Clean energy job profile: hybrid-battery maker in Ohio
Posted May 19, 2009 in Solving Global Warming
When Wes McGuire's employer - a Middletown, Ohio factory - shut down, Wes had to find a new job. Fortunately he found and completed a two-week training course at his local county career center. This led to an interview with Cobasys, which hired him the same day. Wes is now a maintenance technician and CWA-IUE member at Cobasys, a Springboro firm that manufactures batteries for hybrid vehicles.
In Wes' words:
"It makes me feel good that I'm on the cutting edge of technology... to actually help the environment. I can make a living doing something I like to do, plus help the planet at the same time. Because if we don't do it, nobody else is going to. Every choice we make every day is going to have an impact."
"Instead of sitting around talking about it, let's just do it... I think the United States is on the right track and getting away from foreign oil and dependency on every other country. And here's where it starts. So I feel lucky that I got on the [ground] floor of it and I can watch it grow and be a part of it. If I can do it, anyone can do it. It's just putting forth the effort."
**Note: Clean energy workers like Wes are vulnerable to the economic downturn and troubled automakers. Moving forward with clean energy and climate legislation will help expand the numbers of hybrids and plug-in hybrids out there, expanding the hybrid-battery industry and the businesses and jobs that support it.
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Comments
ECD Fan — May 25 2009 12:48 PM
Didn't Mr. McGuire get the memo? He must be on vacation or something... Or, if he did, why didn't he tell you?
As Mr. Gustafson points out (see
http://blog.mlive.com/svengustafson/2009/05/advanced_battery_maker_cobasys.html ), Cobasys is going bankrupt shortly (any day now). Hopefully the skills Mr. McGuire acquired during the two-week course will help him find a job at a real company (one that has at least some chance of ever gettimg profitable and one that does not make leaking batteries that ruin the whole 2007 hybrid production by GM).
However, I have doubts. Mr. McGuire apparently feels (or felt?) good that at Cobasys he is on the "cutting edge of technology." That means that the two-week course didn't really teach him much about propulsion battery technology. If it did, he would have realized that Cobasys' technology is outdated, and their only customer, GM, is moving away from it (GM plans li-ion for its mild hybrids starting 2010). And he would have realized that Cobasys battery technology does not necessarily save the environment - it is simply an expensive and not very efficient energy storage technology - where that energy comes from is quite a separate question. And at current costs and prices, that technology is simply a waste. No wonder GM has sold just 2600 cars using Cobasys' technology so far this year (as of end of April).
More on the NiMH technology that Cobasys uses, read here:
http://ecdfan.blogspot.com/2009/05/advanced-nimh-vs-li-ion.html