So That Happened: I Hate My Job, Really, and Solar Panels Getting a Workout

Editor’s note: Welcome to So That Happened, our editors’ takes on things going on in the manufacturing world that deserve some extra attention. This will appear regularly in the Member’s Only section of the site.

Goodbye Peloton Output Park, Hello First Solar

We now know the fate of the site formerly known as Peloton Output Park, a more-than 1 million-square-foot facility Peloton Interactive Inc. announced with great fanfare in 2021. Slated for Troy Township, Ohio, the soon-to-rise greenfield site would house production, office and amenities space, and be one of the world's largest connected fitness manufacturing plants in the world, according to Peloton. That didn't happen.  In 2022, Peloton not only put a kibosh on Peloton Output Park, but soon after the company announced it would exit manufacturing altogether.

However, it left behind a 1.2 million-square-foot shell of a manufacturing site, and now we've learned the fate of that structure. First Solar Inc. has taken ownership. The solar panel manufacturer announced the purchase in mid-January.

The deal makes sense. Tempe, Arizona-based First Solar has long had a significant presence in Ohio, with three manufacturing sites located in the northwest corner of the state and close to where Peloton was scheduled to rise.  The combined nameplate capacity of those solar manufacturing facilities was approximately 6 gigawatts at the end of 2023, with more on the way, First Solar says.  

The manufacturer anticipates transforming the Troy Township site into a distribution facility.

"As we prepare to expand our Ohio capacity by almost a gigawatt this year, there's a need for our logistics and distribution capabilities to scale to match manufacturing growth," Chief Supply Chain Officer Mike Koralewski said. "We intend to use this facility to ensure the efficient and timely shipping of modules to our customers."

In addition to its Ohio facilities, First Solar's U.S. footprint will soon include manufacturing sites in Alabama and Louisiana, where it expects to invest $2 billion, plus it's adding an R&D innovation center in Perrysburg, Ohio.

None of this ongoing construction precludes the Troy Township location from someday seeing manufacturing within its four walls.

"In the long term, the flexible space that the facility affords us could also serve as a light-scale satellite manufacturing location with the potential to support our factories and R&D center in Ohio," Koralewski said.

Peloton may have stepped away from manufacturing. First Solar continues to step in.

—Jill Jusko

‘We Do Not Believe that the Final Chapter of this Story Has Been Written’

With the full-throated backing of the United Steelworkers Union, Lourenco Goncalves last summer and fall thought he had the ultimate bargaining chip with which to win the battle for U.S. Steel Corp. But the boss of Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. didn’t succeed and U.S. Steel’s board picked Nippon Steel Corp. to buy what 123 years ago became the first company with a market capitalization of more than $1 billion.

This week, Goncalves again took up the mantle of unionized workers.

“Let's talk turkey here. That management team and that board had one goal in mind and the goal was to break the back of the United Steelworkers,” he said on Cleveland-Cliffs’ fourth-quarter earnings conference call.

Goncalves also lambasted U.S. Steel leaders for what he called “severe miscalculations” about the antitrust risks of Nippon’s $14 billion plan and the U.S. Treasury’s review of the proposed deal under the auspices of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. He also lauded Biden administration for “raising alarm bells” and said he believed he’ll get another crack at buying U.S. Steel.

“Fortunately for the workforce, we do not believe that the final chapter of this story has been written,” Goncalves said, pointing to opposition to the deal by several lawmakers on both sides of the political spectrum. “We believe that the mistake will be fixed, hopefully earlier rather than later.”

For its part, U.S. Steel has been regularly promoting the merits of its plan, including by setting up a dedicated website that’s aggregating support. And Nippon leaders also don’t appear to be taking approval for granted: The company last week sent a delegation to Washington for some face time.

— Geert De Lombaerde

Young Manufacturing Employees Pretending to Hate their Jobs to Fit in

The industrial and manufacturing sectors have the highest acceptance of negative communication and gossip in the workplace, according to a recent Preply study. Preply surveyed 996 Americans on the impacts of stress on communication.

The study reports 66% of manufacturing environments tolerate negativity, significantly higher than other industries, which fall between 19% and 42%. Manufacturing also tops the list of workplaces most prone to gossip at 49%.

“Over two-fifths of employees acknowledge that their words, under stress, have sparked misunderstandings or conflicts in the workplace,” notes the study. “I don’t care,” “Not my job,” and “This is a waste of time,” are the top three phrases employees regret using at work.

Nearly two in five employees feel pressure to pretend to be miserable all the time to fit in with their gloomy coworkers; Gen Z and millennials feel the most pressure at 41% and 37%, respectively.

—Anna Smith

Operations Leadership Summit Update

In June, IndustryWeek will be holding its first live, in-person event since 2022 in Indianapolis. The IW Operations Leadership Summit will gather plant managers, vice presidents of operations, department leaders and other professionals tasked with getting product out of factories.

We’ll be unveiling the full speaker slate soon, but here are some new names in addition to the Subaru, Emerson Electric and GE Healthcare names we shared two weeks ago:

PPG’s Juliane Heffel will talk about data collection and how it enabled better results for that company’s support of OLED production, Eric Lussier and David Higgs will talk about continuous improvement and employee engagement at Mayville Engineering Co. and Randy Moorehouse of Falcon Plastics will discuss how to scale continuous improvement gains across multiple production sites.

Stay tuned. We’ll have more information to share in the coming days and weeks, and we look forward to presenting a live event that will be valuable to operations leadership, the people tasked with getting product out of the plant as efficiently as possible.

—IndustryWeek Staff