By Mike Keller

Shopping in a big department store can quickly devolve from a simple errand to an odyssey filled with frustration. What section do they put the bath towels in again? Is there a route to take that avoids the chemical attack of the perfume aisle on the way to kitchenware? Where do they put the on-sale jackets?

There are many of us feeling this way. A recent Google survey found that 66 percent of shoppers couldn’t find the information they were looking for, and 43 percent reported leaving a brick-and-mortar store frustrated.

Also, athough we arrive armed with smartphones, the in-store experience has mostly been a dumb one. Even the most tech-savvy shoppers can do little more than search websites for information and coupons while standing in the middle of a store. Because GPS doesn’t work indoors, we can’t navigate the aisles without first locating one of those big stationary maps that themselves aren’t all that easy to find.

But GE and Qualcomm Atheros are developing a new “intelligent” technology that’s opening up two-way communication indoors. It turns out that the solution to a real-time customized shopping experience can be turned on with the flick of the switch and fits inside commercial GE LED light bulbs.

Illustration: LED matrix

The system is part of GE’s push into the Industrial Internet. It’s using LEDs that light the aisles of stores to chat with customers’ smartphones while they shop. Sensors inside the LED fixtures emit staccatos of imperceptible light pulse patterns readable by phones or tablets when customers opt in to use a special app.

The technology is called visible light communication. It allows such app-enabled smartphones to talk back to the system using a Bluetooth low-energy channel.

This chatter tells the store system where the customer is located and allows it to beam back to the user’s device information and coupons for nearby products. It also gives customers the ability to navigate the store in real-time. This technology can be also tied to a shopping list, making a trip through a large store faster and more efficient.

Meanwhile, the retailer or store manager can analyze how shoppers move through a location and optimize its display. The system could be also used in airports, hotels, hospitals and other places where users must navigate new and complex surroundings.

“Today’s consumers want a customized experience,” said Jeff Bisberg, the global general manager of GE Lighting’s indoor location project. “From the news they read, to the games they play, to the products they buy, they expect technology-driven personalization. Working with Qualcomm Atheros, we’re harnessing the power of our commercial LED lighting to give retailers the opportunity to create an enhanced experience for shoppers securely, while also respecting their privacy.”

Click here to download.

By Mike Keller

Aboard a drillship bobbing in the waters off West Africa, a piece of complex machinery unexpectedly shuts down. A mile below the ship, a newly completed deepwater well waits for the installation of a subsea Christmas tree, which controls the flow of oil and gas from the wellhead. But for now, the tree sits uselessly on the deck of the ship.

A young technician springs into service with a staple of the machine inspector’s trade—a borescope with a video camera at the long end of the probe to see into the deep recesses of the tree. He opens a port into the heart of the equipment-hoisting module and cautiously threads the borescope in. When the image on the screen in front of him gets to a key piece of rotary equipment he needs to inspect, he presses a button on the screen to connect.

InspectionWorks Connect virtually eliminates the distance between field inspectors and senior engineers who can diagnose maintenance issues.

Within seconds, an expert inspector in Houston sees an invitation pop up on his computer screen and signs in to a secure website. The view at the end of the borescope appears on his screen and he texts the on-site inspector, asking him to move the scope 90 degrees to the left. Together, they diagnose what is ailing the machine. Operations restart quickly, and downtime is limited.

In the era of the Industrial Internet, the days of the lone field inspector are numbered. The trade is now moving into the cloud. “We’re digitizing inspection,” says Mike Domke, the product line manager for GE InspectionWorks Connect, a remote collaboration software platform for nondestructive testing and inspection. Traditionally, he says, an inspector in the field gathers data from the equipment he’s investigating, then sends it to an engineer or senior inspector who decides whether repairs or maintenance is needed. “There’s a distance between the two people and we wanted to answer the question of how do you get that far-away expert on the tarmac or in the power plant alongside that junior inspector?”

The software allows for real-time digital inspection.

The new GE software turns the probe into a two-way communicator. As long as the device has access to Wi-Fi or a cell network, it can be used to connect remotely with anyone who has Internet access. The connection allows inspectors and experts to text each other and to draw, Snapchat-style, directly on the instrument’s screen.

Domke says connecting people through the industrial cloud will reap benefits in industries from oil and gas to power generation, aviation and transportation. Funneling of expertise from senior inspectors down to newer hires is also critical, since the average age of such experts is 55 and many are starting to retire.  

“Connecting experts and field inspectors is very disruptive to these industries and to inspection as a whole,” Domke says. “We’re building a world for real-time digital inspection that is transformative to these businesses.”

By Mike Keller

Consider it a jet engine for the Oompa-Loompas. GE engineers working on the future of aircraft manufacturing recently showed off what they could do. They made what could be the world’s first fully functional 3D-printed mini jet engine that roared at 33,000 rotations per minute.

The backpack-sized jet engine was built by a team of technicians, machinists and engineers who work at a GE Aviation lab focused on developing additive manufacturing, a next-generation technique that can make complex 3D structures by melting metal powder layer upon layer. They built the engine over the course of several years to test the technology’s abilities and to work on a side project together, says Steve Grimm, the plant leader at the Additive Development Center outside Cincinnati.

“We wanted to see if we could build a little engine that runs almost entirely out of additive manufacturing parts,” Grimm said. “This was a fun side project.”

Making a whole working jet engine by industrial 3D printing is quite a remarkable feat, since the technology has only been getting a serious look from manufacturers over recent years. The GE team’s finished product joins the 3D printed jet engine built at Australia’s Monash University (though they didn’t start it up) and a working 3D printed rocket engine made at the University of California, San Diego.

The GE team couldn’t build the complexity of a whole commercial aircraft engine into their working model. Instead, they got plans for a simpler engine developed for remote control model planes and customized them for their 3D printing machines. Their final product measures around a foot long by about eight inches tall.

When they were finished, they mounted it inside a test cell typically used to try out full-scale engines and fired it up. “We got it running, high-fived each other and now it’s on display in our conference room along with many other pieces we show to people,” Grimm says.

In contrast to traditional machining methods that typically cut parts out of larger pieces to get to a finished shape, additive manufacturing uses lasers to fuse thin layers of metal on top of each other to build parts from the ground up. This advanced technique means less material waste and more complex parts that can be built precisely to optimize how they work inside a machine.

