Some years ago, Elon Musk of Tesla Co. fame proposed, and built, a gigantic battery-manufacturing factory near Reno, NV, a depressed area not only due to the recession, but also heavily relying on gaming revenues. Yesterday, Musk met there with civic leaders and the Governor. He outlined the need for additional infrastructure, serious need. His plant now employs 7000, and he intends to gradually expand that workforce to 20,000 as the plant will be enlarged from 6 million square feet to upwards of 12 million. The Reno Metro area has a population of about 400,000. This would mean 1/5 of all residents would work for Tesla! Nearly. I never gave this much thought as the plans unfolded for the plant. What about access, transportation, housing, rental availability? As of 2010, Nevada's unemployment rate topped 14%, 175,000 had lost their jobs due to the recession, the state ranked worst in the nation in bankruptcies and foreclosures. Then, Musk stepped in. (Among a few others, also high-tech). Today rental properties, homes and apartments are 98% full, rents have doubled to an average of $1318/month, and median home prices hit an all-time high this summer, of $389,000. Clearly, people have been "put to work"; this includes all kinds of people, contractors, skilled labor, construction, service workers like sales clerks, all kinds of work is available. This mimics the big bubble which built in North Dakota, Williston having folks sleeping in their cars overnight at Wal-Mart: a different kind of boom, oil, which has since largely gone "bust". Will Musk's grandiose plans follow? I think not, as technology advances with the demands of the user-public; oil is a commodity, subject to all sorts of expansions and convolutions. If the State of Nevada fails to adequately address and complement the needs of Tesla, Musk says Tesla will kind of take the matter into it's own hands, creating an on-site housing compound at the Gigafactory, a sort of "Company Town", reminiscent of the old copper-mining days! A "Revolution in Motoring" is being engineered, like it or not! Frank
We are definitely coming into a time where hybrid and electric vehicles are becoming more and more the norm , and I think that this will only increase in the future. Elon Musk has not only designed and built his own Tesla electric cars, but he also helps other car manufactures who have questions about producing an electric vehicle. There is already an extensive amount of the charging stations, and a person can actually drive from one end of the United States to the other end, without using a drop of gasoline for fuel. The charging stations run on solar power, so they don’t even need to have electricity for them to operate and charge vehicles. If a person has a Tesla vehicle, then you can re-charge at any of the stations for free, and if you have a hybrid/electric vehicle of a different make, then it costs, but supposedly, not a large amount of money. Here is a map that shows the network of charging stations, and I think that this is a couple of years old; so there are probably more of them now.
@Yvonne Smith Excellent points, IMO! Note the great scarcity of charging stations across the vastness of Canada. Granted, it's population is far less, but the cost of providing gasoline and diesel fuel must be high due to the great distances encountered with little or no population centering. I regret I am not young enough to last until this reaches fruition! The relentless hold of "big oil" still emerges the winner. Frank
Reminds me of another "Revolution in Motoring". Henry Ford's Fordlandia or Belterra nicknamed Dearborn in the jungle. https://www.thehenryford.org/collec.../popular-topics/brazilian-rubber-plantations/ Modern company towns are a definite possibility as corporations become larger and more powerful than many governments around the world. Companies may need to build their own infrastructure, educate their own workforce and retain them with various perks like good schools, housing, clean water, etc... that are in short supply in some cities today.