on competition and the market to advance productivity, the democratic socialist values of participation, association, and solidarity should be at the heart of the workplace and the new economy. Control should not come from the top down but from the bottom up, as workers engage in self-management to further their social and economic concerns. As Piñeiro writes, “The autogestionarios emphasize the necessity of promoting a socialist conscience, solidarity, and a revolutionary commitment to the historically marginalized.” These principles can be practiced in cooperatives and municipal enterprises, leading to increased consciousness and productivity in the workplace.5

Piñeiro admits that support for the autogetionario position is less consolidated, coming from intellectuals, professionals, and those involved in the international debates over 21st-century socialism. One of the problems is that the old statist model used the terms participation, autonomy, and workers’ control to characterize the relations in the factories, enterprises, and cooperatives that operated poorly in Cuba, and this language has now fallen into disfavor. Today those who try to revive these terms are often seen as making a utopian attempt to resuscitate failed policies.

Ultimately, Piñeiro is optimistic, seeing “a new path for the nation.” It will be a hybrid composed of “a state socialism better organized, a market,” and “a truly democratic sector.”

The periodical Temas is one of the main forums for debate over the Cuban economy’s direction. As editor Rafael Hernández said in an interview in November 2012, “The process of change is slow but irreversible. The question is whether the improvement in economic conditions can be rapid enough to maintain the support of the people at the base. Cooperatives that now exist only in the agricultural sector have to expand into small manufacturing and the services.”

Hernández sees the need to engage the professional and technical sector that constitutes one quarter of the Cuban working population because of the revolution’s historical commitment to public education. He explains: “Their talents have to be harnessed to the process of economic and social change. We need a public sector, not a governmental sector.” He points to the need for elderly care facilities as an example, saying, “My mother had Alzheimer’s. I had to take care of her at home, but she would have had a better environment and perhaps even better care if doctors and medically trained personnel had been able to set up retirement homes either as cooperatives or private medical facilities paid for by some combination of government subsidies and contributions from the families.”

Hernández also argues that the magazines, newspapers, and publishing centers need to be held accountable to the public as opposed to the state. Like Temas, other periodicals should be run by workers and editorial councils in order to better respond to the public interest. The day before my interview, Temas writers and staff traveled to one of Havana’s municipalities to discuss their new issue on social development and the implications for the local residents.

A debate is also emerging in Cuba over democracy and socialism. Temas recently ran an article by Julio César Guanche, “La participación ciudadana en el estado cubano” (Citizen Participation in the Cuban State). After a lengthy discussion of the centralization of power in Cuba’s presidency and the limits of Cuba’s National Assembly of Popular Power, Guanche calls for a new “collective order” comprising “the state, the public sphere, mass organizations [and] citizen groups . . . guided by the principles of autonomy and cooperation, with the direct participation of the [popular] bases.” He argues that Cuba should draw on the “new Latin American constitutionalism” in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, where constituent assemblies were convened to draft new constitutions that embrace the principles of both representative and direct democracy. Guanche concludes his article by stating that to bring Cuban institutions up to date, and “to radicalize democratic socialism,” Cuba needs its own “national constituent process.”6

A critical question is what the updating of the Cuban economy means for social and economic equality. Will everyone advance, or will there be “winners and losers,” as under capitalism? Myra Espina Prieto, in a publication of the Center for the Study of the Cuban Economy, analyzes the social impact of the policies that flow from the 313 lineamientos of the Sixth Party Congress. On the positive side, she sees an increase in individual opportunities through the creation of a “multi-actor” economy that includes “mixed capital enterprises, cooperatives, the usufruct agricultural producers, self-employed workers, etc.” At the same time, she notes the “precarious” nature of many of the new forms of employment that could “increase the levels of poverty.”7 Most of the 181 occupations opened up for self-employment are low skilled and low paying, reproducing what one finds in other Latin American countries—an impoverished informal economic sector.

My personal experiences in central and old Havana corroborate her concerns. Visiting in November 2012, I noticed a significant increase since the previous April in fruit and vegetable vendors in the streets, a larger number of marginal private cafés, and people vying to enter the tourist trade, either through the offering of simple services like bicycle-taxis or, more notably, female and male sexual companionship. When I asked why this was occurring, the responses indicated many were losing their formal jobs as state enterprises were downsizing and laying off redundant workers to increase efficiency and productivity.

As Rafael Hernández says, “There is a push from below. The people have endured much since the collapse of Soviet aid, now over two decades ago. The time has come for them to experience a better life. If we can get economic results, there will be broad popular support for a corresponding participatory and democratic opening.” Julio Díaz Vázquez told me in November, “There is more critical discourse in Cuba at all levels than ever before. Now we have to see if we can end the old economic system and construct a new society.”

The times are challenging in Cuba. It may be an overused metaphor to describe a society as having a “spring.” But if some combination of the three visions can drive the Cuban economy forward, there may indeed be a Cuban spring.

Roger Burbach is the director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA) based in Berkeley, CA and is the author with Michael Fox and Federico Fuentes of Latin Americas Turbulent Transitions: The Future of 21^st Century Socialism, to be released in January, 2013.

Notes.

1. Julio A. Díaz Vázquez, “Cuba: actualización del modelo económico-social,” Centro de Investigaciones de la Economía Internacional, Universidad de la Habana, unpublished manuscript, November 2012.

2. Armando Nova González, “Teoría y práctica en los lineamientos de la politica económica y Social,” Temas, no. 72 (October–December 2012):78.

3. Camila Piñeiro Harnecker, “Visiones sobre el socialismo que guían los cambios actuales en Cuba,” Temas, no. 70 (April–June, 2012): 46–55. Also see her edited anthology, Cooperatives and Socialism: A View From Cuba (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012).

4. Interview with Julio A. Díaz Vázquez, Havana, November 2012.

5. Piñeiro Harnecker, 50.

6. Julio César Guanche, “La participación ciudadana en el estado cubano,” Temas, no. 70 (April–June, 2012):77–78.

7. Myra Espina Prieto, “Retos y cambios en la política social,” in Pavel Vidal Alejandro, Omar Everley Perez, Villanueva , eds, Miradas a la economía cubana, el proceso de actualización (Havana: Editorial Caminos, 2012), 162, 167.

*This article appears in the Spring issue of the NACLA Report on the Americas, The Climate Debt: Who Profits, Who Pays? See: https://nacla.org/edition/8974

Roger Burbach is the co-author with Michael Fox and Federico Fuentes of Latin America’s Turbulent Transitions: The Future of Twenty-First-Century Socialism, just released by Zed Books. To order the book, see www.futuresocialism.org