The development team has already registered a major victory for using additive manufacturing in producing aircraft components. They designed and developed a fuel nozzle that will be additively manufactured for inclusion in the CFM LEAP jet engine for commercial single-aisle aircraft. 

“There are really a lot of benefits to building things through additive,” Grimm says. “You get speed because there’s less need for tooling and you go right from a model or idea to making a part. You can also get geometries that just can’t be made any other way.”

By GE Reports Staff

History remembers the soldiers who streamed from amphibious assault vehicles at Normandy and the tank commanders in the Battle of the Bulge. But let’s not forget Marie Kappa, a government ordnance inspector stationed at GE Erie Works, who also helped win World War II.

The picture of Kappa, pale and serious, peering down the barrel of a Howitzer artillery piece in March 1943 is a reminder of the total immersion of the U.S. public in the war effort. On this day 70 years ago, the efforts of Kappa and millions of others both deployed and on the home front, paid off as the deadliest war in history ended in the European theater. Their images, preserved by GE’s “Publicity Department”, remain an indelible evocation of a completely mobilized society.

The event, popularly known as V-E Day, marked the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. The war in Japan, however, threatened to grind on. “Our victory is but half won,” cautioned President Harry S. Truman. Still, GE gave its workers the day off from making bazookas and turbines to drive aircraft carriers. Presumably, for a job well done.

Below are some of the images of wartime mobilization distributed by GE.

By GE Reports staff

Sailors know that wind can be a fickle servant and they’ve come up with ingenious ways to trap it in their sails. Wind turbine designers have recently developed their own tricks to beat the doldrums and build efficient wind farms for landscapes caressed with slow-moving wind.

One such machine is the GE 2.5-120 wind turbine– the numbers stand for 2.5 megawatts in output and 120 meters (393 feet) in rotor diameter. Last year, construction crews installed 14 of them at a wind farm near Rehborn, Germany.

Rehborn is the largest installation of these massive turbines in the world. Their hubs are nearly 140 meters (460 feet) off the ground, almost half way up the Eiffel Tower. Their height and design combined with sophisticated sensors, software and data analytics allow them to be 25 percent more efficient and generate 15 percent more electricity than comparable GE models.

The designers had to solve a number of challenges. The rotor of each turbine, for example, is as large at the giant London Eye Ferris wheel, so big that the wind whips the blade tips at different speeds when one is 650 feet high in the air and another 25 stories below. This could be a problem, but the team found a clever way to alter the pitch of the blades as they spin. Much like the sail of a sailboat, the changing pitch allows the turbine to capture and concentrate the wind, even when it’s not blowing too much.

The technology allows the Rehborn farm to take advantage of such “slow wind” and produce enough electricity to power 30,000 German homes.

The turbines reach nearly halfway up the Eiffel Tower. Images credit: GE Power & Water

The turbine also works well with data. There are more than 120 sensors inside the rotor, the generator, and on the blades of each turbine, that gather tens of thousands of data points every second. They feed the information to a remote database, which stores 4,000 gigabytes from 25,000 turbines around the world. GE uses powerful algorithms to analyze the data and use it to control the turbines’ pitch, yaw, rotor torque and other functions.

GE’s Industrial Internet software can also bring the entire wind farm together and make the turbines signal to each other like a flock of birds. They can even talk to other wind farms and compare data about wind speeds and wind direction.

“The system is monitoring the turbine’s current technical and operational state, comparing this with a huge data base and then, if there is something out of the ordinary, automatically sending out an alarm and maybe even some recommendations on what to do with it,” says Julian Bergmann, an engineer with GE Renewables.

Projects like the Rehborn wind farm are a crucial part of Germany’s energy transition, or Energiewende. It will allow the country to phase out nuclear power and generate 80 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2050.

By GE Reports staff

Powerful new tremors rattled Nepal again on Tuesday, adding to the devastation caused by a 7.8 earthquake that killed at least 8,000 people three weeks ago in April.

The world has quickly mobilized to help the Himalayan country, but aid workers have been dealing with unique challenges such as mountainous valleys walled off with landslides, roads severed by rock avalanches and collapsed bridges.

Even surviving infrastructure is causing bottlenecks for help that’s streaming in. A single runway at the Tribhuwan International Airport in the capital Kathmandu made it through the first temblor, but the stream of large aircraft delivering aid damaged it, prompting the government to impose weight limits on arriving planes. Officials have also periodically closed the airport due to aftershocks.

The AN-12 that delivered medicine from AmeriCares at Nepal’s only international airport in Kathmandu.

One of the planes that managed to land was an Antonov AN-12 (above and below) carrying 14 tons of antibiotics, bandages, sutures, IV fluids, crutches and other medical supplies valued at nearly $1 million from AmeriCares.

The Connecticut-based non-profit chartered the Soviet-era turboprop because of its sturdy design and ability to carry a lot of cargo despite its moderate size. “We’ve seen a similar situation in Haiti,” says Peter Tokarczyk, the non-profit’s director of logistics. “We were able to come in almost fully loaded despite the maximum weight restriction.”

Local officials then airlifted and distributed much of the aid from the airport with helicopters.

Image credit: Joop Plaisier

AmeriCares sent in a team of relief workers from India within 48 hours of the first earthquake. The team traveled up to eight hours to provide medical care in areas cut off by landslides. “We needed to bring in medicine and supplies fast,” says Dr. E. Anne Peterson, AmeriCares’ senior vice president of global programs.

Dr. Peterson (top and above), who flew to Kathmandu a few days after the first quake, says help is urgently needed in the most affected areas, where up to 90 percent of hospitals and treatment centers have been severely damaged.

Over the last three weeks, AmeriCares workers have been treating survivors at mobile clinics in Kathmandu and in heavily damaged rural villages. “Our medical teams are treating an average of 120 patients a day,” she says. “We are seeing children with trauma injuries, diarrhea, fever and respiratory illnesses who haven’t had access to a doctor.”

The AmeriCares team is now dealing with the effects of the new quake. Judging by the latest news from Nepal, their work is far from done.

The GE Foundation donated $500,000 to AmeriCares to support the relief effort in Nepal, and some of the money paid for the charter flight. (The non-profit is now sending aid in cargo bays of commercial planes allowed to fly in from India and Singapore.) Baxter, GSK, Johnson & Johnson, Purdue Pharma and others donated the medical supplies.

By GE Reports staff

The U.S. Navy’s new Zumwalt class of stealth destroyers is seeking to redefine sea power. Quite literally.

