The demand for energy will continue to grow at an accelerated pace. Digitizing the energy ecosystem from end to end will be essential in helping meet this demand, enabling unprecedented opportunity socially, economically and individually.

Energy doesn’t just turn on the lights – it creates opportunity and allows people and societies to fulfill their potential. According to the World Economic Forum, a reliable and high-quality energy supply goes hand in hand with higher per capita incomes – meaning that energy drives an uplift in living standards. Whether powering the lights of a schoolhouse in Sub-Saharan Africa, a natural gas bus in China, a tech incubator in Detroit or an MRI machine in Western Europe – efficient and sustainable energy solutions are essential for progress.

But the need for energy is growing rapidly. The world’s population is expected to exceed 9 billion people by 2050, with 90 percent of the growth occurring in developing countries where energy use is predicted to double[1]. Currently, more than one in six people in the world lack access to electricity and one in three can’t depend on the sources they have[2]. And countries that have reliable access face big challenges as they look to upgrade aging infrastructure and increase efficiency to make economic, environmental and efficiency improvements.

In order to provide the necessary energy to unlock economic potential in these countries, public and private organizations must come together and collaborate in new ways to develop and deploy new solutions. Within industry we must be more open to joint innovation and partnerships across sectors.

It is also essential to craft the right mix and balance of energy resources to match demand with supply in the most efficient way possible. This is accomplished by integrating digital technologies across the entire energy value chain to improve overall efficiency, cost effectiveness, resilience and sustainability of the system. The process starts by merging the physical and digital – integrating energy-producing machines like gas and wind turbines, oil wells, reactors, and hydro generators with networked sensors and software that generate data and analytics. This enables power and information to flow in multiple directions to improve the performance of the machines as well as the entire energy ecosystem.

The International Energy Agency estimates that $20 trillion will be invested in power and grid technology over the next twenty-five years to meet demand. During the same period, $25 trillion will be invested to extract and transport energy resources to end users, including pipelines, rail systems, and roads while $22 trillion will be invested in end user efficiency[3].

The world needs to take a holistic approach across all energy sources, including fossil fuels, renewables, nuclear and emerging technologies to meet demand. This is especially important given the fast pace of change in technology and the volatility in economic developments — in this new world, flexibility equals resiliency.

Developing end-to-end solutions and visibility across the entire energy value chain is important. We need to focus on optimizing the extraction and transportation of resources, conversion, generation, and transmission and distribution systems. And the transformation of the industrial world with digital technology will mean greater efficiency, sustainability and control for end users. Collectively, we can seize the unprecedented opportunity to harness technology, cloud solutions and new business models to transform the future of the energy sector.

With more than 120 years experience and the shared expertise and technology of the GE Store driving growth, GE delivers one of the most comprehensive technology portfolios in the energy sector across fuel sources, providing customized, end-to-end solutions across the entire energy value chain.

• GE equipment and systems deliver 1/3 of the world’s electricity, each day adding enough power capacity to support 100,000 people around the world
• As importantly, GE is active and impactful across the entire energy value chain, with:
  • 20% of global renewable energy capacity
  • 85% of offshore oil rigs using GE technology
  • 1,500 GW of installed base power generation
  • 80% of the world’s offshore wind installations
  • equipment installed in 90% of the utilities worldwide
  • superior thermal efficiency offerings with total plant capabilities
  • a broad grid portfolio with the footprint and scale to compete globally
  • eco partnerships on hybrid gas solar solutions and energy neutral waste water, and
  • a $13 billion global energy debt and equity financing portfolio.

And with Predix, GE’s Industrial Cloud Platform, we provide a digital layer to help optimize the entire ecosystem, resulting in more efficient, sustainable and cost effective energy solutions. Digitizing the energy mix with the Predix Industrial Cloud Platform offers 20% potential increase in performance across customer base.

Never before have there been so many ways to power the planet – but GE is committed to doing it smartly. The best results will come from balancing a mix of fuel sources and creating maximum efficiency through the power of digital. So whether it’s greater oil and gas recovery, wind farms that adjust to weather changes, vessels that can predict potential failure before it strikes, or power plants that use analytics to increase their efficiency – we are headed into a brighter future where an enhanced energy ecosystem will mean more opportunities for a thriving world.

_______________________________________

[1] http://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/the-energy-future/shell-scenarios.html#vanity-aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zaGVsbC5jb20vZ2xvYmFsL2Z1dHVyZS1lbmVyZ3kvc2NlbmFyaW9zL25ldy1sZW5zLXNjZW5hcmlvcy5odG1s

http://www.iea.org/publications/scenariosandprojections/

[2] http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/resources/energydevelopment/

[3] http://www.ge-alstom.com/

(Top image: This supercritical steam turbine holds an efficiency record. Courtesy of GE Power)

All views expressed are those of the authors.

When Marc Edwards joined Diamond Offshore Drilling Inc. as chief executive in 2014, he already knew how dependent offshore drilling rigs were on blowout preventers — valve assemblies designed to prevent oil spills. But he was surprised when he found out how costly it was when those blowout preventers were out of service.

Now, thanks to an innovative service model involving Diamond and GE Oil & Gas, oil companies have a way to save millions of dollars from downtime and repairs. The deal, which could become a blueprint for the rest of the industry, focuses on optimizing blowout preventer performance by adding cloud-based analytics running on GE’s Predix digital platfom to heavy-duty subsea engineering.

The solution is an example of how GE is partnering with customers to solve some of the industry’s toughest challenges by expanding its services offerings, which account for roughly three quarters of the company’s profits.

Blowout preventers (BOPs) are crucial to well construction and ensuring oil drilling doesn’t damage the environment. The stacks of valves, pipes and seals weigh 750,000 pounds and tower 60 feet above seafloor oil wells in order to stop the flow of oil if a company loses control of a well. But they can cause headaches.

Top Image: Diamond’s drill ship the Hornet carries subsea machines including blowout preventers (the white stack above). Images credit: Diamond Offshore Drilling

When a valve fails, energy companies hoist BOPs from as far down as miles to the surface to find the problem and fix it. Repairs can take several weeks, costing an oil company more than $1 million per day in lost productivity. That way of doing business, Edwards says, is “simply not in the best interest of the stakeholders.”

Edwards previously worked in the hydraulic fracturing industry, which took off because it was able to find a profitable way to get oil and gas out of shale rock. He thought that he could apply the lessons learned in the subsea business, especially in the age of cheap oil. “It was unacceptable,” he says. “There is no other industry that would accept the type of performance reliability that we see in subsea stacks, which costs a lot of money for our clients. There’s significant unproductive time of the drill rig over the well.”

Edwards says a typical deep-sea drilling rig is unproductive about 10-12 percent of the time — and most of that downtime is caused by BOP problems. That can mean more than $35 million of unproductive time annually for just one deep-sea well.

Traditionally, Edwards says, the BOP manufacturer sells the valve that controls the oil flow with a list of spare parts and no maintenance agreement. Imagine if you bought a pickup truck and the manufacturer expected you to source the spare parts and fix the truck yourself. Why, Edwards wondered, is that same setup not considered ridiculous for BOPs?

The new partnership between Diamond and GE changes that business model. Under the agreement, Diamond Offshore has sold eight GE-manufactured stacks, located on drill ships in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, back to GE for $210 million in a 10-year contract. Now GE owns the assets and is responsible for BOP maintenance. Diamond pays GE for days when the BOP is working. On days when the BOP is not working, Diamond doesn’t pay.

That setup gives GE an incentive to keep the BOP working as often as possible through reliability-driven maintenance. The deal makes sense for the company as it opens the door to using GE software and cloud analytics to predict and prevent downtime and make smarter repairs. GE calls the offering engageDrilling Services. “My clients are applauding this deal,” Edwards says. “They believe it will be material in driving nonproductive time out of deepwater drilling.”

Lorenzo Simonelli, GE Oil & Gas president and chief executive, says engageDrilling Services is a solution that “improves drilling efficiency now and in the future.” The deal reduces risk for the driller and gives GE a steady revenue stream. “We are changing the game by building a new blowout preventer service model for the industry. With improved control, maintenance and servicing of our equipment, we are putting skin in the game and guaranteeing performance,” he says.

Simonelli’s business is already testing other digital systems. Engineers often replace as much as a fifth of BOP parts — including those that are still working fine — every time the machines come to the surface to eliminate potential problems. They effectively rebuild the BOP every five years. But the unneeded work can be minimized thanks to another digital predictive maintenance system called SeaLytics BOP Advisor. It collects and analyzes data about pressures, valves and flows from underwater sensors attached to the machines to determine what needs to be fixed and when.

With oil prices in their deepest downturn since the 1990s, making BOPs more efficient and drilling more productive is something that should make everyone more successful.

Why I’m bullish on energy in 2016.

The sharp decline in oil prices has placed them squarely at the center of the global economic debate. Many see low oil prices as evidence that the world economy has lost steam. Stock markets jump anxiously at every piece of news coming from the oil market.

