Energy & Climate Change

In the 1890s, Founder Thomas Edison sold GE’s first lightbulbs. Back then, in order to pay for an hour of light powered at the equivalent strength of today’s 100 watts, the average worker would have to work a full hour. By 1960, the time period decreased to a mere eight minutes. And by 1992, it was down to less than a second when using a compact fluorescent bulb.

GE is proud of the part that Edison played in this energy revolution making lighting cleaner, safer, cheaper and brighter. We continue today to innovate to drive up quality and efficiency, and improve affordability in our core technologies. But Edison was just one in a long line of innovators, and the story of their breakthroughs was not only one of “inspiration and perspiration,” but of wider policy frameworks supporting research and education, open trade and commerce.

Over the past 30 years, while technology has been reinvented in areas such as telecommunications and healthcare, it has hardly budged in energy. Most of the technologies that underlie existing energy and transport systems remain those that were invented decades ago. They are increasingly brittle, and incompatible with the need to support a clean future.

Today businesses, scientists, societies and governments face the challenge of kicking off another energy revolution—to reduce dependence on the fossil fuels that contribute to climate change, radically improve the energy, water and resource efficiency of every industry, and determine whether it is possible, affordable and safe to capture and store carbon dioxide. As with the first industrial revolution, this will create jobs, but also require new skills and ways of thinking within and between companies and nations. As with the shift from candles to oil to gas, then to electric lighting, it must also enable better lives for more people.

GE provides technologies for every kind of energy production, including coal, oil and gas, nuclear, wind, solar, hydro and biomass, as well as energy distribution and use. There is a clear opportunity to develop and deploy new technologies that are more efficient, secure and clean in each of them.

Fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas are projected to be a large portion of our energy mix for decades to come. Therefore GE is committed to developing new, cost-effective technologies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts. The demand for energy means that unconventional sources of oil and gas, such as oil sands, shale and coal seams, are increasingly being utilized. We believe these fuels can be used as part of the overall energy mix, but innovation is needed to reduce the CO₂ emissions associated with the process of extracting and upgrading the oil and gas, and to improve the use and treatment of water used. We are collaborating with leading universities, researchers and water quality experts to develop solutions.

These kinds of technology collaborations are supported in part by GE’s ecomagination initiative. Ecomagination represents GE’s commitment to deliver new cleaner products and technologies to market for its customers and society. It is a business initiative to create value by enabling our customers to cut costs, improve quality and reduce their own environmental impacts, and by reducing our own environmental footprint at the same time. Having invested $5 billion in ecomagination R&D in the first five years, last year we set new, ambitious targets:

• Invest $10 billion in green R&D over the next five years
• Grow ecomagination revenue at twice the rate of the Company’s growth
• Improve our own energy intensity by 50% by 2015
• Reduce GHG emissions by 25% by 2015
• Reduce our freshwater use by 25% by 2015

Ecomagination products make up a large part of our industrial product portfolio, and have been developed by most GE businesses. They range from home appliances to aircraft engines, from water filtration to high-speed rail engines and to loans for energy-efficiency investments. In 2001, GE Capital Real Estate launched a new ecomagination solution—ArdenACCESS—which uses smart-building technology to monitor and reduce energy use in commercial buildings. In 2010, ecomagination sales grew to $18 billion, and now account for 12% of our revenues.

Ecomagination is a business response to the needs of industries and consumers around the world. In countries built on 20th-century infrastructure, the challenge is to transform. In emerging economies it is to “leapfrog,” building new infrastructure with the most efficient solutions. In China, ecomagination sales now account for 18% of the business. In the Middle East, GE has built its first ecomagination Center in what aims to be the world’s first carbon-neutral, zero-waste city—Masdar (Abu Dhabi), one of the world’s most sustainable communities. It showcases wind, solar and other renewable energies, the “Smart Grid,” and water-purification technology and energy-efficient home appliances.

One thing we have learned through our own work to reduce GE’s energy and water footprint is that it cannot be done through top-down processes alone. It is about enabling people to find solutions. Within GE, we enable this process through site-by-site “Treasure Hunts,” where employees use their own knowledge and experience to discover savings opportunities and determine the best solution, together with experts. It is a process that builds on the “Kaizen” technique of Lean Manufacturing, which was first translated to energy use by Toyota. It is also one that we are now sharing beyond our own facilities. In the U.S., in collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), we are supporting companies, universities and even entire cities conducting their own Treasure Hunts. We are also piloting the Treasure Hunt process with some of our suppliers.

As part of the search for bottom-up innovation, in 2010, we launched the $200 million ecomagination Innovation Challenge. The first round focused on smart grid ideas, with almost 4,000 ideas submitted from 150 countries. The five winners were each awarded $100,000 to develop their ideas on creating a smarter, cleaner, more efficient electric grid. Announcing the results in November 2010, GE, along with its venture capital partners, also unveiled new investments totaling $55 million in promising power grid technologies. The second round of the challenge, opened in early 2011, is focused on home energy efficiency.