a race to bring commercial products to the marketplace - The Great Race for Battery Technology
a race to bring commercial products to the marketplace - The Great Race for Battery Technology
One hundred years from now, historians will probably date the beginning of the fall of the American Empire to 1986. That is the year President Ronald Reagan ordered Jimmy Carter's solar panels torn down from the White House roof, and when Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping launched his secret "863" program to make his country a global technology leader.
Some 34 years later, the evidence that China is winning this final battle is everywhere. China dominates in windmill Hp hstnn-ib44 batterypower, controls 97% of the world's rare earth supplies essential for modern electronics, is plunging ahead with "clean coal", and boasts the world's most ambitious nuclear power program. It is a dominant player in high speed rail, and is making serious moves into commercial and military aviation. It is also cleaning our clock in electric cars, with more than 30 low cost, emission free models coming to the market by the end of 2011.
Our only entrant in this life or death competition is the Tesla, little more than a rich man's toy. At $100,000 per vehicle production is capped at 1,000 units a year. Its cheaper S-1 sedan isn't coming out for two more years. General Motors' (GM) pitiful entrant in this sweepstakes, the Chevy Volt, only just became available in limited numbers, and won't see true mass production for at least a year. By then it will be easily overtaken by superior, cheaper technologies offered by multiple Chinese models, Japan's Nissan Leaf, and a third generation Toyota plug-in Prius.
This is all far more than a race to bring commercial products to the marketplace. At stake is nothing less than the viability of our two economic systems. At the moment, China's state directed socialism is winning. By settingnationa goals, providing unlimited funding, focusing scarce resources, and letting engineers run it all, China can orchestrate assaults on technical barriers and markets that planners here can only dream about. And let's face it, economies of scale are possible in the Middle Kingdom that would be unimaginable in America.
The laissez faire, libertarian approach now in vogue in the US creates a lot of noise, but little progress. The Dotcom bust dried up substantial research and development funding for technology for a decade. A ban on government funding of stem cell research, for religious reasons, left us seriously behind in that crucial field.
Fortunately, the US, with its massively broad and deep basic research infrastructure, a large military research establishment (remember the Darpa Net), and dozens of still top rate universities, is in the best position to discover a breakthrough technology. The Energy Department has financed the greatest burst ininorganic chemistry research in history, with top rate scientists pouring out of leading defense labs at Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Argonne National Labs. There are newly funded teams around the country exploring opportunities in zinc-bromide, magnesium, and lithium sulfur batteries. A lot of excitement has been generated by lithium-air technology, as well as much controversy.
In the end, it may come down to whether our Chinese professors are smarter than their Chinese professors. In 2007, the People's Republic took the unprecedented step of appointing Dr. Wan Gan as its Minister of Science and Technology, a brilliant Shanghai engineer and university president, without the benefit of membership in the communist party. Battery development has been named a top national priority in China. It is all reminiscent of the 1960's missile race, when a huge NASA organization led by Dr. Werner Von Braun beat the Russians to the moon, proving our Germans were better than their Germans.
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