The market story is important. But more important is that the oil and gas market is undergoing a deeper and more complex transformation, one that will have powerful repercussions over the coming decades.

The world needs more and more energy. And the energy industry must meet that growing demand in a period of higher uncertainty and volatility. That will require greater efficiency, adaptability and sustainability, which can be achieved in part through through the adoption of digital solutions.

Energy Demand Heading in One Direction — Up

Even with the slowdown of China, global oil demand kept increasing at a robust pace through 2015. By September, it was 9 percent higher than at the peak before the Great Recession.

In the future, the need for energy will only grow. By 2020 the global economy will be one-fifth larger in real terms, and the global population will have increased by about 1 billion. By 2015, total primary energy demand will have increased by close to 15 percent, according to the International Energy Agency’s central scenario.

This increase in demand can only be met by leveraging all available energy sources. Today, oil accounts for about 30 percent of total energy demand; oil, gas and coal together for 80 percent. There are different views, and a lot of uncertainty, on how the energy mix will change in the coming decades. The most likely scenario is that the share of renewables will keep rising, and natural gas will experience fast growth. But oil will remain an important part of the equation.

The IMF projects that the world economy will keep growing at an annual pace of about 3.5 percent — in line with the pre-crisis average of 1980-2006. A larger part of this growth now takes place in emerging markets, which are more energy-intensive than advanced economies.

The bulk of global oil consumption (55 percent) is in the transport sector. Today, China has only seven cars per 100 inhabitants, and India only four. The U.S. has 82. China and India will take time to even partially fill the gap, and will impose more stringent pollution standards in the process — China is already moving in that direction. But even so, there is substantial pent-up demand for transportation that will be unleashed by economic growth. The same applies to aviation.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to predict where oil prices will go. I am simply pointing out that we will still need a lot of oil and gas, together with all other energy sources.

An Uncertain Environment

Meanwhile, the oil and gas industry faces a number of challenges.

The most immediate challenge is copying with low prices without jeopardizing future performance. During the previous decade, the cost of projects ballooned, and oil-producing countries expanded public spending — most of them today need oil prices at $100 per barrel to balance their budgets. Governments now need to cut expenditures and diversify the economy. Oil and gas companies need to increase efficiency and productivity.

A second challenge comes from the increasing technical complexity of the asset mix. Oil and gas companies have developed far more complex facilities — e.g. unconventional fields, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) — that demand higher levels of engineering and operations expertise.

The third challenge is posed by the aging and turnover of the industry’s workforce: by some estimates, as much as 50 percent will have retired by 2025, taking decades of knowledge and experience with them. The industry does not have a comparable pipeline of younger workers to fill the gap.

Last but not least, the oil and gas industry needs to cope with a global environment characterized but much higher uncertainty and volatility, driven by technological innovations, economic developments, geopolitics and regulations. The industry will need to achieve a greater degree of flexibility and adaptability in order to cope.

A Digital Solution

Part of the solution will come from the faster adoption of digital solutions. In a recently released paper (LINK) we have detailed how Industrial Internet solutions can deliver value through three dimensions:

1. Asset performance management: minimize cost, increase reliability, and optimize performance for an individual piece of equipment
2. Operations optimization: system-wide improvements (e.g. across a production facility, LNG plant, offshore vessel or oil field), and optimized life cycle management with increased production, reduced operating costs and reduced risk
3. Enterprise optimization: connection of demand and supply operations to optimize portfolio of cash-generating assets

Digital solutions can also help to preserve the accumulated knowledge and experience embodied in the outgoing workforce to transmit it to newer generations.

The adoption of these digital solutions should be part of a broader strategy. This will encompass targeted investments to increase efficiency and productivity; difficult choices on production capacity, especially on the higher cost sources like oil sands and deepwater; and renewed investment in human capital.

Today, low prices and fears on demand growth capture all the attention. But the true challenge will be to meet a growing demand for energy in a way that is efficient and sustainable from both a technical and environmental perspective — and to mitigate the cyclical swings in capex, production and prices that could otherwise cause substantial future shocks to the global economy.

Read more on the digital energy outlook in the white paper, Digital Future of Oil & Gas & Energy.

(Top image: Courtesy of GE)

Marco Annunziata is the Chief Economist and Executive Director of Global Market Insight at GE.

All views expressed are those of the author.

Few people can fathom the sheer size of the World Wide Web, the most visible part of the Internet where we shop, meet friends, read news and watch movies. But the Web will soon be a minnow when compared to the immensity of the Industrial Internet, a fast-growing network connecting machines and devices of all types: from thermostats to thermal power plants.

GE spent $1 billion over the last few years to develop Predix, a cloud-based software platform that has allowed GE to securely collect data from jet engines, gas turbines and MRI scanners, analyze it and then use the results to make them run better. Last fall GE gave access to Predix to a select group of partners and customers like Pitney Bowes, which has used it to optimize massive mail machines that can sort 900 million letters in a year.

This morning, the company took the next step at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona and opened Predix to everyone. “Many companies are looking at what we are doing and they would like to do the same thing independent of GE,” says Harel Kodesh, chief technology officer of GE Digital and one of the architects of Predix. “To unlock the platform’s full potential, we knew we needed to allow developers outside of GE to get their hands on Predix. After all, where would the consumer app and solution ecosystem be without communities of external developers building for iOS, Android or Linux.”

GE also announced in Barcelona a new “digital alliance” with companies like Intel, Capgemini and Infosys, who see Predix as a revenue stream and a valid business opportunity. “There is a huge amount of interest in the Industrial Internet and in the solutions we are offering,” Kodesh says. “People realize that GE is not just another random company that decided to be a software company. We bring something that goes beyond software. We bring the deep, intimate understanding of how the assets can become part of the Internet.” Read our Q&A with Kodesh we conducted on the eve of the Barcelona announcements.

Top and above: Predix can optimize entire power plants and electricity distribution networks. Image credit: GE Power

GE Reports: What is Predix?

Harel Kodesh: Predix is an operating system for the Industrial Internet. It’s not that different from the operating system that you have in your phone or your laptop. But it can handle a lot of data coming from a lot of places at once and keep it secure. We call the huge amount of data hyperscale. Predix also includes features that allow you to develop and run applications that are optimized for the Industrial Internet.

GER: How much data are you talking about?

HK: We have exabytes of data coming in every month. Keep in mind that as operating system plumbers, we do not tell our customers how to build their applications. In health care, for example, if you want to ingest an MRI image, you run 2 to 3 gigabytes per image. If you store tens of thousands of them, you do the numbers. I think that in the next five years, the Industrial Internet will break the zettabyte barrier, which is 1,000 exabytes. (In 2009, the entire World Wide Web contained 500 exabytes.)

GER: How is GE using Predix today?

HK: The GE Health Cloud is one application. It’s something the healthcare team created to support the distribution and manipulation of images. In the energy sector, we are helping Qatar’s RasGas run its liquefied natural gas plant. The digital system allows the operator to know much more about what’s happening in their shop. Most of our businesses are already using it, and we are starting to see the applications getting built. Mind you, this is a very young system, but the ramp-up rate is pretty steep.

GER: You have opened Predix to all users. Why?

HK: Marc Andreessen said that software is eating the world. We see a lot of software enhancements to what used to be industrial companies. In fact, many companies are looking at what we are doing and they would like to do the same thing independent of GE. At the same time, there is a broad spectrum of industrial applications, like running elevators, we would like to target that go beyond what GE is using. To unlock the platform’s full potential, we knew we needed to allow developers outside of GE to get their hands on Predix. After all, where would the consumer app and solution ecosystem be without communities of external developers building for iOS, Android or Linux.

GE is using software and sensors to test its newest Harriet-class gas turbines and expose them to conditions they will likely never see in service. Image credit: GE Power

GER: How do you convince those companies to join you?

HK: When you make an operating system generally available to everybody, you have to solve three major issues. You have to make sure that the system is robust. Otherwise you will spend all of your revenues on customer support. The system has to operate 24/7. We also had to make sure that we could use Predix to run a commercial operation and be able to bill customers and also allow them to review their invoices. Basically, you have to be able to register and also to swipe your credit card. Finally, Predix has to scale. It’s very difficult to get that sense if you have one user. We want to assure people that it’s going to run even when they start piling applications on top of it. That’s why we ran the system through beta and limited availability phase last year to make sure that it’s ready for prime time.

GER: Who tested it?

HK: We talked to a lot of people, including executives at Pitney Bowes and Toshiba and LIXIL in Japan. LIXIL manufactures bathroom fixtures, and they used Predix to manage their own maintenance scheduling. Keep in mind that it was a handholding exercise. People came to us and we signed an agreement with them. But now it’s strong enough to just register and go. Look, you don’t have to call Microsoft or Amazon every time you want to use their systems. Predix is the same.