In the past, ships used most of their installed power for propulsion, with the engines and propellers directly connected through large and complex gearboxes. But the all-electric Zumwalt vessels will come equipped with so-called “integrated power systems (IPS),“ designed to route electricity around the ship in an instant, eliminating mechanical gearboxes and allowing the power to be used for both propulsion and other electrical systems – including powerful new weapons.

This flexibility means the 610-foot-long Zumwalt, named after the late Admiral Elmo “Bud” Zumwalt Jr., will have nearly 10 times more available power than its predecessors. It could become the first ship carrying next-generation weapons like electromagnetic railguns, which use a strong electromagnetic pulse, rather than gunpowder, to shoot projectiles.

Images credit: Bath Iron Works

The IPS could free up as much as 80 percent of the ship’s power dedicated to propulsion within a fraction of a second. “We’re no longer restricting the engines to provide propulsion power only,” says Adam Kabulski, director for naval accounts at GE Power Conversion, which developed the IPS. “This design allows you to send electric power wherever you need it. You can access many megawatts in a short amount of time and convert it into energy. It’s instantaneous.”

The system is also highly redundant. Instead of the typical three-phase motors, the Zumwalt’s “advanced induction motors” have 15 phases. “The design is innovative, being smaller and quieter than traditional motors, and also highly survivable,” Kabulski says.

The IPS, which delivers power at 4,160 volts, is also equipped with harmonic filters, power electronics and other technology to maintain power quality and manage electrical disturbances from spreading through the system.

So much tighly managed power gives ship designers many options. The U.S. Naval Institute recently reported that the Navy was considering the electromagnetic railgun for the third planned Zumwalt-class destroyer, USS Lyndon B. Johnson.

The weapon can release up to 5 million amps, or 1,200 volts within 10 milliseconds, according to Military.com. That’s enough to speed up a 45-pound projectile from zero to 5,000 mph in one one-hundredth of a second, the site said. "Energetic weapons, such as EM railguns, are the future of naval combat,” said Rear Adm. Matt Klunder, the chief of naval research.

The Navy said it planned to test fire a series of GPS-guided hyper-velocity projectiles from the gun mounted on a high-speed vessel at a floating barge as far as 50 miles away. “We’re going to fire it against a floating target,” U.S. Navy Capt. Mike Ziv, program manager for Directed Energy and Electric Weapon Systems, told Military.com. “We’re trying to gauge the ability to engage a target over the horizon. We’re going to have a gradual ramp up and gather data.” The tests are slated for the summer of 2016.

GE has been supplying electric propulsion technology to the shipping industry for a century. The Navy’s first electrically propelled ship, the aircraft carrier USS Jupiter, was commissioned in 1913.

By GE Reports staff

From Japan’s offshore solar plants to a tidal lagoon in Wales, countries around the world have found clever ways to tap renewable power. But nowhere is the need for ingenuity more in demand than in Germany, which aims to produce 80 percent of electricity from renewables by 2050, up from 30 percent now. “Today, we rely mainly on wind and solar power, but the supply can be very volatile,” says Christoph Lange, chief executive of BLS Energieplan, GE’s energy planning German subsidiary. “We need a third way that brings everything together.”

One such solution began operation today. Engineers have flicked the switch on a new hybrid power plant that combines a flexible gas engine generating heat and power (CHP), a large roof-mounted solar array operating at 1,500 volts, batteries, and heat storage. The plant will generate a combined 1 megawatt of electricity (400 kilowatts from gas and 600 kilowatts from solar), and also heat for a GE factory in Berlin’s Marienfelde district.

The factory’s solar panels can produce 621 kilowatts at peak output.

The power plant, which was designed by BLS, the solar power company BELECTRIC, and the energy services firm Kofler Energies, will use sophisticated software from Kofler to arbitrage energy supply and demand, store excess power and heat in the batteries and heat storage, or sell electricity to the grid. “We needed a new kind of thinking,” says Bernhard Beck, the founder and executive chairman of BELECTRIC. “It’s no longer gas against solar. Here we can combine their benefits.”

The team started working on the power plant about a year ago. They noticed that if they combined power supply curves from a certain type of gas engine and a photovoltaic array (PV), they would get a nice flat line. “The heat and power from the gas engine is reasonable in the winter, but it doesn’t make sense in the summer,” Beck says. “But that’s also when we have long, warm days and the PV kicks in. The software helps us blend the output and optimize the whole design.”

GE inverters changing direct current produced by solar panels into alternating current.

The power plant’s gas engine comes from GE’s "flexible” Jenbacher line. It can quickly ramp up or cut production depending on the amount of sunlight and solar power coming from the PV units. The engine generates low CO2 emissions and can be nearly 90 percent efficient in the combined heat and power mode.

The plant can sell any excess electricity to the grid or store it in batteries, which hold 200 kilowatt-hours, and release it when needed. “We want to cut the peaks in the consumption,” Beck says. “At lunchtime, for example, we can stop the engine and tap the batteries.”

Lange says that the new power plant could cut the GE factory’s energy costs by 30 percent, compared to relying on a conventional CHP engine and the grid. “Solar is cheap and the heat is basically free,” Beck says. “It’s also more environmentally friendly than conventional CHP plans.”

The structure housing the Jenbacher gas engine.

Both lange and Beck say the power plant could be easily scaled elsewhere since its design is modular. “This is the first time we combined gas, solar and batteries in a single design,” Beck says. “It’s unique and it also make a lot of economic and environmental sense.”

A GE Jenbacher engine.

The heat “buffer” at the factory. Photo credits: GE Reports

By GE Reports staff

Humans have been living with ceramics for 25,000 years. We’ve been using them for cups, pipes, pottery and many other handy everyday objects. But the light, strong, and heat resistant material had one fatal flaw, which has kept it confined mainly to the cupboard. “When you hit it, it fails catastrophically,” says Krishan Luthra, chief scientist for manufacturing and materials technologies at GE Global Research in New York. “I thought it would be the Holy Grail if we could get it inside machines, and get more power and savings out of our engines. It could really make an impact.”

Luthra bet almost three decades of his career on making it work. “There were times where I wasn’t sure it was going to work,” Luthra told The Associated Press, which just published a story about his breakthrough. “But I guess I was too stubborn. I thought it was the right path.”

