Eugene Corvallis Salem Beaverton Portland Longview Astoria Bend Hood River The Dalles As a young college graduate in his native Taiwan, Joseph Lu says learning how supply chains work was as easy as walking down the street. “When I graduated college and finished my military service, our government was really encouraging young people to start their own businesses, so there were a lot of small factories,” Lu tells Oregon Business. “Whole families would operate a factory with three or four machines, doing a very small part of the supply chain. One factory might do the injection, another factory — another family — might do the metal fabrication. If you walk down two or three streets, you can learn all the processes and the whole industry. It’s a great education for kids.” Lu, 70, spent a 30-year career managing and overseeing manufacturing operations in Taiwan and China before being coaxed into retirement by his wife and son. In 1989, though, retirement got to be too boring. He left retirement and moved to Oregon to found Powin, a Tualatin-based, high-volume retail manufacturer that designed, built and provided logistics for companies outsourcing manufacturing operations to China and Taiwan. Powin went public in 2010 and began to transition into clean-energy storage. The company consolidated its operations into the energy sector, becoming Powin Energy in 2015. Lu says he didn’t get to fully oversee his company’s transition into the energy-storage sector. A heart attack in May of 2017 sent him into retirement again, but once again it didn’t take. As he puts it, federal investment through the Inflation Reduction Act opened up an opportunity to bring a manufacturing operation to the United States, and that was too good to pass up. In 2020 Lu founded QPO Energy, a lithium-battery module manufacturer in Tualatin. “I heard about the federal incentive, and I said, ‘I want to make these products in the U.S.’ I already know the energy-storage products. I really know the industry. I really know the vendors. So I decided to come back and be a manufacturer,” Lu says. THE NEARER SHORE Powin Energy founder Joseph Lu came out of retirement for a second time to found QPO Energy, following a surge of interest in bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States. BY SANDER GUSINOW 36
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