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Gene Ellis

Tennessee Valley Authority to close 8 coal-fired power units - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • The Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the nation’s five biggest users of coal for electricity generation, said Thursday it would close down eight coal-fired power units with 3,300 megawatts of capacity.
  • Many of the plants were more than 50 years old, and under a consent decree between the TVA, four state governments and the Sierra Club, the authority was required to install additional pollution control equipment known as scrubbers or shut down the plants
  • Johnson said that electricity demand has dropped nearly 10 percent over the past five years., half of that because one company, USEC, which produced and sold enriched uranium for commercial nuclear power plants, ceased its energy-intensive operations.
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  • “There has been a significant reduction in demand over four or five years, and we don’t see robust demand in the future.”
Gene Ellis

Tennessee Auto Industry - 0 views

  • AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY IN TENNESSEE
Gene Ellis

Steel Industry Feeling Stress as Automakers Turn to Aluminum - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Steel Industry Feeling Stress as Automakers Turn to Aluminum
  • For nearly a century, Ford’s River Rouge factory and its neighboring steel mill have worked in close harmony
  • Now, they are trying to respond, making lighter, stronger steel in a bid to retain one of their most important customers, the automakers.
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  • chief executive of Severstal North America, the United States subsidiary of Russia’s Severstal Group, which now owns the Rouge steel operations.
  • At Severstal’s Dearborn factory, for example, carmakers including Ford and others account for 70 percent of sales,
  • The shift to aluminum is gaining momentum. Automakers are under increasing pressure to meet strict new fuel-economy standards by 2025
  • United States Steel has invested $400 million in a joint venture with Kobe Steel of Japan to make advanced high-strength steel in a Leipsic, Ohio, factory expected to produce 500,000 tons annually.
  • Inside Severstal’s steel mill on a cold January day, hissing heavy machinery removed oxides from steel sheets, reducing their thickness to the equivalent of five human hairs.
  • These are headed for Mexico, to Navistar’s stamping plant there.Continue reading the main story
  • Steel makers argue that they still have advantages in price — aluminum can cost as much as three times more — and flexibility, both for the manufacturer and the mechanic who will be fixing the car.“When you build a mass-produced vehicle, you really need to think about the consequences of the supply chain and repair and insurance costs,” Mr. Dey said.
  • new federal fuel-efficiency standards that will require a fleetwide average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, a significant boost from the roughly 25 m.p.g. that vehicles average today.
  • “Sometimes there is a push from the aluminum side, and they win over with a particular model, and steel tends to be the comeback kid, with more innovation,” said Felix Schuler, a Munich-based partner in the Boston Consulting Group’s metals and mining practice.
  • What seems certain is that ordinary steel is likelier to lose out to its new and improved cousin than to aluminum, Mr. Schuler said.
  • Novelis is investing nearly $550 million to upgrade plants in Oswego, N.Y., and Nachterstedt, Germany, and to build a new factory in Changzhou, China, to triple its capacity from a year ago to 900,000 tons annually.
  • Alcoa, the country’s biggest aluminum producer, is investing about $670 million in its Iowa, Tennessee and Saudi Arabia facilities.Continue reading the main story
  • “Henry Ford was a control freak, and he wanted to control as much of the manufacturing as possible,” Mr. Casey said. “He made the steel, he made the glass, he made the tires.”
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Gene Ellis

The iEconomy - Nissan's Move to U.S. Offers Lessons for Tech Industry - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • To train its new American engineers, Nissan flew workers to its Zama factory in eastern Japan. There the Nissan officials, assisted by English-speaking Japanese workers called “communication helpers,” imparted the intricacies of the company’s production techniques to the Americans.
  • Early on, Nissan guarded against quality concerns by not relying on parts from American suppliers. Most components were either shipped from Japan or produced by Japanese companies that set up operations nearby.
  • Gradually, American parts makers were allowed to bid on supply contracts. Even that came amid arm-twisting by Congress, which passed a law in 1992 requiring auto makers to inform consumers of the percentage of parts in United States-made cars that came from North America, Asia or elsewhere.
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  • But no place has benefited to the extent of Tennessee, which counts more than 60,000 jobs related to automobile and parts production.
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