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Trade Wars
US Steel Begins Work On $475 Million Alabama Expansion
U.S. Steel on Monday held a groundbreaking for a $475 million expansion of its tubular operations in Fairfield, promising up to 250 full-time jobs and 600 jobs during its two-year construction timeline. The expansion will add a new quench and temper line to the plant, along with a larger change house, and a new engineering building as well as a training facility. It is an expansion of U.S. Steel’s only manufacturing facility for tubular goods, which has been in use since the early 1980s. All these changes will be geared toward producing tubular products for the energy industry.
Company officials said these upgrades were 12 years in the making. Scott Bogardus, U.S. Steel’s project manager for strategic capital projects, said the products produced will support oil and natural gas exploration. “Manufacturing in Fairfield has been going in the wrong direction for decades, and this investment will turn that around,” he said. “We are part of the energy industry and the security of the country.”
Read more at Alabama.com
U.S. Needs Another $30 Billion To Fix Aging Aviation Infrastructure
The U.S. needs another $30 billion to modernize aging aviation infrastructure, according to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. The call for more funding comes just days after a telecommunications failure disrupted thousands of flights across the Northeast. Duffy said the administration will ask Congress for the additional funding for air traffic control technology and airport improvements. Congress has already provided $12.5 billion toward rebuilding the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control system.
The new request includes $10 billion for airport improvements and comes as the FAA works to replace decades-old communications, radar and air traffic management equipment. Congress approved $12.5 billion for the administration’s new air traffic control system last year. The money pays for more than 10,000 modernization projects across the country. The FAA is replacing copper telecommunications lines with fiber, wireless and satellite connections. It is also replacing aging radars and radios, installing digital voice switches and electronic flight strips, and upgrading airport surface surveillance.
Read more at Forbes
Transformer Demand Surge Challenges Supply Chain
ransformers are one of the most critical components of the power system. Because they are so critical, any shortfall in transformer supply reverberates across the grid. An unavailable transformer can stall interconnection queues, delay new capacity additions, and push back grid build-out timelines. For most of the past two decades, this risk was mostly theoretical. Annual power demand was largely flat in Europe and North America, with North America recording modest growth of less than 2 percent per year in the early 2020s. Few new power plants were built, and grid expansion proceeded at a measured pace. Transformer demand was predictable, with steady order backlogs and utilization rates.
However, the market has changed. A structural rise in electricity demand, driven largely by increasing electrification across industries and data center expansion, has led to a global surge in grid investment. At the same time, the shift toward renewable energy sources is increasing transformer demand compared with traditional energy sources. The transformer industry has absorbed the excess demand by stretching its capacity, but there are limits to what can be done to extend supply. The market has roughly doubled, tipping the industry into a supercycle, which has implications for the transformer value chain. Now, a second phase of the supercycle is beginning, with global transformer demand expected to grow at about 3.5 percent annually, resulting in a 40 percent increase by 2035.
Read more at McKinsey
Pirelli to invest $1.2B, create 1K jobs in Georgia
Italian tire manufacturer Pirelli will add 1,000 jobs and invest $1.2 billion in Georgia as part of an agreement announced by Gov. Brian Kemp on Tuesday.“This historic investment will expand Pirelli's footprint with roughly five times more positions than they currently employ across the region, and we wish them continued success here in the No. 1 state for business," Kemp said in a statement about the plant in Rome about 70 miles northwest of Atlanta. The company employs 234 Georgians, according to Kemp.
“The U.S. is one of Pirelli’s most important markets and offers significant opportunities for growth,” said Claudio Zanardo, CEO of Pirelli North America in a statement. “The expansion of our Rome facility strengthens our ‘local for local’ strategy, increasing our manufacturing capacity in the U.S. while introducing the latest-generation technologies, such as the Cyber Tyre, and advanced robotics."
Read more at The Center Square
Marist University And IBM Launch Innovation Incubator
Marist University and IBM are launching an innovation incubator designed to give students and faculty hands-on experience with artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, the university announced. The Innovation Incubator, the latest development in the institutions’ more than 50-year partnership, will include an IBM z17 mainframe that will provide high-performance computing capabilities on campus for research projects involving students and faculty. The initiative will bring together students, faculty researchers and IBM experts to work on projects spanning business, finance, polling and civic engagement.
