Archive for April, 2012

The Robot Revolution Is Just Beginning

by Editors @ Saturday, April 28th, 2012. Filed under Green Industry, High Design, High Road Economics, Technology, Unemployment

MIT’s Rodney Brooks outlines his vision of the future to student entrepreneurs.

By David L. Chandler
MIT News Office

April 24, 2012 - When industrial robots were first introduced in the early 1960s — initially on automobile assembly lines — computers were still in their infancy, so the robots were designed to perform only the most rigidly predetermined set of repetitive movements.

Despite a half-century of exponential growth in computational power, that’s pretty much still the state of industrial robotics.

But according to Rodney Brooks, who last year left a tenured position as MIT’s Panasonic Professor of Robotics to focus on his latest company, that may not be true for much longer.

Brooks’s “lips are sealed,” as The Economist put it last week, about what exactly he and Heartland Robotics are up to in a converted warehouse in South Boston’s Innovation District. But venture capitalists have already gambled $32 million on the premise that whatever it is they produce, it’s going to set a whole new direction in the field.

Brooks, now the chairman and chief technology officer of Heartland Robotics, spoke at MIT on April 20, addressing a recently formed student entrepreneurship group called do.it@MIT.

In robotics, “today’s technology is going to look so incredibly primitive in a couple of decades,” Brooks told a crowd of about 400, mostly students, gathered at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium. And, he added, “you’re the ones who are going to invent” the new robotic technologies that will transform the field.

Robots down under

The former director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) described growing up in in Adelaide, Australia. While he had never heard of MIT, he was an inveterate tinkerer who became intrigued early on by robotics.

In the early 1960s, Brooks recalled, he built

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‘High Road’ Capital in Clean Energy:

by Editors @ Thursday, April 12th, 2012. Tags: , , ,
Filed under Environment, Green Energy, Green Industry, High Design, Technology

The product: Molds holding half-sections of composite turbine blades fill the floor of TPI Composites' plant in Newton, Iowa. It makes blades exclusively for General Electric wind turbines. Photo by Daniel Cusick.

Wind Turbine and Blade Makers Grow Corn Belt Jobs

By Daniel Cusick
SolidarityEconomy.net via E&E reporter

April 11, 2012, WEST BRANCH, Iowa -- Were it not for the National Park Service's requisite brown sign directing highway travelers to the nearby Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, there would be nothing outwardly remarkable about this gas-and-go exit along Interstate 80 in the heart of Iowa flyover country.

Iowa City, the humming university town 8 miles up the road, offers far more to the discerning tourist. And just beyond is the commercial center of Coralville, where it's easier to book a hotel room or find a restaurant serving Iowa's signature food, pork tenderloin.

Looks deceive. As home to wind turbine manufacturer Acciona Windpower NA, West Branch has emerged as one of a handful of Midwestern communities on the vanguard of the U.S. clean energy economy. The small city of 2,300 has found an economic niche that's the envy of thousands of other small towns across the nation. Turbine blade molds

Herbert Hoover, the former Commerce secretary who later became the 31st president, might swoon at the economic pluck of his boyhood home, where the Spanish energy giant Acciona Energia invested $23 million in April 2007 to build its first North American manufacturing facility.

The decision by Pamplona-based Acciona to anchor its U.S. manufacturing operations at West Branch was made after an extensive review of potential sites, ultimately narrowed to a few locations in the Midwest.

"It was the geographic center of the wind industry," said Joe Baker, Acciona Windpower NA's CEO, who joined the company in 2010. "We're here because this is where the wind blows."

Iowa is also where major railroads running east and west meet major rivers running north and south, giving the state a logistical edge for the shipping of very large pieces of equipment that make up the core components of a wind farm -- the turbines, blades and towers. Its primary interstate highways, I-80 and I-35, are also less congested than those of its eastern neighbor Illinois, aiding in the transport of turbine blades that require special trailers to accommodate their 165-foot-long spans. Convenient to transportation.

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In the Big Picture, Natural Gas and ‘Fracking’ Is Only One Piece of the Puzzle

by Editors @ Wednesday, April 4th, 2012. Filed under Climate, Environment, Green Energy, Third World

How the Big Energy Companies Plan to Turn

the United States into a Third-World Petro-State

By Michael T. Klare
SolidarityEconomy.net via AlterNet.org

April 4, 2012 - The “curse” of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and the environment is ravaged, while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land.

Recently, North America has been repeatedly hailed as the planet’s twenty-first-century “new Saudi Arabia” for “tough energy” -- deep-sea oil, Canadian tar sands, and fracked oil and natural gas. 

But here’s a question no one considers: Will the oil curse become as familiar on this continent in the wake of a new American energy rush as it is in Africa and elsewhere? Will North America, that is, become not just the next boom continent for energy bonanzas, but a new energy Third World?

Once upon a time, the giant U.S. oil companies -- Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco -- got their start in North America, launching an oil boom that lasted a century and made the U.S. the planet’s dominant energy producer.  But most of those companies have long since turned elsewhere for new sources of oil.

Eager to escape ever-stronger environmental restrictions and dying oil fields at home, the energy giants were naturally drawn to the economically and environmentally wide-open producing areas of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America -- the Third World -- where oil deposits were plentiful, governments compliant, and environmental regulations few or nonexistent.

Here, then, is the energy surprise of the twenty-first century: with operating conditions growing increasingly difficult in the global South, the major firms are now flocking back to North America. To exploit previously neglected reserves on this continent, however, Big Oil will have to overcome a host of regulatory and environmental obstacles.  It will, in other words, have to use its version of deep-pocket persuasion to convert the United States into the functional equivalent of a Third World petro-state.

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