Blog of Intellectual Capital

Here is a cleantech story by way of Delaware Online.

Working-class Delaware came out in force Tuesday to celebrate Fisker Automotive’s plans to buy the vacant Boxwood Road plant near Newport and return the state to the business of building cars, potentially creating thousands of jobs in the process.

In front of hundreds of auto workers — past and future — and seemingly every elected official in Delaware, state and national leaders and the startup automaker’s CEO touted the company’s plans to build plug-in hybrid electric cars at a factory that refuses to stay closed.

The Boxwood plant looked doomed in 1993 when General Motors said it planned to close it. The company later changed its mind.

Complete coverage: Fisker’s plans for Boxwood

The factory was again left for dead in July, when GM followed through on ending production there in the wake of its historic bankruptcy filing, costing about 550 Boxwood Road workers their jobs.

Tuesday’s event celebrated an eventual resurrection of the 62-year-old plant, this time as a catalyst for what supporters hope is a seismic shift in the auto industry, the transition from gasoline to electricity as the fuel for cars.

“Since we moved from the horse to the gasoline engine, there has never been such a big change as is happening right now,” Henrik Fisker, co-founder and CEO of his namesake company, told the crowd.

United Auto Workers union members mixed with state government officials and corporate leaders on the Boxwood plant floor Tuesday, everyone savoring an economic development victory for tiny Delaware over larger states that would have loved to lure Fisker.”

Read the full article here.