Introduction:
America is in a state of denial that the middle-class income and way of life is in jeopardy. We have such allowed so much corruption and unethical decisions and our government to bring our nation to the brink of chaos and disaster. Our failure at global project management of our world resources has come to a head. We need to take corporate project management philosophy and implement it at a national governmental level. Then the distribution of project objectives will be delegated to the appropriate companies. Just as a large corporation chooses vendors to manufacture and create parts and services for a corporation, delegation of the following Infrastructure projects will be delegated to states for state/national project management. There shall be national project managers who oversee state project leaders with the progress and problems encountered with these projects.
National Rebuilding America Infrastructure Project:
A. Power Generation Job Generation
1. Energy production and management within its impact on the Infrastructure
a. Solar Panel production and deployment on all new homes and businesses, Arizona, and New Mexico to be designated solar states. The immediate hiring of thousands of people in different disciplines of engineering, manufacturing, and installation of thousands of solar panels for the Silicon Solar panel project. There will be the need to hire concrete workers, electricians, and electric company sub-contractors to integrate the solar panels into the national grid. There also needs to be a maintenance building to monitor the input of solar panels from the array of 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels in Arizona, New Mexico, and Death Valley California. Areas of high heat and sunlight are ideal for the production of electricity.
b. An array of solar thermal collectors would be constructed in all areas of Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and the deserts of California that have the most days of sunlight a year and the highest temperature averages. These would also be deployed for mass production and sale for home use in all cities with at least one hundred days plus of sunshine to provide heated water for all new homes and any home would have to have solar panels and solar thermal heating before they are sold. The land used would be the most uninhabitable in the United States, ideal for use for power generation. This project would involve a team diversity of people from all different disciplines. Immediate interviewing and hiring of people would be necessary with a one-year deployment date. Aggressive scheduling is essential to ensure these are built with no cost overruns.
c. Geothermal generation and magma heat extraction from volcanos for energy are vast resources for energy generation for the United States. Technologies include dry steam power plants, flash steam power plants, and binary power plants. Geothermal heating is used in over 70 countries. (Fridleifsson, Bertani, Huenges, Lund, Ragnarsson, & Rybach) (Alison Holm, 2010 May) This would supply unlimited geothermal power all year round. By tapping into the volcanic and geothermal power which provides 55,709 GWh per year in twenty-four countries.
We currently have 77 power plants and first will pick the top ten sites that currently don’t have geothermal generators built then allocate 20% of the infrastructure funds to hire personnel to work on these projects. The CO2 produced by the geothermal power plants would be injected back into the earth in the form of carbon capture and storage. (Bertani & Thain, retrieved 2009-05-13) (US Department of Energy Geothermal Technologies Program. May 2010. () These are long-term energy solutions that have no nuclear fallout, infinite earth resources, and are good for millions of years. Project managers would utilize the resources form the Geothermal Energy Association to coordinate the deployment and construction of the geothermal plant that would employ thousands, even after construction is completed, to monitor the output and maintenance of the said plant. (Ghassemi, 2010) We have the capacity of producing over 35 to 2000 Gigawatts of power for the United States. This potential for low energy costs would allow the United States to compete in the manufacturing sector. (Rybach, retrieved 2009-05-09)
Areas for the power production of geothermal energy have been thoroughly mapped to determine the appropriate locations in the Imperial Valley, Canby, the geysers, and Yellowstone Park, which is the world’s largest volcano and source of geothermal and magma power.