Marist and IBM said their partnership historically focused on enterprise computing and computer science education but is expanding to include university-wide artificial intelligence research, interdisciplinary projects and experiential learning opportunities. The IBM z17 system is designed for enterprise computing and is intended to provide students with experience developing and testing applications using technology designed for large organizations. Among the initial projects is an effort involving Marist’s schools of Computer Science and Mathematics and Management to test autonomous artificial intelligence agents in simulated marketing campaigns.
Read more at Mid-Hudson News
Toyota Estimates Factory Automation Could Require 400,000 Robots
Toyota Motor Corp. estimates that modernizing factories across its manufacturing network could require approximately 400,000 robots and cost about $6.4 billion annually beginning in 2028, according to Reuters. The estimate covers Toyota, group companies and major suppliers and includes both replacements for existing equipment and new robot installations. The total includes a mix of humanoid and non-humanoid robots, according to the report.
The potential investment would encompass industrial robots, automated material handling and future applications involving collaboration between people and robots on the factory floor. Automakers are increasingly looking to robotics and automation to address labor shortages, aging factory infrastructure and production costs. Toyota's plans come as other automakers prepare to expand the use of humanoid robots in production. Hyundai Motor Group, which owns Boston Dynamics, has said it plans to deploy humanoid robots at its manufacturing plant in Georgia beginning in 2028.
Read more at Assembly Magazine
HII Expands Maritime Drone Operation
Defense contractor Huntington Ingalls Industries completed a 25% expansion of a Massachusetts plant where it builds, develops, and integrates unmanned maritime systems. The Pocasset, Mass., operation now covers 50,000 square feet, with additional production capacity for the U.S. Navy’s Lionfish small unmanned undersea vehicle, which is based on HII’s Remus 300 UUV (unmanned undersea vehicle) platform. Along with the Remus UUVs, the plant builds HII’s Romulus unmanned surface vehicles (USVs.) HII employs about 300 people at Pocasset, having added 50 since the start of this year.
The USN renewed its order for the Lionfish vehicles, the second option year in a five-year program that could total up to 200 units and exceed $347 million in total value. Lionfish is the first uncrewed undersea platform that the USN has transitioned from rapid prototyping to full-rate production. It is built on the commercial-grade Remus 300 platform, and has a modular, open-architecture design that allows operators to update the payload according to the mission requirements. Lionfish drones are used for mine countermeasures; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; anti-submarine warfare; and electronic warfare operations.
Read more at American Machinist
Cobots Growing More Collaborative, Gaining Intelligence
Collaborative robots earned their classification by being compatible with and adaptable to almost any working condition that a manufacturer could identify. They collaborate with machinists and welders, and fabricators of all sorts. Now, artificial intelligence has entered the collaboration, and its no surprise that cobot pioneer Universal Robots has placed those emerging capabilities precisely at the point where intelligence may be gathered and put to use: in the cobot’s control box, through the teach pendant, and in the tool flange.
Artificial intelligence is the coordinating principle guiding Universal Robot’s new platform. Gen 7 introduces three new cobot arms with progressively higher payloads and reaches, all outfitted with an AI-capable tool flange. The g-Series tool flange makes it possible to deploy vision and sensing capabilities that coordinate with AI in real time with the robot, bringing data, power, and safety control to the business end of the cobot. There is no complex cabling required, opening the possibilities for cameras and high-bandwidth sensors to coordinate with advanced automation programs.
Read more at American Machinist
New York Regulators Approve 90-Mile Propel Transmission Line
The New York Public Service Commission on Thursday approved a 90-mile transmission line that aims to increase power flows, including from offshore wind, between Long Island and the rest of the state. The $3.26 billion project is being developed by New York Transco and the New York Power Authority. Opponents argued the project was no longer necessary due to the cancellation of several offshore wind projects. Regulators, however, pointed out that the state’s renewable energy goals remain unchanged despite project headwinds, and New York has more than 1,800 MW of offshore wind either operating or under construction.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state Legislature made changes to the state’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act earlier this year, altering greenhouse gas reduction targets but maintaining a 9 GW offshore wind goal by 2035. The project includes new underground transmission lines at both 138 kV and 345 kV levels, connecting to nine existing or new substations and running through Suffolk, Nassau, Queens, Bronx and Westchester counties.
Read more at Utility Dive
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