GER: What makes Predix stand out?

HK: We are different. We are only taking industrial players. It’s not because our systems cannot run social apps, but we want to make sure that the cloud is as sterile as it can be for the Industrial Internet. Elevated security is the name of the game. Here’s an example: If you buy a million computing cycles, the owner of a normal operating system will actually give you 900,000 and keep 100,000 for security, administration and other functions. We will give you 500,000 and keep the rest for security. You are getting much more security built in, and obviously you have to pay a little bit more for the cycles. This makes it fundamentally different from any other system. Finally, there are all kinds of structures in the system that are driven by Industrial Internet use cases. For example, we are working with services such as Workflow that manage the flow of patients and keep their records. We have to support potentially hundreds of millions of workflows. We need distributed architecture to do that, but we couldn’t find anything like that on the market. So we had to build it ourselves, but in such a way so we would be able to scale it without a limit.

GER: GE Digital also announced the Global Alliance program today. How is different from the Industrial Internet Consortium?

HK: The two groups serve different needs, and they are both doing great. The IIC is a strategic technology body seeking to standardize components of the Industrial Internet. Our competitors are part of it. Like any consortium, there’s no allegiance that you have to swear before you come in. The Alliance is different. It’s much more commercial and tighter. The members will deploy Predix directly and also through allies like telecommunications service providers that are not going to compete with us. They see Predix as a revenue stream and a valid business opportunity.

The GE Health Cloud will collect and analyze patient data. Image credit: GE Healthcare

HK: The Alliance has a lot of big names coming in, including Intel, Infosys, Deloitte Digital and others. There is a huge amount of interest in the Industrial Internet and in the solutions we are offering. People realize that GE is not just another random company that decided to be a software company. We bring something that goes beyond software. We bring the deep, intimate understanding of how the assets can become part of the Internet. The Industrial Internet is much more massive than the consumer Internet. It’s also newer, so people don’t associate it with Internet at all. It’s a whole new ballgame.

GER: What’s Predix going to look like in a year?

HK: You’ll see tens of thousands of developers working on Predix. That will force us to become an at-scale software company. You’ll see our data centers hosting many, many petabytes of industrial data. The ecosystem will also start feeding on itself, and you’ll see more and more interesting applications. If you look at the Internet as we know it circa 1996, you are at the release of Windows ’95 that allowed browsers to run and launched the Internet revolution. You are going to see things changing. The magic is in the numbers, and you are going to see a very vibrant developer community.

The digital twin can simulate and optimize entire wind farms inside the cloud. Image credit: GE Renewables

Now that we have a historic climate deal in place, we have to make sure we have the funding to translate words into action.

The world’s first universal climate deal, signed in December at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, has been hailed as historic, transformative and momentous. However, as the EU climate chief, Miguel Arias Cañete, said, “Today we celebrate, tomorrow we have to act.”

What must happen now is action at the national and global level to shape a sustainable financial system that can support the transition to a low-carbon, green economy. The first step towards this effort is attracting capital for profitable, environmentally friendly infrastructure investments. A key issue for the nearly 200 participating governments at COP21 is how to build and adapt infrastructure to sustain extreme weather, which even a conservative prediction forecasts will cost an additional $150 billion a year by 2025.

However, this hefty investment requirement is dwarfed by the more than $6.2 trillion annual investment required for new low-carbon infrastructure, which countries must begin building if they are to limit the effects of climate change and meet the commitments made at COP21. Despite the urgent need, infrastructure funding is approximately $5 trillion a year— leaving a more than $1 trillion gap annually.

When Do We Need It? Now

The nearly two weeks’ worth of speeches, sessions and side events at COP21 made it crystal clear that the world’s economies must act soon — within the next five years. Scientists predict countries have until 2020 to reduce emissions that will trigger unavoidable and rapid increases in temperature. Creating a low-carbon economy now is vastly cheaper in comparison to dealing with the catastrophic effects of climate change.

Despite low interest rates, limited public sector funding coupled with increasing constraints on bank capital suggests that building green infrastructure requires new financing sources. A key source of that capital — institutional investors (including pension funds) and insurance companies, which have more than $93 trillion of assets under management in OECD countries alone — can play a significant role in financing a greener future through bonds.

By providing a low-cost and long-term source of capital, bonds are an attractive financing instrument for infrastructure projects — particularly green infrastructure, which requires more upfront capital than traditional, high-carbon versions. The cost of capital has a tremendous impact on the economic viability of green projects. This is especially true in emerging markets, where the most climate-friendly investment is needed, but where the dual challenges of higher interest rates and capital costs prevail.

Seeing Green

A key tool in the effort to finance the transition to a low-carbon economy is bonds that are labeled green, whose proceeds are used for green projects — typically climate change mitigation and adaptation. The good news is that if an entity can issue a bond, it can issue a green bond because the green label depends on the type of project funded, not the green credentials of the issuer.

The green label makes it simple for institutional investors, who have increasingly made climate change commitments, to identify green investments. The label is a discovery tool that reduces friction in the investment process.

Green bonds also help policymakers, regulators and public financial institutions achieve three critical goals:

• Meet infrastructure investment needs
• Develop capital markets
• Achieve climate action goals

Green bonds are the fastest-growing segment of the bond market, with outstanding issuance at $66 billion as of June 2015. Yet the market is small compared to the $532 billion global bond market.

Over time, green bonds can significantly contribute to closing the investment gap for climate-friendly infrastructure, but the market will need to scale faster to keep pace with the climate fight. The Climate Bonds Initiative, in partnership with UNEP Inquiry and the World Bank Group, produced a guide for policy makers that provides practical options for scaling the green bond market at a faster clip.

The guide also identifies several key challenges in developing the green bond market, such as a lack of a well-functioning market, commonly acceptable green standards, or coordination among the many stakeholders.

Overcoming these challenges will require a concerted and coordinated effort by all stakeholders — governments, businesses, international institutions, investors and individuals. The public sector can lead the charge in accelerating the growth of the green bond market by taking action in three primary areas:

1. Enabling Policies: Ensuring a stable and predictable policy environment, combined with a supportive regulatory framework, is the most important way governments can support the development of a green bond market.

2. Standardized Practices: The due diligence costs associated with infrastructure projects are high, especially in emerging markets. Standardizing the tendering, contracting and payment processes would benefit developers, governments and investors by reducing upfront due diligence costs.

3. Risk Mitigation: Tools such as political risk insurance, credit guarantees, hedging instruments and other products offered by public institutions can help investors reduce their risk exposure.

Green bonds require complex financial structuring, which is beyond the market maturity of many emerging economies where climate-friendly infrastructure investment is most needed. Commitment and collaboration among policy makers, regulators and financial institutions will be a critical component in attracting capital to finance a low-carbon future.

(Top image: Courtesy of Thinkstock)

Leila Aridi Afas is Vice President, Strategy and Global Development, at The Spectrum Group. She was previously Director of Export Promotion at the U.S. Trade and Development Agency. You can follow her on Twitter @TheTradeLady.
 

All views expressed are those of the author.

GE spent $1 billion over the last few years to develop Predix, the cloud-based platform that has allowed GE to securely collect data from jet engines, gas turbines and MRI scanners, analyze it and then use the results to make them run better. Last fall GE gave access to Predix to a select group of partners and customers. On Monday, the company took the next step at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and opened Predix to all developers.

“We’ve been pleased,” says Roger Pilc, executive vice president and chief innovation officer at Pitney Bowes, which has been working with Predix for six months. “The data is successfully coming off our machines and through our security systems up into the cloud. The applications running on top of the cloud have been showing our field service teams and our customers the data visualizations we have designed together. So in terms of technology and functionality, things have been going very well.”

How GE will super-charge clean energy innovation in the decade ahead.

The renewable energy era has begun. Today, when a new power plant is built somewhere in the world, it is just as likely to be renewable as it is fossil fuel or nuclear. Renewable energy currently accounts for 50 percent of new sources global electricity supply and is the second largest source of electricity generation behind coal. And it is rising quickly. As we point out in recently released report, at GE we see this remarkable trend continuing through the end of the decade driven largely by further technology innovations by GE and others. We have published a new report that examines the renewable energy era, and outlines the future pathway for renewables.

The economic, environmental, and energy security benefits of accelerated renewable energy deployment are clear. GE estimates that electric sector carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have already been reduced by up to 8 percent as a result of the addition of non-hydro renewable power generation. We estimate that by 2020 CO2 emissions from electricity generation will be up to 13 percent lower than they would otherwise be without non-hydro renewable power technologies in the global electricity portfolio.