Above: A LEAP engine with ceramic parts during a flight test above the Mojave desert. Image credit: GE Aviation. Top: GE started testing the first LEAP in Ohio last fall. GIF credit: CFM International

Call it a billion-dollar hunch. Starting in the 1990s, he and his team started studying a new family of materials called ceramic matrix composites (CMCs). Working in partnership with the Department of Defense, the team focused on one subgroup of CMCs that combined heat resistance with toughness.

The research almost died and then took a detour to space, but the team eventually came up with a version of the material good enough for jet engines. “If you don’t do that right you get a ceramic that behaves like china, and if you do it right you get ceramic with metal properties, and that’s the big deal,” Luthra told the AP.

Above: Luthra’s team shot a steel ball flying at 150 mph at their ceramic composite to prove that it would not shatter like a cup. (Chipping was okay since that would not release large pieces of debris into the turbine.) Image credit GE Global Research 

CMCs have now allowed GE engineers to build jet engines that can take planes farther and burn less fuel. That’s because the material has two hugely winning attributes for aviation: it’s one-third the weight of metal and it doesn’t need to be air-cooled, which allows designers to build lighter and more efficient engines.

The first jet engine with static turbine “shrouds” made from CMCs  (above) is the LEAP, developed by CFM International, a joint venture between GE Aviation and Frances Snecma (Safran). Although the engine won’t enter service until next year, it is already the bestselling engine in GE history with 8,000 orders valued around $100 billion (U.S. list price).

GE is building a CMCs factory in North Carolina. GIF credits: CFM International

The engine, designed for the latest single-aisle planes including Boeing 737MAX, Airbus A320neo, and Comac C919, is 15 percent more fuel efficient than current CFM models. “We took the long view and the high potential payoff justified the high risk,” Luthra says.

But the static shroud for the LEAP is just one application. In February, GE engineers made an important breakthrough when they for the first time successfully tested rotating parts made from CMCs inside a jet engine turbine. “Going from nickel alloys to rotating ceramics inside the engine is the really big jump,” says Jonathan Blank, who leads CMC and advanced polymer matrix composite research at GE Aviation. “CMCs allow for a revolutionary change in jet engine design.”

A turbine rotor with blades made from ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) after a test. The yellow blades are covered with an environmental barrier for experimental purposes. Since blades made from CMCs are so light, they allow engineers to reduce the size and weight of the metal disk to which they are attached (the shiny steel part in the center), and design lighter and more efficient jet engines. Image credit: GE Aviation.

GE is also exploring the use of the material for helicopter engines, and gas turbines and compressors for power plants. The new GE9X engine – the world’s largest jet engine GE’s developing for next-gen Boeing 777X wide body plane – will have core parts made from CMCs, as will the Passport engine for business jets.

Mark Little, the head of GE Global Research, says this multitude of applications illustrates the concept the company calls the “GE Store.”

Says Little: “The GE Store is a place where every business can come for technologies, product development and services that no one else can provide.”

By Michaela Maerkl

GE engineers have recently designed massive subsea power generators that will soon allow the U.K. to produce electricity from the tides. In Japan, special GE LEDs are helping a local farmer grow 10,000 heads of lettuce per day indoors (see below). Germany just opened a hybrid power plant designed by GE that binds together solar panels, natural gas and batteries with software and makes renewable power more reliable, rather than subject to the vagaries of the weather.

GE has 300,000 employees in more than 140 countries working on cutting edge projects like those above. Working together with the digital publisher Quartz, the company’s marketing team has developed an interactive graphic called World in Motion that allows anyone anywhere with access to the Internet to read stories about them.

The graphic, which launched on Monday, holds 240 pieces of content from 10 regions around the world. Users can sort stories (some of them from GE Reports), slideshows, video and other content by region as well as by 8 core themes like the Industrial Internet, energy, healthcare, and advanced manufacturing.

Jay Lauf, Quartz’s president and publisher, told Ad Age that World in Motion was “among the largest content-driven projects” his site has worked on.

Jason Hill, GE’s global director of media and content strategy, said the project meets an important need. He said that while people were very familiar with the GE brand, few of them know what GE actually does, particularly in non-U.S. markets. “Really great, engaging content takes people behind the logo and allows us to explain how we are changing the world,” Hill says.

By GE Reports staff

Few people embody the backyard inventor better than Charles Brush. In 1887, he built behind his mansion in Cleveland, Ohio, a 4-ton wind generator with 144 blades and a comet-like tail, and used it to power a set of batteries in his basement. Although by today’s standards the huge, 60-foot machine was massively inefficient, it started a new industry that pushed generations of engineers to make it better. Now GE has decided to go further and improve on the entire wind farm in one fell swoop.

“Every wind farm has a unique profile, like DNA or a fingerprint,” says Keith Longtin, general manager for wind products at GE Renewable Energy. “We thought if we could capture data from the machines about how they interact with the landscape and the wind, we could build a digital twin for each wind farm inside a computer, use it to design the most efficient turbine for each pad on the farm, and then keep optimizing the whole thing.”

GE calls the concept the “digital wind farm” and this week the company has offered the first glimpse at what it’s going to look like.

Digital windfarm designers are using a “digital twin” model (see above) residing in the cloud to build and optimize the real-world wind farm. GIF credits: GE Power & Water

The concept has two key parts: a modular, 2-megawatt wind turbine that can be easily customized for specific locations, and software that can monitor and optimize the wind farm as it generates electricity.

GE says that the technology could boost a wind farm’s energy production by as much as 20 percent and create $100 million in extra value over the lifetime of a 100 megawatt farm. That value will come from building the right farm at the right place and then using data to produce predictable and power and further optimize the farm’s performance.

“The world’s electricity demand will grow by 50 percent over the next 20 years, and people want to get there by using reliable, affordable, and sustainable power,” says Steve Bolze, president and CEO of GE Power & Water. “This is the perfect example of using big data, software and the Industrial Internet to drive down the cost of renewable electricity.”

The Industrial Internet is a digital network connecting, collecting and analyzing machine data. GE believes that the Industrial Internet could add $10 to $15 trillion to global GDP in efficiency gains over the next two decades.

America’s first wind turbine generated just 12 kilowatts of electricity. Brush built it behind his mansion, in the middle of a 5-acre backyard running along Cleveland’s fashionable Euclid Avenue. In 1892, his company, Brush Electric Co., became part of GE.

