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Energy Clarity: Our need for cheap, plentiful, reliable energy

By General Posts

By Alex Epstein From Center for Industrial Progress

When making energy choices, there are three major criteria that need to be considered:

1. Is it cheap? Simply put, if you can’t afford energy, then you don’t have energy.

2. Is it plentiful? If energy is scarce, then many people will have little to no energy.

3. Is it reliable? If energy is unreliable, then you won’t have it when you need it.

In other words, energy is only valuable to the extent that it is cheap, plentiful, and reliable.
And to make it that way, we have to discover cheap, plentiful, reliable processes for generating energy.

Energy is a process

Energy is a process. Whether it’s coal, oil, gas, solar, wind, we describe them as materials, but they’re really processes. The materials are just one part of the process, but the whole process can include things like mining, refining, manufacturing, transportation, operation, maintenance, and disposal.

And then you have to look at how the whole process adds up. When we see something in the marketplace being cheaper or more expensive that reflects the whole process.

The general reason why certain forms of energy are not adopted is because the process to produce them is too expensive or it’s not reliable.

Let’s look at some examples of this.

Jimmy Fallon’s irrefutable case against “renewables”

For this first example, I’m going to let comedian Jimmy Fallon do the talking.

“New Scientist Magazine reported on Wednesday that in the future, cars can be powered by hazelnuts. That’s encouraging considering an eight ounce jar of hazelnuts costs about nine dollars. Yeah, I got an idea for a car that runs on bald eagle heads and Faberge eggs.”

So you may be thinking, “Isn’t hazelnut energy renewable? Doesn’t it come from the sun? Isn’t the sun free and forever? What’s going on here?” It’s all about the process.

While we don’t have to pay the sun, we do have to pay for the land, the labor, and many other inputs necessary to make hazelnut energy. And with hazelnuts, the process to produce them is very costly. The same turns out to be true for many alternatives.

Polaris factory decisions controlled by Supply Chain Bottlenecks

By General Posts

By Bob Tita from https://www.wsj.com

Supply Chain Bottlenecks Drive Factory Decisions at This Maker of Boats, Motorcycles, ATVs.

Polaris is changing manufacturing processes on the fly to adapt to parts shortages; ATVs missing seats, snowmobiles without shocks.

Polaris is juggling 30 or so supply-chain constraints for its ATVs, motorcycles, snowmobiles, boats and utility terrain vehicles.

Like other manufacturers struggling with wobbly supply chains, sports-vehicle maker Polaris Inc. is deciding what to produce based on what parts it has on hand.

Polaris is changing its manufacturing and sales strategies on the fly to cope with shortages of materials and parts and an unreliable global transportation system that has disrupted precise production planning.

The company said it is juggling 30 or so supply-chain constraints for its all-terrain vehicles, motorcycles, snowmobiles, boats and off-road utility vehicles. Polaris changes its plans sometimes daily for what it produces. The company switches models for a while as supply-and-logistics managers scrounge for parts and materials for other models it is unable to build.

When there aren’t enough seats in the supply pipeline to produce four-seat versions of utility terrain vehicles because of a shortage of foam padding, for example, Polaris shifts production to two-seat or three-seat models. When more seats become available, factories circle back to four-seat models or add the missing seats to vehicles that have already been assembled.

“If you’re mixing and matching, eventually you’ll attain a good product mix,” said Kenneth Pucel, operations chief for the Medina, Minn.-based company.

Companies spent decades conditioning their supply chains to deliver just enough components and materials to match production schedules to hold down costs for storing parts. The absence of backup stocks of parts left manufacturers more exposed if a few large suppliers couldn’t deliver on time.

Tight markets typically provide opportunities for some companies to siphon customers away from competitors. But retail dealers say the supply-chain disruptions, transportation bottlenecks and labor shortages for manufacturers are now so pervasive that it is hard for anyone to capitalize. Polaris dealers sold out and the company couldn’t resupply them at their normal levels; instead, customers are now placing deposits on orders sent to factories.

Polaris shipped out some snowmobiles to dealers without shock absorbers and had dealers install them later when supplies recovered.

Chris Watts, owner of America’s Motor Sports dealership in Nashville, Tenn., said he carries Polaris and other brands. But his stocks of those brands are mostly depleted as well. “Customers are buying whatever they can get their hands on,” Mr. Watts said.

Like many manufacturers, Polaris had an unexpected surge in sales during the Covid-19 pandemic. When restaurants, movie theaters and fitness centers closed, consumers shifted their spending to boats, motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles and other outdoor vehicles. Polaris’s retail sales in North America last year grew by 25% from 2019 and increased by 70% in the first quarter from last year.

Polaris, which last year had sales of $7 billion, has a leading share in off-road vehicles with about 40% of the North American market, according to industry analysts.

Before the pandemic, Polaris could increase orders to its parts suppliers when needed. But this time, suppliers were less responsive. After a weekslong shutdown of factories last spring to slow the spread of the Covid-19 virus, stocks on hand were depleted. Making matters worse were clogged ocean ports, the freak winter storm that struck Texas in February and a ship blocking the Suez Canal that delayed vessels hauling shipping containers with Polaris’s parts and products from Asia.

