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Siemens CEO says region should steer toward green growth
Region should steer toward green growth, CEO says
By Karl Henkel
YOUNGSTOWN
Eric Spiegel has spent a lot of his life around energy. The Mahoning Valley native and president of industrial giant Siemens Corp. started working for his father’s construction company, dealing with coal and nuclear plants, and his interest in energy soon blossomed.
But it wasn’t until he began working on his thesis at Harvard University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in economics, that he started to consider the impact of clean energy and new technology.
“I did a lot of research on what it would cost to build nuclear power and the fact it was sustainable and was a clean energy,” Spiegel said. “Unfortunately, I finished my thesis just about the time that Three Mile Island happened. That was the time the light went on that technology can really change the world.”
The Three Mile Island accident, a core meltdown in a nuclear-generating station near Harrisburg, Pa., in 1979, may have been the most significant accident in American nuclear-power history, but the event ultimately sparked Spiegel’s affinity for energy.
And after 24 years as a consultant for Booz & Co., Spiegel in January 2010 shifted to his current position as president and CEO of Washington, D.C.-based Siemens, a U.S. division of Siemens AG, a German conglomerate that provides technological products and services for the health-care, energy and industrial sectors and had more than $125 billion in sales last year.
Spiegel on Monday returned home (he’s a 1976 graduate of Poland Seminary High School) where he served as the keynote speaker at the 2011 Youngstown State University Sustainable Energy Forum at Kilcawley Center.
“I never thought I’d come back to Youngstown and talk about sustainability and clean energy,” he said. “It’s really great to see the kind of people we have around here — politicians, big universities, big companies, clean-energy companies, everyone — pulling together to figure out how to drive the growth here.”
The event drew more than 150 guests who heard Spiegel’s analysis of America’s infrastructure and energy sources and what the tech belt, consisting of Cleveland, Youngstown and Pittsburgh, needs to do to regain and ensure future economic stability.
“The region already has several key advantages,” he said. “Every city is going to have its pluses and its minuses. Pittsburgh and Cleveland clearly have much bigger airports, but Youngstown has other values like highway routes.
“If you put that together and think of that as a megacity, I think that’s where the real power is going to come from.”
Spiegel demonstrated his strength-in-numbers theory by comparing the tech belt’s population to Chicago’s and said as a whole, the region could act as a top five or six market.
Spiegel, who also met with Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams and today heads to the White House as part of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit, said the bulk of the region’s growth should come from three areas: clean coal, wind power, and maybe most importantly, the Marcellus Shale.
“I think we can do the right thing for the environment and grow the shale gas business dramatically,” he said. “It’s going to come relatively quickly. There’s no way that this won’t be on a very large growth path in the next five to 10 years.”
What does that mean for the future of the tech belt? More jobs for skilled workers, which Spiegel said could keep the youth in the Mahoning Valley and spark innovative thinking much like Spiegel when he was in college.
“Having the other industries is fine,” he said. “But you want to get into the other things that are really going to drive interest in the young people. What’s going to keep the Eric Spiegel’s of the world in Youngstown?”