Each digital wind farm begins life as a digital twin, a cloud-based computer model of a wind farm at a specific location. The model allows engineers to pick from as many as 20 different turbine configurations – from pole height, to rotor diameter and turbine output - for each pad at the wind farm and design its most efficient real-world doppelganger. “Right now, wind turbines come in given sizes, like T-shirts,” says Ganesh Bell, chief digital office at GE Power & Water. “But the new modular designs allows us to build turbines that are tailor-made for each pad.”

But that’s only half of the story. Just like Apple’s Siri and other machine learning technologies, the digital twin will keep crunching data coming from the wind farm and providing suggestions for making operations even more efficient, based on the software’s insights. Longtin says that operators will be even able to use data to control noise. “If there is a house near the wind farm, we will be able to change the rotor speed depending on the wind direction to stay below the noise threshold,” he says.

The data comes from dozens of sensors inside each turbine monitoring everything from the yaw of the nacelle, to the torque of the generator and the speed of the blade tips. The digital twin, which can optimize wind equipment of any make, not just GE’s, gobbles it up and sends back tips for improving performance. “This is a real-time analytical engine using deep data science and machine learning,” Bell says. “There is a lot of physics built into it. We get a picture that feels real, just like driving a car in a new video game. We can do things because we understand the physics – we build turbines – but also because we write software.”

The digital wind farm is built on Predix, a software platform that GE developed specifically for the Industrial Internet. Predix can accommodate any number of apps designed for specific wind farm tasks – from responding to grid demand to maximizing and predicting power output. Says Bell: “This is the start of a big journey for the wind industry.“

A GE wind turbine and its digital twin. Image credit: GE Power & Water

By GE Reports staff

A next-generation A320neo Airbus passenger jet powered by twin LEAP jet engines with 3D-printed parts and new advanced materials inside took to the skies for the first time on Tuesday.

The LEAP is the first engine equipped with 19 3D-printed fuel nozzles and parts from space-age, super-strong ceramics that make it 15 percent more fuel efficient than comparable engines built by CFM International, the 50/50 join-venture between GE Aviation and France’s Safran (Snecma) that designed the engine.

“Today, we are celebrating the next step in our very successful journey with Airbus, a journey that goes back nearly 35 years to the very launch of the A320 program,” said Jean-Paul Ebanga, president and CEO of CFM.

Top: An Airbus A320neo powered by a pair of LEAP-1A engines took a maiden flight on May 19 in Toulouse, France. Image credit: Airbus Above and below: LEAP engines attached to GE’s “flying test beds” during testing in California. Image credits: GE Aviation

The two engines used for the four-and-a-half-hour flight were the LEAP-1A, developed specifically for the Airbus jet. Airbus picked the LEAP for the A320neo in 2010. Since then, CFM has received more than 2,500 orders and commitments for the LEAP-1A engine, representing 55 percent of A320neo orders to date.

CFM International also designed the LEAP-1B for Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraft, and LEAP-1C for Comac’s C919 planes.

The LEAP has 19 3D-printed fuel nozzles (top) and static turbine shrouds made from ceramic matrix composites (CMCs)(above). Image credit: CFM

With a running tally of 8,900 orders valued around $115 billion (U.S. list price), the LEAP is the bestselling engine in GE Aviation’s history.

CFM has said it was “on track” to receive joint U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and European Aviation Safety Agency certification. The first LEAP is scheduled to enter service in 2016.

There are currently more than 30 LEAP engines (all three models) in final assembly or going through tests at GE and Snecma testing facilities in Peebles, Ohio, Victorville, Cal., and elsewhere in Europe and around the world. The testing program has logged a total of more than 3,660 certification test hours and 5,460 test cycles.

The FAA recently certified the first 3D-printed part for a GE jet engine - a casing that houses the compressor inlet temperature sensor inside the GE90 jet engine.

By David Lurie

From Amazon to Zynga, many companies glean powerful business insights from slicing, sorting and analyzing data. But GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt says it is the combination of big iron and big data that gives his company “a killer competitive advantage.”

Speaking yesterday at the Electrical Products Group Conference in Florida, an annual gathering of industrial executives, Wall Street analyst and investors, Immelt said that as a maker of both machines and software like Predix, GE’s “ability to combine the knowledge of the assets, the physics and the analytics,” gave an edge to its customers and to itself.

Immelt said that by the end of 2017, GE software will manage and monitor 500,000 machines and other assets, generate an estimated $8 billion dollars in annual revenue and $500 million in productivity gains for GE. He said that GE’s $1 billion investment in software has been paying for itself “with our own productivity savings, so as an investor you kind of get the growth for free.”

Nearly a month after he announced the company’s exit from banking and the sale of the bulk of GE Capital, Immelt said the company remains focused on shaping the next industrial era. You can find his presentation here. 

Our slideshow below illustrates a handful of recent combinations of machines and software.

Last fall, GE installed its 25,000th wind turbine. Now the company is making the wind farm digital. Ganesh Bell, chief digital officer at GE Power & Water, says software and analytics will allow the company to create a virtual digital twin of any wind farm, gather data, learn from it and optimize the farm. He says that the digital wind farm could produce as much as 20 percent more electricity from the same wind.

A jet engine with GE technology inside takes off every two seconds and that frequency will soon increase. With a running tally of 8,900 orders valued around $115 billion (U.S. list price), the LEAP, which will enter service next year, is already the bestselling jet engine in GE Aviation’s history. The engine was developed by CFM International, a 50/50 joint venture between GE Aviation and France’s Snecma (Safran). But GE Aviation engineers are also connecting engines and entire planes to the Industrial Internet. Their systems look for hidden patterns and saving opportunities, and allow airlines to cut their annual fuel bill by more than 1 percent. That’s on average about 550 pounds of jet fuel - the equivalent of 11 packed suitcases - per hour of flight.

GE’s Tier 4 locomotive is the first freight train engine that meets the U.S. government’s strict Tier 4 emission standards. Orders for the machine now stand at a record $40 billion. In Australia, at the Roy Hill iron ore mine, GE locomotives connected to the Industrial Internet will send 9 million data points every hour to a system called Locotrol Distributed Power, which uses it to manage the movement of the train while it’s en route.

You can find out more about GE machines connected to the Industrial Internet here.

By GE Reports staff

In 1954, GE researcher H. Tracy Hall and three colleagues built a machine that squeezed carbon so hard it turned into nature’s hardest substance: diamond. Their discovery earned the team a spot in America’s National Inventors Hall of Fame, but it didn’t lead GE into the bling business. Instead, the company used the stones to make tools for cutting and polishing metals, glass and even teeth.

