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.

You Get a Utility Structures Plant! And You Get a Utility Structures Plant!

The leaders of steel titan Nucor Corp. are committing $200 million to further build out the utility towers and structures division they began building in 2022.

Looking to get more than their fair share of the booming energy infrastructure market, Chair, President and CEO Leon Topalian and his team in June of that year acquired Pennsylvania-based Summit Utility Structures and soon after said they would invest in new facilities in Alabama and Indiana. Those plants are scheduled to being producing poles and other utility structures in the next few quarters.

On to Step 3, then: Nucor said last week it will add a utility products center to its Brigham City, Utah, campus. The project will create about 200 full-time jobs and feed a very hungry Western United States infrastructure investment market where PG&E Corp. and Edison International Inc. are among the major utilities that have beefed up their growth—and thus capital spending—forecasts in recent months.

More broadly, analysts at S&P Global late last year said they expect aggregate utility capex to top $195 billion in both 2026 and 2027—a big jump from 2022’s $144 billion. And they added that it’s likely those forecasts will climb as more plans fall into place.

“This new facility in Utah positions us to meet growing demand for utility infrastructure in the region resulting from distributed energy projects, data centers, and population growth,” Topalian said in a statement. “We believe our nation’s energy infrastructure should be built with American-made low embodied carbon steel.”

—Geert De Lombaerde

USTR Publishes Half a Dozen Policy Papers to Strengthen Supply Chains

Is “read more” on your list of New Year’s resolutions? If so, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has you covered. “Adapting Trade Policy for Supply Chain Resilience: Responding to Today’s Global Economic Challenges,” is a series of six policy papers published Jan. 7 which “distill the insights we have gathered at USTR that point the way forward to adapting trade policy approaches and tools in service of achieving resilience in supply chains,” says Ambassador Katherine Tai.

Last year, the USTR held several public hearings and requested written comments “seeking input to inform the development of trade and investment policy initiatives that promote supply chain resilience,” according to a March 2024 press release. The series accumulates strategies gathered during the public engagement effort.

The series consists of the following topics:

• Policy Paper No. 1: “Reshaping the Global Trade Paradigm”
• Policy Paper No. 2: “Sustaining Resilient Textile and Apparel Supply Chains”
• Policy Paper No. 3: “Harnessing Rules of Origin for Resilience”
• Policy Paper No. 4: “Countering Non-Market Policies and Practices to Strengthen Supply Chain Resilience”
• Policy Paper No. 5: “Improving Data and Analytical Tools to Promote Supply Chain Resilience”
• Policy Paper No. 6: “Strengthening Supply Chain Resilience through Sectoral Trade Agreements”

“The pandemic illustrated that our pre-existing approach to trade, with its principal focus on reducing barriers to maximize short-term efficiency and minimize costs, had created significant vulnerabilities,” says Tai. “This work is crucial to bringing badly needed innovation to trade policy so that, through collaboration with participants in the U.S. and global economy and with Congress and our trading partners, we can make progress in ensuring trade policy works in service of our people and the planet – and not the other way around.”

—Anna Smith

Board Peace at GrafTech?

GrafTech International, an Ohio company that makes graphite products used by steel mills, has agreed to a series of concessions with activist investor Nilesh Undavia, possibly ending a nearly year-long proxy fight at the company.

Undavia began trying to install his own director candidates to the company’s board last March, saying GrafTech was taking too long to replace its CEO (former Cleveland-Cliffs executive Timothy Flanagan was named CEO a few weeks after Undavia’s first investor letter) and underperforming the broader industrial market.

The company, once part former industrial giant Union Carbide, had been fighting Undavia’s efforts to join the board, saying in an April letter that he didn’t have the background to advise an industrial steel-industry supplier as most of his experience was in portfolio management in the energy sector.

Earlier this month, GrafTech announced that it would add former Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry Co. CEO Sachin Shivaram to its board immediately to satisfy Undavia’s requests. Undavia now owns 6.7% of GrafTech’s stock. The company’s board and Undavia will also work on finding another independent board member to advise the company by its 2025 shareholders meeting, which is typically held in May.

—Robert Schoenberger

Global Lighthouse Network Shines on Two US Sites

The World Economic Forum recently named 17 new sites to its Global Lighthouse Network, a global community launched in 2018 that showcases manufacturing sites from around the world that are embracing leading-edge technologies to drive improved performance. 

Two U.S. sites made the list of latest additions, which were announced Jan. 14. Both received additional recognition for their sustainability efforts, gaining them Sustainability Lighthouse designations.

The two U.S. industrial sites are aluminum producer Novelis’ recycling facility located in Uhrichsville, Ohio, and Nucor Corp.’s steel mill in Sedalia, Missouri.

• In selecting the Novelis site, the WEF highlighted its achievement of 97% recycled aluminum content, achieved in part through its use of digital tools, as well as scrap and procurement strategies. The GreenCircle-certified site also has a greenhouse gas intensity well below the industry average, according to the World Economic Forum announcement.
• Over in Missouri, Nucor built its sustainability credentials with the launch of a $250 electric arc furnace in 2020. It achieved zero Scope 2 emissions via a power purchase agreement and has reduced Scope 1 emissions by nearly 60% with process and technology improvements.

With the addition of these 17 sites in 2025, the Global Lighthouse Network has grown to 189 members. (One of those members, Erisson in Lewisville, Texas, was the subject of IndustryWeek feature in 2022).

You can find the complete list of 2025 additions on the WEF site.

—Jill Jusko