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Wednesday, June 13, 2012

USA: Feds give $54M to cut manufacturing energy use

USA: Feds give $54M to cut manufacturing energy use



Funding innovation and manufacturing to create jobs is a big theme in this election year, and you can expect a flurry of announcements from the Department of Energy to drive that point home. In fact, the DOE announced Tuesday that it’s giving away $54 million to 13 projects to develop technologies that will help manufacturers reduce energy use and lower production costs of components that will lead to cheaper clean power equipment.

The money is going to academic research institutions and quite a few large companies such as General Motors and Delphi Automotive. Some projects aren’t sexy. GM’s project, for example, “will develop an integrated super-vacuum die casting process using a new magnesium alloy to achieve a 50% energy savings compared to the multi-piece, multi-step, stamping and joining process currently used to manufacture car doors,” the DOE press release said.
The funding announcement underscores President Obama’s twin goals: reminding his clean energy supporters that he still cares and positioning himself as a job creator, which he hopes will help him attract voters on the right as well.


It’s a perennial cause for politicians to show they want and can boost domestic manufacturing of a variety of goods. But accomplishing that goal is difficult, and the bottomline is manufacturers will set up factories at places where they could produce more cheaply and easily ship their products to customers. Enticing them with incentives – such as grants, loans and tax breaks – certainly helps, and so will relaxing rules. Adding regulations that require, say, government agencies to buy only American-made goods also will prompt some manufacturers to set up shop domestically. But manufacturing is a largely a global business these days, and there are many countries that are happy to provide more lucrative incentive packages and relaxed environmental and other rules in exchange for manufacturing jobs and tax revenues.


Here is a look at some of the more interesting projects from the DOE announcement today:
1. PolyPlus: The battery maker is getting nearly $9 million to complete its work on encapsulating the lithium anode and enter mass production of three types of lithium-based batteries for electric vehicles: lithium-water, lithium-air and lithium-sulfur batteries. These batteries should be able to pack a lot more energy into a given space than conventional lithium-air batteries today, the company said. Polyplus previously received a DOE grant to develop one of the three, the lithium air battery, which has been a subject to academic debates over whether it would be suitable for electric cars. PolyPlus plans to work with Corning and Johnson Controls on the project.


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