Provide a forecast of what the workforce demand would be over a five-year period to produce and market your team’s technical application or process. Include the impact such production would have on the marketplace.

           Our system consists of products that exploit relatively inexpensive and simpler High Temperature Superconductors. These materials contain a vast amount of economic potential, but as with any fledgling technology, sustained efforts are required in order to further increase the performance of the material as well as decreasing its cost and complexity. Presently, the superconducting market, varying from university research to laboratory facilities, primarily consists of Low Temperature Superconductors. Magnetic Resonance Imaging is the largest current market for superconductors. The MRI industry as well as the scientific industry account for approximately 2.9 billion US dollars worldwide in the year 2000. These industries are expected to grow significantly, with market value exceeding 4.3 billion US dollars in 2010.

          Aside from these established businesses, new businesses will mainly consists of areas such as electric power and transportation. According to Conectus, success in the field of HTS depends on developing materials to techno-economic maturity using cost-effective processes, on demonstrating the technical feasibility of devices and on proving their reliability in field tests. Conectus expects that during the 5-year period between 2005 and 2010, the development and cost reductions for HTS components will prepare the economical foundation for these new fields. The contributions to the world market will be about 2 billion US dollars in 2010. Electrical power applications emerge as one of the businesses with the greatest growth rates. The total market of LTS and HTS is predicted to reach 49 billions US dollars in 2020. Market penetrations of approximately 15% in major fields reflect upon the total market.

          Electric generators utilizing superconducting wire are incredibly efficient machines. In fact, their efficiency is above 99% and their size is about half that of conventional generators wound with copper wire. General Electric has estimated the potential worldwide market for generators utilizing HTS in the next decade at around a staggering 20 to 30 billion US dollars. Other commercial power projects currently busy at work that employ superconductor technology include energy storage to enhance power stability for the power grid. For example, American Superconductor has received an order from Alliant Energy in March 2000 to install a Distributed Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage System (D-SMES) in Wisconsin. SMES are impressive power reserves. Just one of theses D-SMES units has a power reserve of over 3 million watts. Of importance to our system, power utilities have also begun to use superconductor-based transformers and "fault-limiters". Both the US and Japan plans to replace existing copper power cables with superconducting cable-in-conduit cooled with liquid nitrogen. Although, superconducting cables are over 7000% more space-efficient, inquiring a task force would not be that difficult. Rerouting cables as well as the massive undertaking of integrating superconducting components requires a large workforce. The current workforce in this area is mainly consisting of maintenance instead of development which will certainly increase in the next five years. Power utilities in the next five years must begin to start integrating superconducting concepts and must begin to start training as well as specialization. The implementation of replacing our current grid, or at least refurnishing parts of the grid, with superconducting parts as with our system will cause an increase in jobs especially in public utilities. We do not see this growth in the next five years as much as the five afterwards. This is due to still to the time needed for further development in the area of HTS.

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