Above: GE’s “diamond press” produced pressure of 1.5 million pounds per square inch and temperature of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The press squeezed a special metal-carbon mixture so hard that it turned after 20 minutes into synthetic diamond. Image credit: GE Global Research Top: Black diamond is the toughest form of natural diamond. Diamond and graphite are both “allotropes,” or  different crystalline forms, of the same element: carbon. 

Although GE eventually sold the diamond unit, it did not abandon carbon altogether. Scientists at GE Global Research, the birthplace of the synthetic diamond, are now working with silicon carbide– another hard, carbon-based material originally used for sandpaper. They’re using it to make heavy-duty microchips that can handle megawatts of power and make everything from solar panels to MRI scanners and oil pumps more efficient.

This cross-pollination of ideas and technologies can found everywhere around GE – from using MRI magnets to improve wind turbines to deploying jet engine technology inside power plants.

GE calls the concept the GE Store. The company recently produced a series of videos to explain how it works. Take a look:

By Matt Benvie

From GPS to the Internet, many everyday technologies have military roots. The same is true for jet engines, especially those powering business jets.

For America, the jet age began the night of October 4th, 1941 with the arrival from England of a top-secret engine at a barren airport in Boston’s Back Bay. It was Sir Frank Whittle’s turbojet. Rebuilt by General Electric on the same grounds that now produce engines for the US Army’s Black Hawk and Apache helicopters, the IA engine was the first jet engine flown for the Allies during World War II.

Above and below: A Passport jet engine (attached below the wing) during flight tests over California. Image credits: GE Aviation

Through the Korean and Vietnam Wars, GE Aviation began its practice of transferring military technologies to improve civilian air travel. In the 1960s, GE used the design of its supersonic J85 engine to help Bill Lear – a self-taught radio engineer – launch the business jet market.

Fifty years later, GE is making a bid to shape the business jet space once again. It shrunk the core of the new LEAP engine developed for next-gen passenger jets to help business jet travelers fly farther and faster with lower-than-ever emissions and fuel consumption. Called Passport, the jet engine will power Bombardier’s latest Global 7000 and Global 8000 business jets.

“Passport is like a scaled version of the LEAP core,” said Shawn Warren, general manager of the Passport program. “They are very similar, which is great for both programs because we not only share the differentiating technologies for cost savings, but we also share lessons learned as both programs progress through certification testing.”

Bombardier estimates that the business jet fleet will increase by 22,000 planes by 2033. The company pegged the revenue opportunity at $617 billion over the same period.

The LEAP was developed by CFM International, a 50/50 joint venture between GE Aviation and France’s Safran (Snecma). With a running tally of 8,900 orders valued around $115 billion (U.S. list price), the LEAP is the bestselling engine in GE Aviation’s history.

Like Bill Lear’s first jet engine, the Passport and LEAP engines have Air Force pedigree. Their beating hearts, or so-called “cores” comprised of the compressor, combustor, and high-pressure turbine, evolved from the F101 engine, which first powered the B-1 bomber in the mid-1970s. The engines are infused with new technologies like ceramic matrix composites and 3D-aerodynamic compressors developed through GE’s new engine design program called eCore.

A Passport powering through a water ingestion test at GE jet engine testing facility in Peebles, Ohio. Image credit: GE Aviation

Both engines have already completed thousands of grueling certification test hours, but none more significant than flight-testing. The LEAP took off for the first time on October 9, 2014, on GE’s historic 747-100 flying test bed. Crews at GE Aviation’s flight test facility in the Mojave Desert then rebuilt the aircraft’s wing to install the Passport engine.

With Passport FAA certification required in 2015 to support the scheduled 2016 entry into service of Bombardier’s 17-seat Global 7000, time was of the essence. Passport beat the clock and began its flight certification testing on December 30, 2014. Testing concluded with more than 100 hours and 20 flights.

By GE Reports staff

On June 6, 1944, nearly 160,000 American, British, Canadian and other Allied soldiers boarded 5,000 ships and landing craft in Plymouth, Southampton and other English ports and embarked on the largest seaborne invasion in history. They headed across the English Channel toward 50 miles of beaches in northern France bristling with heavily armed German units. D-Day, as the June Tuesday became known, opened a new front in World War II, and launched a military campaign that liberated large portions of occupied Europe stretching from France to former Czechoslovakia and helped defeat Hitler.

Some 9,000 soldiers died or were wounded during the invasion, including Pfc. Ralph T. Messervey, a brakeman at GE’s transportation plant in West Lynn, Mass. He was reported missing in action on June 9th, three days after the Allied attack started. He was the 49^th Lynn worker killed in the war.

Pvt. Grant Crego was one of the thousands of GIs who made it past German trenches, forts and bunkers. He was 19 years old when he landed in Normandy in June 1944.

Crego had enlisted the previous year and left behind a job at a GE plant in Schenectady, NY. When he arrived in Europe, he still carried with him a subscription to Schenectady Works News, a newspaper published by GE (and an ancestor of this publication).

Crego was “somewhere in Belgium” in Sept. 1944, when he shared his view of the invasion with Works News readers in a published letter. “The first bit of General Electric production that I saw on arrival at the beachhead was a huge portable generator and a four-wheeled searchlight, which I knew to be the type made in Bldg. 42,” he wrote. “It sure gave me a feeling of being ‘home’ after months in England.”

The two machines were not the only materiel that Crego recognized. “Since the eventful ‘D’ Day, I have seen thousands of miles of wire, cable, and other necessary materials used both in communication and electrical systems vitally needed over here,” he wrote. “To know that all of these are General Electric made makes me feel very proud to have worked in one of the many plants. To see the thousands of spools of wire answers the questions I used to have in mind as I saw the production going on in Bldg. 109, and wondered: Where could all this be going to?”

Before Normandy, some of the equipment was going to a beach in Maryland. GE workers manufactured and tested electrical systems that went inside D-Day landing craft like the large landing ships for tanks (LSTs) and the smaller landing craft for infantry (LCIs). The Navy even invited a GE team to a dress rehearsal for the invasion, which took place on the shores of Chesapeake Bay on America’s East Coast.

GE also made the turbo supercharger, ignition system and flying instruments for the P-47 Thunderbolt fighter planes that provided air cover for Allied ships heading for France and battled the Luftwaffe above Normandy.

