How Modular Manufacturing Can Help Create Abundance

Forbes

3 hours ago

Scott Graybeal, CEO of Caelux, a solar energy innovator in perovskites to make solar energy more powerful and cost effective.
We live in an age of incredible technological advancement, yet we face critical shortages and high costs in many essential areas. To solve the challenge, I believe we need to build more. A lot more. What do we need to build exactly? The simple and not overly glib answer: everything.
We need more electricity and more renewable energy to power today's technologies and tomorrow's innovations. We need more resilient supply chains, more affordable healthcare options, more effective public transportation, more opportunities for advanced education and skills training, and more sustainable food production systems. Solving the problem of artificial scarcity is a policy issue, but it's also a manufacturing and production problem.
In that respect, I believe modular intelligent manufacturing can help accelerate the pace of production while driving down costs and enhancing local economic benefits. Here's how:
Issues With Current Manufacturing Methodologies
Traditional, centralized manufacturing models, while powerful, can often create bottlenecks, inflate costs and limit accessibility. For example, building out a complete supply chain in the solar industry is currently a very expensive undertaking as producing key components such as polysilicon safely and cost-effectively requires large campuses and significant capital expenditures.
In today's typical solar manufacturing supply chain model, the foundation is silicon, most of which is processed in China's Xinjiang Province. Quartzite is extracted and melted using readily available but dirty coal and converted to polysilicon. Similarly, contract manufacturing of electronic goods has often leveraged large campuses with massive dormitories housing potentially coerced workers who produce products that we use daily. This race to the bottom has driven a transition from West to East and increased wealth for the recipients, but at the expense of the ultimate consumer.
While these examples are particular to my industry, the solar sector, they are emblematic of the bottlenecks, ethical quagmires and inherent vulnerabilities in existing manufacturing methodologies.
How We Can Innovate For Abundance And Localized Production
The days of mega-campuses and complex international supply chains should be on their way out. To unlock abundance, a transformation in supply chains and manufacturing is needed and enabled by recent innovations.
The issue often cited by manufacturing executives is that centralized manufacturing models may be less efficient than we think. For instance, large campuses mean large human infrastructure, and AI agents have the potential to greatly simplify tasks that would normally require a large staff that are not directly adding value to the product.
Likewise, the future of manufacturing engineering could also be streamlined, where a single engineer may command hundreds of agents processing experiments from data and evaluating thousands of parameters far more quickly than their human counterparts.
With AI, process control moves from a strictly defined recipe to fluid feed-forward, feedback control that determines the ideal operating point given thousands of input parameters based on tens of millions of micro-experiments. As a result, innovation can be accelerated and products manufactured more quickly. In order for this to happen, we need to focus on exploring more readily available material systems that put the 'hard' in 'hardware' and source from multiple locations to ensure supply chain survivability alongside sustainability. These two are not mutually exclusive.
Modular intelligent manufacturing is an approach where production processes are designed to be readily scaled in sections or 'modules.' These modules can be aligned with the amount of capital available, allowing companies to build out multiple production lines or nodes—often at a more affordable price point. Modular intelligent manufacturing also strives to package production in such a way that it can be deployed almost anywhere, so producers can leverage local job seekers to spread the economic benefits of manufacturing jobs across the widest possible part of the market. The implications for housing and solar power could be enormous.
According to the Urban Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan policy research and educational organization, modular housing can speed up the time from permit to completion by two months compared to stick builds, while also making units more affordable. Similarly, modular intelligent manufacturing in the solar sector could enable localized, cost-effective production. This change can happen rapidly. In my experience, using automation and trained agents, production sites can be set up in days, not months.
In closing, we need to build more, faster and more efficiently to address societal needs. Manufacturing abundance doesn't have to be an esoteric dream. We can bring it to fruition right now. Modular intelligent manufacturing can help, allowing us to build more, more efficiently and more cost-effectively.
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