Phil Bredesen in 2009 Governor's State of the State speeches

On Corporations: Plan for robotic factories of the future

I visited the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg, Germany--the mother ship. That visit was a concrete lesson for me about the factory of the future. I visited one enormous hall where the drive trains and chassis were being joined. There were robots working--but very few people. They called it the "ghost hall", and I believe you could turn off all the lights and it would continue to churn out those Volkswagens just fine.

The lesson here is not that factory work is obsolete; far from it. The Wolfsburg complex employs 54,000 people in good, high paying jobs. But most of them don't position and bolt and weld. They invent, they design, they purchase, they contract, they do the logistics to make sure the machines have parts to work with, and they program those machines and fix them when they break. And yes, some of them still load parts and check results, but you can already see a future in which those jobs get fewer and farther between.

Source: 2009 State of the State address to Tennessee legislature Feb 9, 2009

On Energy & Oil: Green energy growth: develop a Solar Institute

In the area of clean energy technology, while no one knows exactly which specific technologies will ultimately prevail, it seems beyond dispute that "green energy" will be an area of vast importance and growth in the decades ahead. There is great opportunity even in traditional businesses, like auto manufacturing, and we have companies here in Tennessee that are world leaders in automotive innovation, from the development of electric vehicles to clean fuels.

We are extraordinarily well-positioned here and in the next couple of years, I want to wrap this up even tighter. Here's an idea about how we might go about that: develop a Solar Institute that is the basic research leader in making solar power practical.

Solar power today is a tiny part of the power equation. It remains far too expensive, and it's ripe for breakthroughs. There's a lot of basic science to be done. We have the pieces--the building blocks--here in Tennessee to be major players in this area.

Source: 2009 State of the State address to Tennessee legislature Feb 9, 2009

The above quotations are from 2009 Governor's State of the State speeches. Click here for other excerpts from 2009 Governor's State of the State speeches. Click here for other excerpts by Phil Bredesen. Click here for other excerpts by other Governors.
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Page last updated: Dec 02, 2018