The planning of these projects would take methodical efforts due to the scope and scale of such endeavors. If there is too much management, decisions made would take too long to implement. Speed of implementation is critical to the success of getting people to work to create this phase of energy production and the elimination of natural gas power plants.
d. Tidal Power from the energy generated by waves and thermal differential of cold water versus warm water. The first tidal power station facility was built in France in 1966. It produces 240 megawatts, generated by 24 turbines. It is interesting how Canada, China, Russia, France, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and South Korea have tidal power plants, but the United States doesn’t have one power station. Russia, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, India, England, and Wales are all proposing to build additional tidal power plants. The feasibility and viability of any energy project must be researched as to the profitability of deployment of any energy production facilities. (R.H. Charlier, 2009)
The production of tidal power through the harnessing of wave power will involve the creation of teams hired from the engineering, civil engineering, physics, and power generation fields. Fujita Research for example has already created horizontal and vertical-axis tidal power turbines. (R.H. Charlier, 2009) pg. 20. We do not realize that 70% of the earth is water and that there is an incredible amount of energy generation potential in the oceans. This series of projects for infrastructure power integration will call for hundreds of people to be employed in the building, staffing, and maintenance of the power facilities. OTEC plants would be analogist to underwater hydroelectric power plants, without the impacts on the land environment that hydroelectric power generation power plants currently have on the landscape. The Golden Gate Bridge is an ideal area for tidal power due to the massive amounts of water that flow through the area of the Golden Gate Bridge from the ocean into the Bay Area. There has been extensive tidal and harmonic analysis of the ideal locations to locate tidal generation plants along the West Coast and East Coast of the United States and the Gulf States. China is proposing over 128 tidal plants to be built; their project management philosophy is continual growth and expansion, a never-ending, ever-changing economy.
Effective communication is essential to integrate tidal power and solar power into the national power transmission grid. We shall have school millions of people in schools for these new energy production fields. As we make the transition from agriculture to an industrial economy as occurred in the 1930s and 1940s, we are once again making a transition from an industrial or manufacturing-based economy to a technological and scientifically based economy. This time we did not focus on training through the public and university school system to prepare the millions of people who need training in the computer, science, and technology fields. Decisions for expansion must be in concert with all the stakeholders and those with the technological skills, communications, and organizational skills to make these projects successful.
The electrical or power grid is a vast, interconnecting network for delivering electricity from suppliers to consumers. (Kaplan, 2009) There is electricity generation, from hydroelectric, solar, geothermal, tidal, coal, natural gas, biomass, wind, and nuclear power. Then the power has to be transported from its source to the electricity distribution substation which steps down the electricity to be sent to the homes and businesses in the various cities around the United States.
B. Electrical Power Grid Distribution Project
The electrical power distribution system is almost a hundred years old and in desperate need of maintenance and upgrading. The development of upgrade projects will be structured based upon areas of the United States with the highest degree of growth, and oldest power lines in need of replacement. Hiring and training in power distribution management will take years to accomplish. The hiring of workers and project managers to implement this plan will involve the input of every major city and state in the country.
By upgrading and integrating all the power grids we can ensure no more power failures, power outages, or brownouts during the hottest days of the summer, or the coldest days in the wintertime. Effective leadership skills in the development and implementation of this phase of the national infrastructure plan will help reduce the cost to all Americans and American businesses for lower energy costs for domestic production of goods, and farming energy costs to be competitive with the global manufacturing network. We produce so much in manufacturing and energy production but have not improved our water, waste, and garbage management system.
C. Water, Waste, and Garbage Treatment Management Job Generation
a. Through the expansion and rebuilding of our water treatment plants in cities with the highest growth over the last 30 years. We have neglected their maintenance, and with that, the use of chloramine, which is ammonia and chlorine to purify our water supply is strained to the breaking limit. Many of the cities that process our wastewater have to dump a large portion of it into the ocean during a rainstorm due to the mismanagement of the water treatment system. Civil and chemical engineers would be hired to formulate a plan in coordination with all city leaders to establish the top cities that need water treatment expansion. Team leaders of each city would coordinate their efforts for the need for ordered materials to replace and expand current fresh water supplies coming from a wide variety of sources to meet the ever-growing American need for fresh, clean water and its equivalent need in waste treatment.
b. Repair and replacement of all water and waste treatment pipes nationally that have the highest degree of neglect and potential for breakage and failure during a hurricane, heavy rainstorm, and in areas of large population. The manufacturing and development of all the piping needed to replace our aging national pipeline network will be an ominous task, taking the efforts and expertise of thousands of workers. Hiring the type of worker that worked on the Alaskan pipeline and training the thousands of needed pipeline workers needed to dig up and replace the hundred-year-old pipes in such areas as Boston, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, and other large cities.