Polaris said it devised workarounds to ease the company’s reliance on the hardest-to-get components, including semiconductor chips used in vehicle gauges. The company said its engineers redesigned the gauges on the fly to operate with different chip sets that are more readily available than the chips the company had been using.

When the supply of foam for seats tightened following the storm in Texas in February, Polaris built vehicles without seats for weeks and installed them later when resin for making plastic foam became available again.

About one-third of the vehicles coming off the company’s assembly lines are being held back until missing parts arrive, the company said. That is about twice the volume of new vehicles that typically need to be reworked.

The availability of shock absorbers has been particularly erratic. When shocks for snowmobiles ran out during the fall production season, Polaris shipped some snowmobiles to dealers without them and sent the shocks later for the dealers to install.

“It wasn’t efficient from a cost standpoint, but it bought us time,” Chief Executive Michael Speetzen said.

Shock absorbers for single-seat all-terrain vehicles became so scarce late last year that production managers at the Roseau, Minn., plant switched to a two-seat variant of the four-wheel motorcycles instead that used different but available suspension components. The production lines at the factory that welded metal frames and produced plastic moldings for ATVs were reset overnight to allow production of the two-seat models to begin the following morning.

“You pivot away from parts shortages. Our team is good at building what we can,” said Mr. Pucel.

Mr. Pucel said at least 10% of the company’s suppliers have been under stress since the pandemic, often struggling to obtain enough materials from their own suppliers or to come up with the money needed to purchase additional equipment to increase production. He said the number of suppliers struggling would be greater if Polaris hadn’t culled underperforming companies from its supplier base a couple of years before the pandemic.

Polaris has intervened to purchase equipment and materials for some suppliers in exchange for reduced prices. When production of plastic resin in Texas stopped because of the February storm, Polaris allocated some of its own resin to its suppliers.

In anticipation of extended higher demand, Polaris is expanding its Monterrey, Mexico, plant where some of its most popular utility terrain vehicle are assembled. The company is increasing boat production at its Elkhart, Ind., plant and reopening another in Syracuse, Ind. It has hired about 1,000 more employees in the past year, a 7% increase in the workforce.

Maintenance on equipment and rush jobs to realign assembly lines to produce different models often happen overnight or on weekends. Disruptions in production and the social-distancing procedures in plants because of Covid-19 have been rough on employees.

“The whole organization has been on high alert,” CEO Speetzen said. “It’s one of the things I worry about.”

Tesla among companies sued for complicity over child labor in Congo

By General Posts

by Matthew Lavietes from https://www.autonews.com

NEW YORK — Five of the world’s largest tech companies, including electric vehicle maker Tesla Inc., have been accused of being complicit in the death of children in the Democratic Republic of Congo forced to mine cobalt, a metal used to make telephones and computers, in a landmark lawsuit.

The legal complaint on behalf of 14 families from Congo was filed on Sunday by International Rights Advocates, a U.S.-based human rights non-profit, against Tesla, Apple Inc., Google parent Alphabet Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Dell Technologies Inc..

The companies were part of a system of forced labor that the families claimed led to the death and serious injury of their children, it said.

It marked the first time the tech industry jointly has faced legal action over the source of its cobalt.

Images in the court documents, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, showed children with disfigured or missing limbs.

Six of the 14 children in the case were killed in tunnel collapses, and the others suffered life-altering injuries, including paralysis, it said.

“These companies — the richest companies in the world, these fancy gadget-making companies — have allowed children to be maimed and killed to get their cheap cobalt,” Terrence Collingsworth, an attorney representing the families, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Cobalt is essential in making rechargeable lithium batteries used in millions of products sold by the tech industry.

More than half of the world’s cobalt is produced in Congo.

Global demand for the metal is expected to increase at 7 percent to 13 percent annually over the next decade, according to a 2018 study by the European Commission.

The lawsuit said the children, some as young as 6 years old, were forced by their families’ extreme poverty to leave school and work in cobalt mining owned by the British mining company Glencore. Glencore has previously been accused of using child labor.

Some children were paid as little as $1.50 per day, working 6 days a week, it said.

In response to a request for comment, Dell said in an email that it has “never knowingly sourced operations” using child labor and has launched an investigation into the allegations.

A spokesperson for Glencore said: “Glencore notes the allegations contained in a U.S. lawsuit filed on 15th December 2019.

“Glencore’s production of cobalt in the DRC is a by-product of our industrial copper production. Glencore’s operations in the DRC do not purchase or process any artisanally mined ore.

“Glencore does not tolerate any form of child, forced, or compulsory labor.”

Tesla, Apple, Google, Microsoft did not immediately respond for comment.

The legal complaint argued that the companies all have the ability to overhaul their cobalt supply chains to ensure safer conditions.

“I’ve never encountered or documented a more severe asymmetry in the allocation of income between the top of the supply chain and the bottom,” said Siddharth Kara, a researcher on modern slavery who is an expert witness in the case.

“It’s that disconnect that makes this perhaps the worst injustice of slavery and child exploitation that I’ve seen in my two decades research,” Kara said.

More than 40 million people have been estimated to be captive in modern slavery, which includes forced labor and forced marriage, according to Walk Free and the International Labour Organization.