Certainly, the development of these turbines is a case of challenge and response since they were developed to meet the Scandinavian environment. GE and others will develop generators that will provide wind farms offshore where the windiest but harshest environments exist. Animal lover will be delighted to know that sea birds are able to avoid offshore wind farms.
The economy is down, but here is another sign that green technology may be the way out of our economic dilemma. US clean energy patents hit a record high last quarter.
This column highlights the top economic stories of the week.
General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt is on a mission to improve U.S. exports. That’s because General Electric doesn’t just sell light bulbs and refrigerators to the American public. The company is a global giant in energy, transportation and financial services. More on this story here.
With a full House vote expected this week on the American Clean Energy [...]
Cleantech startups have stopped seeing GE as an adversary and have started realizing the company can help them make a difference, Kevin Skillern, a managing director at GE Energy Financial Services, said in a keynote speech at a Thomson Reuters conference called “Financing the Cleantech Vision” in Palo Alto on Wednesday.
In spite of the recession, Skillern assured the audience that the long-term business opportunity for cleantech is still there, though it will require “a strong stomach and a lot of patience” to cash in on it. He also called climate change “one of, if not the biggest, societal challenges of our time” and said technology was an essential part of the solution.
GE’s hybrid locomotive battery
GE partners with New York state to create a $ 100 million manufacturing facility for a new sodium based battery technology in the Capital region.
Who imagined that ordinary table salt could be the secret to storing energy?
GE is once again bringing the notion of a technology based economy home, this time with ordinary kitchen ingredients like table salt. Today, the company announced a plan to locate a new, sodium battery manufacturing facility in Upstate New York’s Capital Region.
The sodium battery was developed in GE’s Global Research Center. Made of ordinary table salt and nickel, the sophisticated technology already has about 30 patents blocking the intellectual property in its space.
GE has already invested more than $150 million to develop advanced battery technologies, including this high energy density, sodium-based chemistry battery that is designed to store huge densities of energy in a relatively small space. The first application will be GE’s hybrid locomotive, which will be commercialized in 2010. The investment in sodium battery technology complements GE’s investment in A123, a leading supplier of lithium batteries for plug-in electric passenger cars.
New York Governor David Paterson, is intent on making his state, the capital of the global clean energy economy. He and Dennis Mullen, President of the Upstate Empire State Development Corporation, have shown strong support for GE’s sodium battery project from the outset.
This new column highlights the top economic stories of the week.
At the outset of this week, it looked like the Swine flu might be the largest influenza epidemic since the virus that wiped out a significant portion of the world’s population at the end of the first World War. Local economies everywhere have been affected given that people have stopped going out for fear of “The SuperFlu.”
Not [...]
GE’s Electric Bus (Source: GE)
The Inspired Economist (IE) recently interviewed GE’s Bob King, a 30-year veteran of the company who has driven the company’s research in the advanced electric and hybrid vehicle space.
With the energy crisis of the late ’70s, GE began to aggressively pursue the development of an electric test vehicle, creating a prototype that included nearly all the components that can be found in today’s hybrid vehicles. Bob worked on this, and also on the development of GE’s hybrid bus in 1996. The bus established the emissions requirements for NYC’s hybrid transit buses and paved the way for those that you see on the roads today.
Bob has witnessed the cyclical nature of the country’s demand for energy-efficient cars and the changes in technology that have resulted in advancing the industry. Here’s what he had to say to IE.
IE: What is GE’s hybrid vehicle? Can you describe it? It’s USP?
BK: GE researchers are working on hybrid systems and battery technologies for a hybrid locomotive and for heavy-duty vehicle applications, which we believe could cascade down and help accelerate key advancements for Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) in the automotive sector. In fact, we also have been performing some research in conjunction with the lithium-ion battery maker A123Systems to support their battery development for automobile applications.
Smart meters will have their own web pages that can be presented on social networks.
Earlier this week, General Electric (GE), announced a huge step in towards transforming the electric grid in Houston, Texas — one of the largest grids in the United States.
GE will work with CenterPoint Energy to implement a smart grid system called Advanced Metering System (AMS) that is designed to provide Houston-based consumers with the ability to better monitor and manage electric use and cost in near real-time.
After years of railing against special interests, I find myself presented with a quandary. Special interests are lining up behind the Smart Grid technology I love and, in doing so, risk saddling this cool program with the baggage intrinsic to special interests.
After writing my post earlier this month about genetically engineered ingredients and animal cloning, I was given the opportunity to speak with Lisa Bunin, Campaign Coordinator with the Center for Food Safety.
We spoke about some exciting new developments in the fight against genetically modified beet sugar.
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