2. De-Salination Plant Construction
a. Examine the need for additional water reservoirs for free water for every major city in the United States. A map of potential water reservoirs needs to be drawn up and then constructed in areas where there is the greatest need until desalination plants come online. (Schorr, 2011) There are many studies project managers can draw upon relative to what type of de-salination plants should be constructed around the United States.
b. The applications of electrodialysis technology are an essential component of the demineralization of brackish salt water during the production of fresh water.
c. Map the locations for De-Salination Plants in the United States to generate fresh water for every major city in the United States. From the deployment of De-Salination and water treatment plants from the Great Lakes, East Coast, West Coast, and the Gulf States. (Schorr, 2011) By integrating wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear power to generate the electricity needed for all the new water desalination plants, this would appease the environmental need of using environmentally friendly, renewable energy to generate fresh water for every man, woman, and child in the United States, with excess to be exported to other countries. China is currently developing a massive number of de-salination plants for the ever-increasing masses in China. Small, decentralized water treatment plants will be connected to wind, solar, and geothermal plants near each de-salination plant established along the West Coast, East Coast, and Gulf Coast. The cost of each de-salination plant is $110 million, not including the infrastructure integration into the national energy grid. The creation of solar desalination plants would utilize southern California, eastern Texas Coasts, Florida, and all the coastal areas of the East Coast in the summer months, due to their abundance of solar energy and southern proximity to the oceans. The project managers for de-Salination plant deployment would have to make sure that this new freshwater would reach all the farming areas and cities of the United States. This would require the construction of pumping stations and electrical grid integration as the water must be pumped like electricity to all the necessary areas of the United States, North, South, East, and West. The system has to be balanced with computer and human monitoring to ensure that when there are rainstorms, hurricanes, and snowstorms the water grid can handle the entire sewer runoff that would normally be directed to a water treatment plant.
d. The current system allows far too many flooded cities during hurricanes, rain, and snowstorms. The lack of a proper water management system costs these countries billions of dollars every year in the destruction of homes, businesses, and lost productivity, due to the inability to remove copious amounts of rain from rural, and city areas in the time of tropical storms, and hurricanes.
e. A National Aqueduct system to transport water between all areas of the United States shall be implemented to expand and integrate all the areas of the United States with the drought-stricken areas that would get water from areas of floods and vice-versa. Computer systems to analyze the water needs of the nation, areas that need less water in the winter and more water in the summer. This would be integrated into the water treatment, desalination, and freshwater system to create a balanced water system, to be managed by system-level managers, engineers, civil engineers, and a multi-level national tiered system. Effective communications between all departments of the national infrastructure plan would implement all of the above power, sewage, and water needs of the nation in a computerized network, manned by thousands of people to monitor the fluctuations in weather as it influences the national power and water grid.
Effective project management on such as massive scale and be accomplished with the correct balance of communication skills, organizational management skills, team-building skills, leadership skills, and coping skills which will require flexibility, creativity, patience, and persistence. The greatest need is the balance of superior technological skills of people with the appropriate experience, and project knowledge to make each facet of this project a reality. If there is the proper amount of planning, organizing, and staffing, an effective work breakdown structure for all the phases of each project will ensure minimal project delays when realistic schedules and deadlines are made for each infrastructure project. When a critical path method is implemented with the right amount of cost value, and peer assessment for feedback at all stages of these projects, it will ensure and minimize challenges that will be encountered in every step of the project. Evaluation, continual improvement, and quality management will help to ensure quality project competition to ensure minimal redesign, maintenance, and downtime. If we can minimize the political elements of these projects and implement them as necessary, we can ensure millions of people long-term employment that will repair and rebuild the foundation of the infrastructure of the United States. This will ensure decades of growth and prosperity for this nation.
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