The business case is clear. As a result of technology innovation, renewable power technologies have become increasingly cost competitive over time and more “grid-friendly” or compatible with the electric power system. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), from 2010 to 2015, global average onshore wind generation costs fell by an estimated 30 percent, and the costs of new solar PV projects declined by a full two-thirds.[i] Continued innovation will continue to drive down renewable energy costs and improve customer economics. GE’s research partner, the Joint Institute of Strategic Energy Analysis (JISEA) has estimated that by 2025, innovation will enable wind costs will fall by another 29 percent and solar PV costs to fall by up to 44 percent.[ii]

Beyond economics and innovation, several additional trends have helped accelerate the rise of renewables around the world over the last decade:

• The rise of distributed power. The growth of renewable energy has occurred in both a centralized and decentralized manner, allowing them to be part of both existing and emerging business models. Wind, hydro and geothermal are being used primarily as centralized sources – while solar is being added at both utility scale and distributed rooftop applications.
• Integrated energy systems. Renewables are increasingly being added as part of integrated systems that can contain conventional and renewable energy technologies. Hybrid natural gas and solar PV systems are one example of this emerging trend.
• The digitization of energy. Thirdly, as in many other sectors, the renewable energy transition is occurring as physical and digital worlds merge.

Looking ahead, at GE, we are committed to renewable energy innovation in order to accelerate the renewable energy era. Here’s our plan:

• We will collaborate across global industries to leverage research synergies. At GE we call this using the “GE Store,” working across the various parts of our company to accelerate innovation. For example, we’ve accelerated wind turbine innovation in this manner. GE uses imaging algorithms designed for the healthcare system in sensors embedded in our wind turbine blades, we leveraged gearbox innovations from our transportation business for use in our wind turbines, we’re using control systems originally designed for airplanes in our wind turbines, and we’ve borrowed computational fluid dynamics models from gas turbines to better understand how wind turbines interact with the environment. To maintain the robust rate of renewable energy innovation, as an industry, we need to continue challenging ourselves to look for new ideas in unexpected places.
• We will continue to invest billions in clean technology innovation. At GE as part of our commitment to our Ecomagination strategy, we have invested over $2 billion over the last decade in wind power R&D. Overall, we’ve invested over $15 billion in clean technology research over the last ten years and have committed to invest and addition $10 billion by 2020. In offshore wind, we are developing floating turbine technology that will help deliver competitive energy costs in deeper waters where conventional fixed-bottom solutions are not viable. Our unique global network of R&D technology centers for hydro power has contributed to breakthroughs in the fields of oil-free turbine components, fish-friendly turbines, and variable speed pumped storage technologies used to improve reliability.
• We will partner to maximize our global impact. Through Ecomagination, GE’s business strategy for resource productivity, we are partnering with other like-minded firms to tackle challenges that could have a big impact. For example, we are partnering with Total to develop hybrid gas-solar solutions for industrial use in developing countries and remote regions.
• We will maintain our focus on digital. At GE we are harnessing the power of data analytics to drive efficiencies and greater output throughout the energy value. For example, GE’s Digital Wind Farm allows a customer to connect, monitor, predict, and optimize both unit and site performance. The technology can boost a wind farm’s energy production by up to 20 percent and could help generate up to an estimated $50 billion value for the wind industry.

Cost-competitive and environmentally sustainable power generation technologies are more than just an aspiration: they are now the reality. Over 100 years ago, GE imagined a world where humankind was able to successfully harness the sun, wind, and sea. Thanks to continuous technology innovation, this is the world that we live in today. Let’s seize the opportunity and work collaboratively to further accelerate renewable energy innovation, build new solutions, and create a truly sustainable electric power system for the planet, its people, and the world economy.

[i] IEA, “Renewable Energy Medium-Term Market Report 2015” (October 2015).

[ii] Camila Stark, Jacquelyn Pless, Jeffrey Logan, Ella Zhou, and Douglas J. Arent, “Renewable Electricity: Insights for the Coming Decade” (JISEA: Golden, Colorado, February 2015).

Read more on the renewable energy outlook in the white paper, The Renewable Energy Era — GE, Ecomagination and the Global Energy Transformation.

(Top GIF: Video courtesy of GE)

Jérôme Pécresse is President & CEO, GE Renewable Energy.

Debora Frodl is Global Executive Director at GE Ecomagination.

All views expressed are those of the authors.

Christmas comes in the summer in sub-Saharan Africa, and for months leading up to the 2014 holiday season, homes and businesses in Cabinda, Angola, were often hot and dark. The old power grid that had supplied power to this fast-growing and oil-rich province had faltered under the growing demand. “There was immense pressure on the administration in Angola to solve this problem,” recalls Leslie Nelson, executive general manager for GE Power in Africa.

Luckily, help was only a plane ride away. In early December 2014, local Angolan power developer AE Energia partnered with GE to fly a giant Antonov cargo jet, carrying a semi-truck-sized “power plant on wheels,” into Cabinda. By Christmas Day, this blocky mobile TM2500 turbine, which is actually a re-engineered jet engine, was providing 25 megawatts, the equivalent power needed to supply approximately 100,000 Angolan homes. “It was a very happy time for people in politics and everyone residing in the Cabinda area,” Nelson says.

Above: “There was immense pressure on the administration in Angola to solve this problem,” recalls Leslie Nelson, executive general manager for GE Power in Africa. The TM2500 turbines wasn’t the only GE technology on the tarmac. The Angola Airlines Boeing 777 in the background is powered by a pair of GE 90 jet engines. Image credit: GE Power

Angola is just one country that’s benefited from GE’s Fast Power technology. When there was a sudden need for energy, such as during a natural disaster or period of intense growth, the technology quickly provided electricity to the hurricane-hit Baja California peninsula in Mexico, booming Egypt, Algeria and, most recently, Tunisia.

Fast Power is more than just turbines. It’s really a group of complementary power systems that can rapidly and reliably generate and distribute power to even the most remote areas.

GE says the machines can be up and running within 30 days (unlike a traditional heavy-duty power plant, which can take approximately 12 months to come online). Each mobile unit generates about 25-30 megawatts of electricity using either natural gas or diesel. It can also be configured to burn propane. The Fast Power turbine reaches full power in as little as 10 minutes — almost like an airplane.

GE’s CF6 jet engine sits at the core of the TM2500 turbine. It powers many Boeing 747, including Air Force One. Image credit: GE Aviation

That makes sense since the TM2500 turbines are so-called aeroderivatives, repurposed from jet engines manufactured in Cincinnati. The TM2500, for example, has at its core a turbine from the CF6 engine, the same kind that powers many Boeing 747s, including Air Force One. GE refers to such technology sharing among its businesses as the GE Store.

“The aeroderivatives make these mobile power plants lighter than other, similar systems on the market,” says Patrizio Prunecchi, commercial operations leader for GE’s gas power systems. Weight is important since countries like Angola do not have the transportation infrastructure that would allow a giant power plant to be easily built. “The mobile units are light and can be transported — on their own wheels — to remote parts of the country,” Prunecchi says.

The compressor of the TM2500 aeroderivative turbine. Image credit: GE Power

There are now more than 200 GE TM2500 turbines strategically placed throughout the world — mostly in areas with developing economies and without an electric grid infrastructure. Often, they provide backup power during an emergency or a bridge to a longer-term solution.

In Egypt, 20 of these GE units gave the country a lasting boost during a power outage due to the summer heat. In Baja, Mexico, four TM2500s revived power in just two weeks after Hurricane Odile devastated the region in 2014. Ten of these units came to the rescue in Japan after the 2011 earthquake triggered a tsunami and caused widespread power outages. In arid, heat-blasted Algeria in 2013, GE fast-tracked power production with four TM2500s so that residents would be able to have air-conditioning during the summer surges. The plants arrive fully manufactured from a GE plant in either Houston or Hungary.

Aeroderivatives also have marine applications. They power many ships, including the Francisco, the world’s fastest passenger ferry. Image credit: GE Power

But mobile power plants aren’t the only way GE is supplying people with Fast Power. In Tunisia, GE is delivering the Tunisian Company of Electricity and Gas (STEG) with a full-scale turnkey power plant. Unlike a mobile unit, the Bouchemma power plant is permanent and can generate over 250 megawatts, the equivalent needed to supply more than 1.2 million Tunisian homes. Yet thanks to a combination of technology and a speedier manufacturing, transportation and installation process, the Fast Power team expects to get it up and running in just seven months.

Two 9E.03 gas turbines, generators, a control system and an electrical Balance of Plant (eBoP) system will help Tunisia’s coastal region avoid power outages during the summer season and to keep a local factory humming. The eBoP grid solution was derived from technology developed by GE’s power and grid business, which GE acquired from Alstom last year. It’s now also part of the GE Store.

The aeroderivatives in Angola traveled to their final destination by plane, by truck and finally by boat. Image credit: GE Power

The final installation in Cabinda, Angola. Image credit: GE Reports

GE opened Predix, its cloud-based operating system for the Industrial Internet, to all users at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday. As of now, companies of all stripes can start using it to write industrial applications and make their machines and factories run better.