The company also developed a 12,000 horsepower turbo-electric engine for the Buckley-class naval destroyers. The U.S. launched 102 Buckleys between 1943 and 1944, and some took part in the invasion. One of them, USS Amesbury, arrived off the coast of France on D-Day. It attacked German planes with anti-aircraft guns and rescued the crew of a landing vessel that had hit a mine. In August, another Buckley, USS Donnell, dropped anchor outside the liberated port of Cherbourg in Normandy and the city used its engine as a floating power station.

The fighting that summer, fall and winter was brutal. But soldiers like Pvt. Anthony Masi were trying to find a positive side. Like Crego, he had been employed by GE in Schenectady before he enlisted. “It’s been a little rough going here for our doughboys, but the job is being done for you back there, to be technical,” Masi wrote from France. “We will expect victory now in a matter of time.”

Click here to download. 

Captions and credits from top to bottom:

Landing ships putting cargo ashore on one of the invasion beaches at low tide during the first days of the invasion.Credit: Archives Normandie

A page from River Works News. Courtesy of Chris Hunter, Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady.

Troops in a landing craft approaching Omaha Beach on D-Day. Source: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

Into the Jaws of Death — U.S. Troops wading through water and Nazi gunfire. Credit: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

Carrying full equipment, American assault troops move onto Utah Beach on the northern coast of France. Credit: U.S. Army

A page from Works News. Courtesy of Chris Hunter, Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady.

By Hana Bolinova

Lukla’s Tenzing-Hillary Airport has been called the world’s most dangerous landing strip. It’s now also one of Nepal’s busiest.

Trekkers often refer to Lukla (elev. 9,334 ft.) the “gateway to Mt. Everest.” But the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that devastated Nepal in April and the second one in May also hit hard this small Himalayan village clinging like a swallow’s nest to the flanks of the Mt. Everest massif. Despite the damage, the tiny airport’s short, uphill runway that starts at the edge of a chasm and ends in wall has become a lifeline for the area’s remote valleys and climbers trapped on Mt. Everest.

Lukla’s 1,700-foot-long runway starts on top of a cliff and ends in a wall.

Over the last month, the airport has received tons of tents, food and medicine, and served as an escape route for stranded tourists and locals whose homes were ruined by the quakes.

“We are trying our best to come up with the best we can do,” says Sanjima Sharma, commercial secretary from Goma Air, one of Nepal’s commercial airlines flying to Lukla from the capital Kathmandu. “We helped the people with the daily basic needs like temporary shed, food supplies and medicines.”

One of Goma Air’s L-410s unloading aid.

Goma Air is flying to Lukla two new Czech L-410 turboprops built Aircraft Industries and powered by H80 engines from GE Aviation. Karel Zatloukal, an Aircraft Industries technician who just returned from Lukla, says that after the first earthquake, the planes were taking wounded off the mountain, and after the second tumbler in May, they were hauling cargo to Lukla and victims back to the capital.

Climbers and survivors are waiting to board a Goma Air flight from Lukla.

Goma Air put the two Czech planes in service last year after conducting rigorous high-altitude trials and testing their short takeoff and landing capabilities. Tests included a crew from GE Aviation. (You can read about them here and watch the video below.)

High-altitude airports like Lukla are yet another extreme destination served by planes powered by the H80 engines. They are already flying airports in Siberia and in the desert. Engineers designed them to withstand punishing heat, dust as well as bitter frost.

The GE Foundationis also sponsoring relief efforts in Nepal. It helped fund AmeriCare’s aid airlift to Kathmandu.

By GE Reports staff

Over the last year, GE engineers have been testing the largest, most efficient and most powerful gas turbine in the world. It weighs as much as a Boeing 747 filled to the brim and, when paired with a steam turbine, can generate enough electricity to power the equivalent of 600,000 French homes. (Its exhaust would fill up the Goodyear blimp in about 10 seconds.)

This week, GE’s factory in Belfort, France, finished the first production unit built for the French utility Électricité de France (EDF).

Top: EDF’s gas turbine during production in Belfort. Above: Blades made from superalloy monocrystals help the HA turbine manage temperatures as high as 2,900 degrees Fahrenheit and extract more energy from fuel. The turbine channels air with variable stator vanes (the moving parts above), which were originally developed for supersonic jet engines. GE calls this concept of sharing ideas between its businesses the GE store.  Image credits: GE Power & Water

Even if you don’t care a whit about gas turbines, this machine, which GE calls 9HA, is a big deal. It can convert natural gas into electricity at a sky-high 61 percent efficiency, when paired with a steam turbine.

The turbine can also zoom from cold iron to full power in less than 30 minutes. This speed is important because there are wind and solar plants cropping up all over Europe (and in other regions for that matter) and energy companies are increasingly looking for ways to smooth the supply peaks and valleys created when the sun gets behind a cloud or the wind stops blowing. The new turbine will give EDF new flexibility to integrate renewables onto the grid and respond quickly to weather changes.

“The efficiency alone is huge, but, taken all together, this is bigger than winning the Triple Crown of power generation,” says Victor Abate, president and CEO of GE Power Generation Products.

The 9HA turbine for EDF is the second one made by GE workers. The first one is being used for testing in Greenville.  Image credits: GE Power & Water 

GE engineers have also placed hundreds of sensors on the turbine to monitor temperatures, vibrations and other conditions. The sensors will be able to feed the data over the Industrial Internet to software built on GE’s Predix platform for analysis. EDF can use the results to improve performance and also to schedule maintenance and prevent unplanned downtime.

Workers measuring the  inside the turbine. Image credits: GE Power & Water

The first 9HA turbine will travel to EDF’s power plant in Bouchain in northwest France in June by road and by barge. GE estimates that the two-week trip, which will have the 400-ton turbine mounted on a platform the length of a football field, will be one of the largest road transports in Europe’s history.

GE’s Abate says that although just 18 months ago the 9HA turbine was not even in GE’s portfolio,the company has already $1 billion in orders. The first machines in the U.S. will serve inside two new power plants that are being built by Exelon in Texas.

Let’s see American Pharoah beat that.

By Ysabel Yates

Comic books were as popular with kids and teens in the 1950s as TV and social media is today. Although many parents couldn’t stand them, the team inside GE’s communication department took a second look. Since comics often featured outlandish spacecraft and superheroes, the GE PR whizzes thought they could use comics to explain some of the underlying science and get kids hooked on technology, engineering and mathematics, a program we now call STEM.

GE’s most recent stab at STEM substitutes comics with the Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon.

