Revolutionary times

We are, according to Jeremy Rifkin, a leading US economist and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, entering the third industrial revolution. What he means by this is the end of the oil/carbon-based energy era and the transition to a new, sustainable energy future. Indeed, he suggests peak oil production will occur somewhere between 2010 and 2030 – after that the amount of oil coming out of the ground starts to diminish. In brief, what he sees is locally-generated green energy distributed via an ‘intergrid’. It will drive a revolution in technology that will require a huge variety of new and different things to be made and which will require machine tools as part of that process. That apart, up to 2030, a trillion euros – a million, million euros – must be invested annually into the energy sector to meet the world’s forecast demand. All that investment for products that must be manufactured. But many things are going to have to change. Cars driven by internal combustion engines will give way to electric cars, for example. But these new sustainable solutions will need to be manufactured, and manufacturing technology – machine tools and more – will be required to turn these solutions into products. CNC is a key technology and right at the heart of this change, this transition to the third industrial revolution. I don’t think I put it too strongly. Haas is clearly interested in supplying machine tools — indeed, is successfully doing so — but we are also interested, through the establishment of our Haas Technical Education Centres (HTECs) already set up in America and now being rolled out across mainland Europe, in attracting youngsters into manufacturing and training them. Haas does business in over 100 countries in the world, and everywhere we hear that there is a shortage of technologists: people who can program, set up and operate machines. This is also true of the advanced economies such as the UK, Germany and Switzerland, as well as the many developing economies. The shortage of trained manufacturing technologists is holding back companies and economies worldwide. In America, some 10,000 students every year are trained on Haas machines in HTECs, of which there are around 750 with more than 2,000 machine tools. In mainland Europe, each of our 52 Haas Factory Outlets locations is working with two or more technical schools in order to establish a network of HTECs, with the goal being to establish around 200 by 2015, covering 28 countries. Sixteen were established in 10 countries in 2008, with over 20 new HTECs planned for 2009. As in the past, it will be technologists that will be key to change through clever application of manufacturing technologies and machine tools. This article is taken from Machinery's March 2009 issue