But a handful of businesses have had access to a beta version of the system since last fall. Roger Pilc, executive vice president and chief innovation officer at Pitney Bowes, has been developing on Predix for about six months. We talked to him about the experience. Here’s an edited version of the conversation.

GE Reports: How are you using Predix?

Roger Pilc: We leverage physical and digital technologies to help our clients drive business outcomes. We have an enterprise mail business that develops, sells and services very large machines called inserters. The machines help companies like banks and healthcare providers put exactly the right piece of mail inside exactly the right envelope. The scale and speed of the work is tremendous. For one bank alone, our machines helped assemble 900 million mail pieces in one year, just to give you a sense of scale. Most of these machines produce over 20,000 letters per hour and the requirements for accuracy and precision are astronomical. You can’t get it wrong.

This is not an easy feat. We need visibility into the machines to avoid outages and fix the machines before they break down. We also need to understand the root cause of any problems very quickly. Predix is helping us and our customers do that. This is something we didn’t have before.

GER: Is Predix meeting your expectations?

RP: We’ve been pleased. The data is successfully coming off our machines and through our security systems up into the cloud. The applications running on top of the cloud have been showing our field service teams and our customers the data visualizations we have designed together. So in terms of technology and functionality, things have been going very well.

GER: Besides outage prevention, what else are you using Predix for?

RP: So far I’ve mentioned one application, but our customers have a hierarchy of needs. Reducing downtime is the foundation level. The next step is improving productivity.

Predix can do that by using some of the same data from the same sources as in the first example, and applying an additional layer of analytics and different applications. They allow our customers to manage uptime, and also productivity in terms of output and how it relates to the mix of the types of machines, applications and operators in the factory. It gives our customers the analytics to optimize those machines even more.

GER: You talked about reducing downtime and improving output. Anything else?

RP: Helping our clients grow productivity revenue is the third and most advanced level of our use of Predix. When we talked to our customers on the most senior level, they were ultimately most interested in driving more revenue and more profit out of their locations. For that, you need to go even higher with capacity planning and job scheduling. Predix allows you to plan production in a more informed and data-driven manner against a whole fleet of machines. It allows you to place the right applications and analytics on the right machines at the right time, and essentially foresee what will happen in the future.

Here’s another way of looking at it. There’s descriptive analytics, which allows you to describe and visualize what’s happening; there’s prescriptive analytics, which is based on what’s happening — the root causes behind it — and gives you the prescriptions for remediating it; and then there is predictive analytics, which allows you to use data to be able to foresee what will happen and to be able to act in advance of it to optimize outcomes even further.

“The scale and speed of the work is tremendous,” says Roger Pilc of Pitney Bowes. “For one bank alone, our machines helped assemble 900 million mail pieces in one year, just to give you a sense of scale.” Image credit: Pitney Bowes

GER: Have you worked with other Industrial Internet software platforms?

RP: We certainly have experience with other leaders in the industry. We are a large customer of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and we also work with another industrial-strength hosting company. We evaluated Predix thoroughly and were very satisfied with the technology architecture, the level of scalability and the ability to ingest the very large quantities of data that often come from our types of machines. We are also very comfortable with the level of security, which is very important to us and to our customers.

Next, we looked at the actual applications. Here, Predix for us is more like Salesforce.com than AWS. The critical element was the layer of asset performance management applications running on top of the technology and the analytics that informed those applications. The application layer where the data is used to drive the performance of our industrial assets was something that we viewed as the industry leader. Plain-vanilla application-hosting companies do not have that layer.

Finally, and this is also very significant, these Predix-enabled applications are helping us provide more value to our customers, get to better business outcomes and also transform our own operations. We are using Predix to transform our own service organization from a break-fix model to an increasingly consultative one informed by data and analytics. We want to engage with customers in a way that’s more directly related to business outcomes.

GER:That sounds similar to what GE is doing inside its own factories.

RP: We placed value with GE because they not only built the data and analytics platform, but also because of the journey they’ve been on for the last several years. They’ve been using data from their own machines, doing the data analytics and then ultimately evolving their own services organization in the exact same way as us. That was an important element to us. We speak regularly not just about the technology and the applications, but also about this digital-industrial transformation.

GER: How has it been working with GE so far?

RP: It’s been very good. First of all, I think that our two companies have an amazing cultural fit. We both care a lot about our customers, we try to do the right thing the right way and we both have a high bar in terms of the quality of our engineering. We also share GE’s strong focus on innovation, meaning that we try to meet customer needs very quickly by doing things differently and introducing new physical and digital technologies.

GER: What are your plans in the future?

RP: We’re a $3.6 billion company with 1.5 million clients. In addition to the mailing machines, which are a relatively small part of our business, we are leaders in software and analytics around geospatial and location intelligence and customer information management. We are now using Predix to develop apps around those services and offer them to customers through the Predix app store.

Any Predix customer can use these capabilities, from fleet management businesses to drilling companies. Location management is a fundamental enabler. I’m sure other companies will be writing apps leveraging these capabilities as well. This is the power of the Predix ecosystem.

To meet the world’s growing demand for energy, the power sector needs to transform into a digital industry.

This week I had the privilege of participating in CERAWeek in Houston, where thousands of industry leaders, technology experts, government officials and policymakers gathered to discuss growth in the energy sector. There is no question that the global power industry is facing unprecedented challenges. On the demand side, more than 1 billion people around the earth continue to lack access to power, while rising living standards mean that another 8 billion people will require 50 percent more power by 2025. On the supply side, the power industry is seeking to reduce its carbon footprint through a combination of improved efficiencies and transitioning to more renewable energy sources.

Yet at the same time, advances in digital technologies present tremendous opportunities for the power industry to achieve the efficiency, reliability and affordability needed to deliver sustainable economic growth and shared prosperity.

In order to achieve the speed and scale needed to grow, the power industry has begun an exciting digital journey, with the emergence of digital power plants, smart grids and bi-directional connections with consumers. However, the path to a more sustainable energy future won’t be complete until we have achieved a complete transformation of the entire energy ecosystem into a new digital industrial economy.

To turn the challenges into opportunities, the power sector needs a strategy that enables a new value chain interconnected by digital technologies. To take full advantage of new digital capabilities, power producers can apply big data analytics to optimize plant operations and accelerate the adoption of natural gas and renewables. They can also develop new ways to interact with customers, empowering them to become more efficient, participative and responsive to demand and supply.

To be sure, this transformation will not be easy. Beyond the change in business models and critical investments in infrastructure and new technologies, there are some key conditions that must be in place to enable the digital ecosystem:

Open Standards and Interoperability: As with any ecosystem involving a multitude of technologies, products and stakeholders, a common set of standards is necessary for continued innovation. To maximize the potential value of the Industrial Internet — the convergence of multiple technologies with advanced connectivity across devices and systems — different systems and assets must be able to communicate with each other, share data and respond to common monitoring and control systems. Moreover, as these connected devices interact with utility and other personnel, data standards can help drive consistent analytical views to improve decision making.

Cyber security: The digitization of energy opens a new form of vulnerability, exposing network participants to potential data privacy and system security risks. Monitoring and minimizing these risks is a top priority, and is now achievable across the industry.

Education and Skills Development: Energy companies need people with software and analytical skills to reap the benefits of the digital transformation. They must invest in employee education and training, facilitate the use of mobile devices, and partner with universities and other vocational training institutions to build data science capabilities.

Imagine a future of energy that realizes the goal of ubiquitous access to clean, reliable, sustainable and secure electricity — while fostering economic growth through the creation of new energy ecosystems. Under the right conditions, the convergence of digital and physical technologies can bring this bright future within reach.

Read the white paper, Powering the Future — Leading the Digital Transformation
of the Power Industry.

(Top GIF: Video courtesy of GE)

Ganesh Bell is Chief Digital Officer & Head of GE Power’s Digital Solutions business, GE Power

All views expressed are those of the author.

In this week’s haul, one of the world’s most advanced robots gets knocked down with a pipe and gets up again, scientists collect clues on defusing a superbug’s immunity barrier with a light source 10 billion times brighter than the sun, researchers fight drug-resistant leukemia with a Trojan horse virus and engineers take tips from a desert beetle to squeeze moisture out of arid air. Take a look.

Study: Health Savings Offset Clean-Energy Costs in Spades

Image credit: GE Renewables

A study published by Nature Climate Change found that clean-power technologies tied to goals set by the Paris climate accord could save the United States $250 billion in healthcare bills per year in the near term, and prevent as many as 175,000 premature deaths by 2030. “Including longer-term, worldwide climate impacts, benefits roughly quintuple, becoming [about] 5-10 times larger than estimated implementation costs,” the authors of the study wrote.