Above: The cover of a GE comic printed in Spanish and covering transistors. Image credit: Museum on Innovation and Science in Schenectady Top: Fallonventors Sahar Khashayar, Brooke Boyer, and Sean Violette. Image credit: NBC

The mediums might be different, but the message is the same. “In the public relations field, although we were all aware of the adult fear that comic books were producing a crop of juvenile delinquents, we couldn’t escape the conclusion that the medium had attractive possibilities for mass communications,“ said a 1953 story about the GE comics program published in General Electric Review, an in-house newspaper.

GE started printing comics, some illustrated by George “Inky” Roussos of Batman fame, “on mammoth presses of newsprint stock in quantities of 500,000 to 3,000,000.” The books were both in English and in Spanish and included titles Adventures in Jet Power, Adventures inside the Atom, Adventures in Electricity and many others. One issue even described the method used to make artificial diamonds (see below). Many well-preserved issues are still available online.

A fun job. GE had a strict approval process in place for its comics. According to the GE Review, the “drawings were shown to several vice presidents and managers” before publication. Image credit: Museum on Innovation and Science in Schenectady

GE has now injected TV into the “adventures,” but the goal is the same: engagement. The company partnered with NBC to create a segment called Fallonventions for the Tonight Show designed to inspire young minds to pursue STEM. (They don’t have to stay up late. The video is available on YouTube.)

The show recently invited three young inventors to present their prototypes. They brought a wildfire warning system controlled by an Arduino processor, a Velcro belt that attaches a tissue box to the body called “Tissue Time 3000,” and a paper airplane launcher.

The tissue box invention demonstrated that great ideas are often born from adversity: its 7-year-old inventor, Brooke Boyer, says she came up with it after her parents wouldn’t let her stay up on New Years Eve, and she “cried, and then they let me.”

As Florence Nightingale once said: “If there were none discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.”

If you know kids whose minds are crackling with hot ideas, they can be the next Fallonventors.Simply create a short video featuring the inventor (ages 13+) and their invention, and upload it to YouTube using the hashtag #MyFallonvention in the title. Go here for more details.

By GE Reports staff

Most people might still consider the idea of using tides to generate electricity as outlandish as a trip to the moon. But starting this year, the concept is quickly becoming reality. “We went to the moon 46 years ago, and now we are using it to produce energy,” says Frederic Navarro, project director at GE Power Conversion in Belfort, France. “That’s because the moon’s gravity tugs on the ocean and produces predictable tides that run like clockwork, twice a day.”

Navarro leads a GE team that is helping build France’s first subsea tidal power plant for Electricité de France (EDF), near Paimpol-Brehat, in Brittany. When completed at the end of this year, it will generate 1 megawatt of renewable power and feed it through a 10-mile-long (16 kilometers) underwater cable to the local grid.

Above: A drawing of EDF’s tidal array off the coast of Brittany. The turbines were made by OpenHydro. GE technology will transform the current and send it to the grid. Image credit: OpenHydro Top Image: EDF’s subsea turbine during testing. Image credit: EDF

As the tides move in and out, they will spin two huge turbines measuring 16 meters in diameter and sitting 35 meters below the sea level. The turbines generate electricity with direct-drive permanent magnet generators and send it for processing to a subsea converter. Navarro calls it the “yellow submarine” because of the way it looks. “It works just like dropping a wind turbine to the bottom of the ocean and using water to move the blades,” says Navarro. “It’s that simple.”

The French island of Brehat is famous for its dramatic and fast moving tides.

The idea might be simple, but the execution takes some serious skills. The turbines, made by OpenHydro, a DCNS subsidiary specializing in the design, manufacture and installation of marine turbines, are so large they have to be assembled in a dry dock in the port of Brest and deployed using a custom built barge.

In the dock, they will be coupled with the “yellow submarine,” built by GE Power Conversion at GE Power & Water’s massive factory in Belfort. But it just happens that Belfort is the most geographically distant town from any coast in France. So this week, the company loaded subsea vessel on a customized flatbed truck for the 650-mile long journey to Brest.

The turbines, which are 16 meters (52 feet) in diameter, will sit 35 meters (115 feet) below the sea level and 16 kilometers (10 miles) off the coast. Image credit: OpenHydro

Navarro says the “yellow submarine,“ which is 9 meters long and 5 meters wide, will be “the brain” of the whole tidal array that decides how the turbine should move (see below). The technology inside will control the rotation of the turbines and optimize the power produced generators according to the speed of the tides. “There is a lot of complex engineering that takes place behind the yellow walls,” he says.

For example, it holds sophisticated technology that can independently control the speed of each turbine, transform their variable AC voltages to a high DC voltage, and reduce losses along the 16km subsea cable.

GE’s yellow submarine contains power technology, nitrogen, and special transformer liquid more expensive than olive oil. Image credit: GE Marine

The current’s journey is anything but ordinary. When it first enters the “yellow submarine,” it travels through a chamber filled with nitrogen. “This allows us to remove any moisture and oxygen and prevent corrosion,” Navarro says.

The current then flows to an enclosure filled with special transformer oil. Made by Midel, the ester-based fluid has been especially designed to protect the environment in case of a leak. “This stuff is more expensive than the best olive oil,” Navarro says.

Finally, the current travels to an onshore sub-station where another piece of GE technology transforms it again, so it can be connected to the French electrical grid (see below).

DCNS and OpenHydro will assemble the turbines and the GE equipment in Brest and then tow them via barge to Paimpol-Brehat some 200 kilometers away.

That’s when some of the hardest work will begin. “Naturally, tidal array go to places where there are strong currents,” Navarro says. “But these currents also make such locations a tough place to work.”

OpenHydro will use specially trained divers to install the equipment some 35 meters below the surface. “The divers will be only able to work during certain times of the day, when the conditions aren’t dangerous,” Navarro says. The pertners expect the array to start producing power by the end of the year.

A subsea turbine during tests. Image credit EDF

France is far from being a tidal power newbie. In 1966, the country opened the world’s first tidal power station inside a bridge spanning the River Rance, in Brittany. Just like Paimpol-Brehat, the plant is currently operated by EDF.

Likewise, Paimpol-Brehat is not the only tidal project involving GE. In February, the company said it would supply technology for a massive, 320-megawatt tidal lagoon off the coast of Wales.

“Not too long ago, tidal power seemed like science fiction,” Navarro says. “But today, we’ve started unlocking the potential of tidal energy around the world.”