There can be too much of a good thing even in renewable power. Imagine that you run a wind farm with 50 wind turbines churning away above gusty hills and valleys. Suddenly a message from the grid operator who buys your electricity flashes on a screen in your control center. Her wires are transmitting power at capacity, demand is dropping, and she wants you to reduce output. This is what industry calls “curtailment.”
GE hopes to make wind turbines far cheaper, and open up new ways to design them, by ditching the stiff fiberglass blades it uses now in favor of turbine blades made out of fabric. GE says the project, which recently received nearly $4 million from the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, could lower wind turbine blade costs by 40 percent.
One way to reduce the cost of wind power is to make larger turbines. But as the blades have been getting larger, the costs of making them have been rising as well, says Wendy Lin, a principal engineer at GE. That’s offsetting some of the advantages of bigger turbines. “We know we really need to make a drastic change in the way we make these blades to bring the cost of the system down,” she says.
General Electric’s CEO explains his company’s recent bets on 3D printing and software
There are lots of ideas that pass for interesting and important in Silicon Valley (‘Hey, I’m building a social network for pets!”). Manufacturing technologies aren’t usually on the list.
General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt thinks that’s going to change. Next year, in 2013, Immelt predicted, “is a time when manufacturing becomes sexy again,” as he addressed a software and dotcom-heavy crowd at a conference GE hosted San Francisco today.
The Industrial Revolution radically changed the way we use energy and make things. The Internet Revolution altered how we communicate, consume information, and spend money. A combination of these two transformations, called the Industrial Internet, now links networks, data and machines. It promises to remake global industry, boost productivity, and launch an entirely new age of prosperity and robust growth.
Last October, Michael Idelchik, vice president for advanced technologies at GE Global Research, pointed to 3-D printing called it “the next manufacturing revolution.” Idelchik said that 3-D printing, also described as additive manufacturing, “had the potential to fundamentally disrupt” how we make complex machines and transform industries. “The potential impact of additive manufacturing is huge,” Idelchik said. The technology “prints” intricate designs by adding thin layers of material on top of each other. “Four decades from now, we could be printing an entire engine this way,” says Michael Idelchik.
There is a difference between book smarts and street smarts. The same applies to data. You can measure every action, gather gigabytes of information, but gain little knowledge. “Big Data is not just that there is value within, but rather there are connections to be made to make Big Data more proactive and predictive – or making information more intelligent,” says Bill Ruh, GE vice president and global technology director.
There is a difference between book smarts and street smarts. The same applies to data. You can measure every action, gather gigabytes of information, but gain little knowledge. “Big Data is not just that there is value within, but rather there are connections to be made to make Big Data more proactive and predictive – or making information more intelligent,” says Bill Ruh, GE vice president and global technology director.
Phill Scott does not wax romantic about the moon. Where others see mystery or madness, he ponders megawatts. Twice a day, like clockwork, the moon’s gravity makes the seas ebb and flow. For Scott, a business manager at GE Power Conversion, the tides are the perfect source of renewable energy, more predictable and reliable than wind or solar power. “Some tides off the coast of U.K. clock in at seven meters per second,” he says. “It’s a force of nature begging to be leveraged.”
The crowd in San Francisco looked impressed yesterday as Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the light and svelte iPhone 5. It made sense. Consumers and businesses have grown enamored of smartphones and mobile apps—see last year’s 17.7 billion app downloads worldwide.
To underscore how smart CIOs and corporate leaders are integrating apps into the way they do business, Cook flashed on stage the GE Genius app. The business app, which helps GE Capital’s sales teams access customer information and gather market intelligence on the go, is one of many in GE’s app portfolio.
One of the largest startups in and around Silicon Valley is GE Global Software in San Ramon, California, a brand new division of giant General Electric, built from scratch into an organization of 400 engineers, growing to as many as 800 software engineers and researchers by year end.
Betting big on software is a key business strategy for GE. The business group’s annual revenues were more than $142 billion in 2012. In 2008 they were nearly $180 billion. Software businesses have high profit margins especially if they can be applied across a large user base.