Fighting Drug-Resistant Leukemia With 3,000-Year-Old Strategy

Scientists at The Ohio State University used a virus like a Trojan horse to smuggle cancer medicine into the body and attack drug-resistant leukemia. The strategy has been used against solid tumors in the past, but this is the first time it’s been unleashed on leukemia. “Cancer cells have novel ways of resisting drugs … and the exciting part of packaging the drug this way is that we can circumvent those defenses so that the drug accumulates in the cancer cell and causes it to die,” said study co-author John Byrd, a professor of internal medicine and director of the university’s hematology division. “Potentially, we can also tailor these structures to make them deliver drugs selectively to cancer cells and not to other parts of the body where they can cause side effects.”

A New Way to Disarm and Kill Superbugs

An image of a Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria. Image credit: Getty Images

Researchers at the University of East Anglia say they are “getting closer” to figuring out how drug-resistant bacteria protect themselves from antibiotics. Using a powerful new microscope, which shines light 10 billion times brighter than the sun, they were able to observe how bacteria assemble their defensive armor against antibiotics. “The findings pave the way for a new wave of drugs that kill superbugs by bringing down their defensive walls rather than attacking the bacteria itself,” they wrote in a news release. “It means that in [the] future, bacteria may not develop drug-resistance at all.”

Watch Google Robot Get Knocked Down With A Pipe, Get Up Again

Boston Dynamics, now part of Google’s parent, Alphabet, unveiled the latest generation of its Atlas robot. The 5-foot-9, 180-pound, battery-powered robot has LIDAR eyes, just like Google’s self-driving car, and uses sensors to keep balance. It can open doors, take a stroll through snow-covered forest, and lift and shelve boxes, and it’ll even put up with a fair amount of bullying. We dare you not to empathize with it.

Tips From Desert Beetles Could Help Water Farmers Harvest Moisture From Air

The Namib beetle’s bumpy shell provided clues for efficient water farming. Image credit: Getty Images

Engineers have been taking clues from evolution for a long time: Thistle burrs led to Velcro, kingfisher noses shaped Shinkansen bullet trains. Now scientists at Harvard have used the “slippery asymmetric bumps” covering Namib Ddesert beetles, cacti and other desert plants to come up with a material that can pull water out of air 10 times faster than any other stuff known to us “I’m a big fan of ‘Star Wars,’ and so you could imagine this kind of condensation system being used simply for water collection on a moisture farm, such as the one on Tatooine where Luke Skywalker was raised,” Harvard’s Kyoo-Chul Park, who led the team, told Popular Mechanics. “The basic idea is already here: harvesting liquid water from air-bound vapor in an extremely arid region.”

Fresh from inventing the recording and playback machine (1877) and the first practical lightbulb (1879), Thomas Edison focused on moving pictures. In 1889, he filed a patent for the Kinetograph, an early movie camera.

The wooden box didn’t look like much. Inside was a complicated mechanism that used a sprocket powered by an electric motor to pull the perforated edge of unexposed celluloid film, which had just been invented by George Eastman. The film moved in front of a lens at a speed of 46 frames per second.

But the device was so large that even Edison called it the “dog house.” “But what a perfectly marvelous dog house!” wrote The Nickelodeon, a brand-new magazine covering the budding movie industry, in 1910. “It stands there in the Edison works as the absolute foundation of an amusement business that encircles the world, giving employment to thousands and numbering its daily devotees by hundreds and hundreds of thousands.”

Thomas Edison with an early camera. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

Edison didn’t stop at the camera. He proceeded to the next obvious thing and invented the Kinetoscope, another wooden box that allowed people to watch movies through a peephole. Edison then hired the Scottish inventor William K.L. Dickson and let him experiment with the devices. Dickson and another movie pioneer named William Heise took the Edison camera for a spin in 1889 (or perhaps 1890 — the records are blurry) and shot “Monkeyshines No. 1,” possibly the first film ever made in the United States.

“Monkeyshines” may be the first movie made in the U.S. 

The film, all 56 seconds of it, probably shows lab worker John Ott “horsing around” – the meaning of “monkeyshines” – in front of the lens. Alternately, the “actor” might also be G. Sacco Albanese, another lab worker at the company. But nobody knows for sure.

Today the film doesn’t look like much, but back then any moving image must have caused a stir. It certainly gave Edison a business idea. In 1893, he erected a wooden building covered with tarpaper behind his lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, and called it Black Maria. It was perhaps the world’s first movie production studio. It started making film loops for the Kinetoscope.

The first Kinetoscope. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

Hundreds of Edison loops and films survive in the collection of the Library of Congress. They show President William McKinley’s inauguration, Mark Twain, the Sioux Ghost Dance and even a pair of boxing cats (eat that, Buzzfeed!).

Edison later moved the film studio to the Bronx. His mind always on the next big thing, he was already thinking about movie theaters, Technicolor, surround sound and even music videos. “Thus the motion picture of the future will show apparently solid objects projected in natural colors and accompanied in natural reproduction by all the concomitant sounds,” The Nickelodeon quoted him in 1910. “It will revolutionize the stage. The world’s greatest musicians, singers and actors can then be heard in the most insignificant hamlet at a nominal price.”

“The possibilities of the motion picture in the field of entertainment are tremendous and unbounded,” Edison went on, “and opportunity is offered to the inventors of the world to solve some interesting problems before the Utopian state I picture will be realized.”

Sunday’s Oscars will give us an annual taste of the utopia Edison imagined.

The Black Maria was Edsion’s first movie studio. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

When the large Pakistani textile maker Sapphire Group wanted to secure a reliable supply of electricity for its mills recently, it didn’t just build a new power plant. The company used a technology called digital twin to model the entire plant inside the cloud, run simulations and come up with the optimal way to design and run it.

In Ireland, the operators of the Whitegate Power Station, near Cork, placed more than 140 sensors throughout the plant. They digitize vibrations, temperature and other data, and feed it into the cloud for analysis. The results help the plant managers monitor and optimize operations in real time. The idea is to improve efficiency and minimize downtime at the 445-megawatt plant, which supplies up to 10 percent of Ireland’s households with electricity.

On the French Riviera, near Nice, another piece of software managing a smart grid is helping a municipality juggle different energy sources and pick the most efficient one.

The digital glue that connects these technologies is Predix, the cloud-based platform for the Industrial Internet developed by GE. Starting today, they will all live under one roof as part of GE Power’s new Digital Solutions business. “We’ve pulled together all of our software offerings, sensors and domain-specific applications for the power and electricity industry,” says Ganesh Bell, chief digital officer for GE Power, who also runs the new unit. “From now on, we’ll be just another GE Power business like nuclear, gas power systems and steam.”

GE has spent $1 billion over the last few years to develop Predix. The platform has allowed GE to securely collect data from jet engines, gas turbines and MRI scanners, analyze it and then use the results to make machines run better. The platform is now open to all developers.

“People are starting to realize that digital technologies are the most potent tool for driving value and efficiency in the energy industry,” Bell says. “We can use it to maximize total plant and grid performance and create new business models that reach all the way to consumers. Imagine if your utility was your best friend, using software to provide reliable electricity, drive decarbonization and even help you participate in the energy market by allowing you to sell back into the grid the electricity you make with the solar panels on your roof. This is happening now.”

The opportunities are huge. For starters, the world needs to add a lot of power — as much as 50 percent of existing capacity over the next two decades. Experts estimate that 1.3 billion people still live without access to a reliable supply of electricity.

To fix that, countries will need not only turbines and generators, but also software to get the most out of the machines. A study released by the World Economic Forum in January estimated that optimizing how electricity gets delivered over the grid from power plants to customers could save between $440 billion to $1.2 trillion, while lowering peak demand, reducing emissions and creating new jobs.

Right now, Bell says, GE is the only company that knows how to make both the machines that make electricity and the software that runs them. “We understand the industrial and the digital side,” he says. “The utilities that embrace digital will redefine the industry. They will be the leaders.”

There is no opting out of digital transformation. Successful companies carve out new strategic options for themselves — others fail.

The future is not what it used to be. Digitization has reached us all and changed everything. Consumers, clients and indeed the whole economy have become faster paced, less predictable, and more volatile. The number of digital options open to businesses is growing exponentially, with no sign of letting up.

At the same time, digitization poses a huge threat to existing competitive positions and is radically shifting companies’ chances of winning the game. Anyone in a position of corporate responsibility – be it in a supervisory or top management capacity – should therefore be asking themselves whether their company is properly prepared to face digital disruption.

Basically, there are two reasons why companies fail:

• Management doesn’t make the right decisions at the right time.
• External upheavals change the playing field so profoundly that business as usual is simply no longer an option.

Ideally, companies should right now be working out new strategic options and safeguarding their future success. In the worst case, businesses could cease to exist because they end up losing their customer interface, and because their share of the value chain shrinks to such a degree that they are left with no room for flexibility.

Innumerable Digital Initiatives, Little Analytical Rigor

Digital disruption is the number one reason for restructuring exercises. Most companies have innumerable initiatives across the various business units and regions. Many such initiatives lack analytical depth and rigor. However, when the board wants to launch new ones, it is told that they are already established throughout the organization. Managers fall for the illusion that things are progressing. Yet they can’t shape the digital transformation if they don’t see the big picture.

Many companies are already asking the right questions: are we cultivating the right knowledge? Are we finding – and capturing the imagination of – the right people? Are we mobilizing the right resources? The problem is that silo mentalities are still far too deeply entrenched for companies to piece together answers that form a coherent overall picture.

Product categories, processes and even companies’ view of customers are equally rigid and inflexible: at many firms, new topics are only ever tackled from the inside out. But if digital transformation is what you want, that is not enough. Organizations that still think in terms of status and prestige have, at best, a single plan A for their future. Precious few of them are open to a convincing digital roadmap: a viable plan D, which is both radical and plausibly quantifiable.

• How, then, do you break free of received thought patterns and the shackles of micro-planning?
• What path leads out away from the analysis of myriad individual factors and toward a broader take on trends?
• How do you expand your horizons to look beyond individual competitors and see innovative products and services?

The notion that the best seats in the house are already taken is the first obstacle: Google dominates data, the Europeans make the best cars, and so on. No! The only thing we can say with any degree of certainty is that someone somewhere in the world of connected mobility will end up earning money with data. Yet that could just as well be companies from other industries – or completely new firms that do not even exist yet.

• So where do you want to take your organization?
• Where do you want to be in the long run?
• Who are your customers?
• What will drive your growth and make you profitable?

Digitization leads to the recombination of business models, so it is important to grasp one central point: In a world of such dazzling diversity, you cannot be equally good at everything, nor do you have to be.

The digitization scenario – plan D – says nothing about what businesses will crumble in the digital future. Unlike in conventional scenario planning, it is not one of several possible scenarios whose probabilities must be carefully weighed to identify a series of “if-then” response patterns. Our radical scenario instead paints a constructive, optimistic picture of precisely those areas in which profitable new businesses can be tapped.

Forget Your Competitors. Think About Your Customers!

The key to reaching this goal lies in mapping out your ideal future scenario exclusively from the perspective of the customer. Such scenarios expose any blind spots by ignoring the limitations imposed by corporate, sectoral or market boundaries, by refusing to keep to rules of the game that are supposedly cast in stone, and by looking very far ahead without any regard to competitors. Why the latter point? Partly because no one can make reliable predictions today about who will still be in the game in the distant future, and because new players will in any case join the game and trample today’s rules underfoot. But partly also because you can only truly unshackle your thinking and ideas if your vision of the digital future is not weighed down by historical baggage.

Drawing up the digitization scenario is not merely an intellectual exercise. Putting numbers on the most important market, customer and product KPIs gives a very clear understanding of market developments and their consequences.

Successful digitization is the fruit of radical corporate resolve. Attitudes – and good leadership – are of crucial importance. Managers are advised to:

• Never look at the number of digital initiatives, but rather assess their strategic consistency and how they combine.
• Never complacently tick off checklists, but rather constantly review and reinvigorate efforts.
• Never see themselves as the market leader, but as a challenger who must fight for their position – even in their own market.

The digital transformation of a company should be seen as conquering a summit for the first time. Set off resolutely and at a brisk pace. Abandon what turn out to be blind alleys with equal speed and resolve. You can learn lessons from every mistake and gain strength for a new assault on the summit. What appear to be detours can sometimes get you to the top more quickly than an apparently direct ascent.

Better to Fail Early Than Wait Too Long

That is especially true of the “rapid prototyping” phase – the phase in which new products or services are introduced. It is better to fail on the early foothills than spend too long waiting around and looking up. Iterative, collaborative development methods can be very useful on this score: they do not simply churn out any number of prototypes for new digital products and business propositions. Instead, they help you craft products, try them out, discard them and try again.

As you work on development, it will become clear in what form of organization your prototypes can be groomed for success, as the chart above shows.

• One option is for existing products and services to be refreshed by digital components, just as autonomous cars benefit from advances in IT development. In such cases, digital business will be embedded in your traditional business.
• Second, your new business could complement what you already have, just as digital services monitor and handle the predictive maintenance of machinery. Traditional and digital offerings thus exist in parallel.
• The third option is where digital business replaces traditional models, just as e-commerce platforms have become the channel of choice through which to purchase spare parts for cars.

Essentially, digitization does far more than merely adding extra business: It also has a profound impact on the world as we know it.

(Top image: Courtesy of Thinkstock)

This piece first appeared in the World Economic Forum’s Agenda blog.

Charles-Edouard Bouée is the Global CEO of Roland Berger.

All views expressed are those of the author.

A group of physicists that included a Nobel laureate and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s brother spent the 1940s working in GE labs to figure out how to control the weather. After a promising start – they created snowfall over Schenectady, N.Y. – the project eventually fizzled.

Seven decades later, GE electrical engineer Naresh Acharya is attempting something similar. His system could one day help utilities predict the amount electricity generated by inherently unpredictable renewable resources like wind and sun, and send as much of it as possible over the grid to consumers.

Working at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, N.Y., not too far from Bernard Vonnegut’s lab, Acharya is using software to predict and balance the electricity generated by renewables and the amount of power used by consumers. The research is partially funded by the U.S. government’s Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy (ARPA-E).“The goal of ARPA-E’s program is enable a grid that can reliably manage a power mix where nearly half or more is supplied by renewables,” he says.

The software must aggregate and control thousands of customer loads in real time and match them with production projections. “We want to create a scenario that never puts a damper on the grid or the clean power that’s delivered to homes,” he says.

“The goal of ARPA-E’s program is enable a grid that can reliably manage a power mix where nearly half or more is supplied by renewables,” says GE’s Acharya (above).

It’s a sky-high challenge. Today, most of the power that U.S. utilities provide comes from traditional centralized power plants that run on fossil fuels. These plants often provide some reserve capacity that can be readily controlled by a grid operator. Since the load changes every second, this reserve capacity is very handy in managing these fluctuations. But as more fickle renewable power is brought online, providing the reserve capacity for the entire grid will become more challenging. The sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow.

The stakes are also quickly rising. In 2015, more than 65 percent of America’s new generating capacity came from solar and wind energy. The day when renewables could supply half of all electricity may be closer than you think.

Acharya and ARPA-E aren’t working on the challenge alone. Their other partners include GE Energy Consulting, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Enbala Power Networks, Consolidated Edison, Inc., Southern California Edison, Sacramento Municipal Utility District and California Independent System Operator. He will present his results at ARPA-E’s annual Energy Innovation Conference this week in Washington, D.C.

Acharya says that in recent years, renewable power was the global leader in bringing new generation online, adding more than 100 gigawatts of wind and solar in 2014 alone. This amount could power the entire state of Texas. Moreover, countries like Denmark are already generating 40 percent of their electricity from wind.

“We need to get visibility to bring all this energy into our home,” Acharya says. “We can’t control the weather, but our software will help us control the electricity it generates. I can live with that.”

Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir (left), Bernard Vonnegut (center) and Vincent Schaefer are seeding snow clouds in GE labs in 1947. Their effort to control weather fizzled out. Now another GE scientist is using software to predict and control electricity generated by the wind and the sun. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

Speaking last fall from Studio 8H inside New York’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza — best known as the set of “Saturday Night Live” — GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt told a crowd of investors and analysts how he was turning the 138-year-old business into the world’s largest digital-industrial company. He wasn’t joking. “We’re the only company that will have the machines, analytics and operating systems,” he said. “That’s how we’ll play the Industrial Internet.”

Immelt expanded on the theme in his annual letter to shareowners, which GE released today. He wrote that the Internet, which has had a massive impact on consumer productivity and commerce, is now transforming industry. “We are a company that invests in broad industrial transitions, and they don’t come much bigger than the full application of data and analytics to machines and systems,“ Immelt wrote. “Sensors on our products send constant streams of data, analyzed and translated into upgrades that drive productivity in industries where even the smallest incremental efficiency can mean very large gains.”

Immelt said that for GE alone, applications and analytics running off Predix, GE’s cloud-based platform for the Industrial Internet, will generate $500 million in productivity savings this year. The platform is now open to all developers. Immelt wrote that by the end of 2016, “we expect to have 200,000 assets under management, 100 GE applications and 20,000 developers” working with Predix. He said that GE revenue from apps and software stood at $5 billion and is growing at 20 percent annually.

One “killer” Predix app is the digital twin, a software model of a physical machine or a process that makes it possible to manage its “real world” sibling better. “GE is creating living digital profiles of [more than] 500,000 industrial machines in the field to provide new opportunities for customer growth and productivity,” he wrote. Immelt wrote that when GE applied it to the GE90, the world’s largest and most powerful jet engine, the digital twin increased fleet availability while saving tens of millions of dollars in unnecessary service overhauls.

The digital power plant is one application of the digital twin. Image credit: GE Power

All GE businesses, from Healthcare to Oil & Gas, can use Predix. The range illustrates another key concept that Immelt calls the GE Store. “The Store allows GE to innovate at scale, investing more than our peers and spreading the innovation across more businesses,” he wrote. As a result, Immelt said, “over the last five years, our organic growth has averaged 5 percent, two times our industrial peer group. And, since 2011, our margins have grown from 14.8 percent to 17.0 percent.”

The digital transformation and the GE Store are both reflected in the spirit of the 2015 Annual Report, which opens with Immelt’s letter. The immersive document, rich with interactive graphics and released online today, allows users to explore GE Store case studies, technologies and business results. CEOs of all GE businesses contributed their own letters to shareowners, and GE will make them available one after another over the next week.

Immelt concluded his letter with an appeal to investors. “I am asking investors to join GE as we transform and execute,” he wrote. “We have delivered for you in the last five years. But we are still underowned by big investors. In this time of uncertainty, why not GE? We have great businesses, global scale and strong initiatives. We have a ton of cash that can protect you. And we will lead the Industrial Internet. We are the Digital Industrial. We have grit. … Join us as we create the next wave of growth.”

From the Brink: As part of a regular series featuring content from BRINK, Jason Rao of the American Society for Microbiology and David Silbey of Cornell University discuss the importance of collaboration between governments and NGOs in containing a disease outbreak.

The 2014 outbreak of Ebola in the countries of West Africa quickly became a global health crisis. Ebola symptoms often did not manifest for three weeks after exposure, allowing an infected person to travel around the world before they knew they had the disease. One American physician made it home from Guinea to New York City before his case manifested, threatening an Ebola outbreak in the largest city in the United States. Though his case was contained, there was a global spread, not of the disease, but of fear of the disease, and policymakers and politicians discovered that their reaction required skills and coordination across borders and oceans.

These kind of emerging and reemerging infectious disease outbreaks have not only tested governments, but societies and individuals themselves. How prepared are we as citizens? As a nation? As an interconnected global community? How well informed are we? How well can we respond? From SARS to MERS to Ebola and now Zika, the globe has dealt with numerous outbreaks and learned a number of lessons. In some areas, we have adapted and improved our capabilities, and in others, there remains much work to do.

Lessons from the Frontlines

While there is a natural focus on what individual governments and international organizations, such as World Health Organization (WHO), did to prevent and respond to an outbreak, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) also played a crucial role.

NGOs had the technical expertise, human resources and communications and policy infrastructure needed to mitigate a crisis before, during and after it occurred. NGOs, for example, often had the local knowledge and were locally known in the areas where the diseases ran rampant. NGOs thus played an important role on the front lines in administering aid, but were also as a trusted resource, building crucial relationships with local communities fighting the current outbreaks and fostering resiliency for future ones.

Another one of the lessons learned was that, more than ever, disease outbreaks were a national security concern. “[W]e must come together to prevent and detect and fight every kind of biological danger—whether it’s a pandemic like H1N1 or a terrorist threat or a treatable disease,” said President Barack Obama in 2011.

The launch of the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) in 2014 formalized the connection between national security and public health, recognizing that whether an epidemic outbreak or a bioweapon attack, the capabilities to prevent, detect and respond to insurgent disease were identical. The GHSA has provided a common and global platform for government agencies to act together effectively. The recognition that health and security are now inextricably linked meant the response to them had to be sustained by the ongoing diplomatic efforts of the international community. Here again, NGOs have proven effective, as trusted and unbiased experts providing a neutral voice, and being a trusted ally to achieve the objectives of both public health and security communities alike.

The American Example

In the U.S., the recent Ebola outbreak further strengthened collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control, Department of Defense and United States Agency for International Development, all coming together to deploy a range of programs, connected in part by the GHSA. NGOs were leveraged in the roll-out of these Ebola response programs, with capabilities developed from their substantial earlier activities.

Specifically, large scientific associations such as the American Public Health Labs, Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute and the American Society for Microbiology gained experience and proved their effectiveness in the roll out of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief starting back in 2004. They helped to stem the tide of HIV and other infectious diseases across Africa and beyond, building laboratory capacity and other programs.

These scientific societies deployed subject matter experts and pulled in not only their parent society, but often universities and professional groups. Thus, individuals developed their own understanding and, more importantly, built trust and relationships that lead to lasting and sustained collaboration beyond the scope of the initial government funded activity.

The capacity developed was not just of physical space and equipment, but also of the networked understanding of a range of people. During the Ebola outbreak, that very capacity, once focused on HIV/AIDS, shifted to include the new outbreak. It remains in place to deal with emerging infectious diseases.

NGO capacity building has proven useful in other ways. While U.S. government assistance on health security has historically been less focused on Latin America, the NGO community has maintained strong ties across the Americas. Through organizations such as the Pan American Health Organization and a robust north-south university network, NGOs have a hemispheric capacity that will, for example, play an important role in the response to the recent Zika virus outbreak.

In addition, the NGO connections with universities are also creating new pathways for careers in global health security and diplomacy, where diverse expertise and experiences are needed. The American Association for the Advancement of Science Policy Fellowship program is an example, placing PhDs in research science in government jobs, leading to an infusion of science into policy and vice versa. The new Global and Public Health Major at Cornell University is an undergraduate example, creating expertise in the areas needed to deal with emerging health threats globally.

Health issues, particularly those of emergent diseases, have become internationalized. The lines between health, security and diplomacy have largely vanished, meaning that any response to them has to come from a multitude of organizations, governmental and non-governmental. In these responses, NGOs have been particularly useful, offering area- and disease-specific knowledge, managing capacity building in both physical and knowledge resources and developing long-term development paths for expertise. The combination proved substantially effective with the Ebola outbreak in 2014, and hopefully will do the same with the next emergent disease.

(Top image: Volunteers in Nigeria. Courtesy of CDC.)

This piece first appeared in BRINK.

Jason Rao is Director of International Affairs at American Society for Microbiology.

David Silbey is Associate Director of the Cornell in Washington program and an Adjunct Associate History Professor at Cornell University.

All views expressed are those of the authors.

Dr. Waseem Faidi’s research playground looks an awful lot like a high-tech hospital room. There’s the large white doughnut of a computed tomography scanner and a medical bed surrounded by digital dials and other instruments seemingly ready to pronounce on biological data.

But here, at this sprawling block in GE Global Research in Niskayuna, New York, there aren’t any flesh-and-blood patients just machine parts made from advanced alloys and space-age ceramics. “We’re not looking for cancer or heart disease,” Faidi says. “What my team does is to assess and even predict the health or condition of functional parts of products like a jet engine. To do this, we use the same imaging tools as medical doctors. We may modify and adapt them, but much of what we have developed for our healthcare business we can turn around and apply to industrial inspection.”

Faidi leads the nondestructive evaluation team at the GRC, which looks for the least invasive and most cost-effective ways to inspect critical industrial components and test the insides of parts made by the latest manufacturing methods like 3D printing.

Over the last decade, GE has built an entire inspection business by adapting new imaging applications originally developed for GE Healthcare. The unit, and Faidi’s research, are examples of what GE calls the GE Store: the idea that sharing the knowledge and expertise pooled inside its collection of businesses – which range from aviation and power generation to software and intelligent LED lighting – will make the whole company move faster.

Faidi and his team take from the store, but they also give back. GE Oil & Gas uses the technology to inspect pipelines and GE Aviation uses it to closely and quickly monitor complex jet engine parts during manufacturing.

New applications pop up everyday. Faidi and his team are testing an advanced high-energy x-ray system to image entire aircraft engines, including the world’s largest and most powerful engine, the GE90.

The diameter for this engine, which powers many Boeing 777 aircraft, is almost as wide as the body of a Boeing 737. Faidi is adapting his imaging machine to inspect and measure the clearances between parts inside the engine, and see if they yield insights into improving the design.

Faidi started his career in medical imaging as a medical ultrasound engineer, and still has the same goals as he did at the beginning. “We want to reach a time where doctors can tell patients exactly what is wrong with them and then prescribe exactly the right treatment to fix them or make them better,” he says. “The same is true with GE’s industrial machines.”

The medical world is moving toward preventive health care and away from the break-fix model, and machines are no different. “It’s much cheaper to cure a medical condition if you catch it early,” Faidi says. “Aircraft engines need to be serviced regularly to make sure they’re in peak operating condition and to make repairs when needed.”

Dr. Faidi (middle) and members of his team are moving a sample inside their CT scanner. Image credit: GE Global Research

GE Healthcare recently launched the Health Cloud to help hospitals gather and analyze medical data. It’s powered by Predix, a cloud-based software platform that GE Digital developed for the Industrial Internet. Faidi and his team are now using the same platform to collect deeper insights from the data produced by their inspection scanners. “Just like medical doctors, we want our patients to live healthy, happy and productive lives,” he says. “When the patients are machines that power and transport much of the world, the mission takes on an even greater importance.”

They can study the insides of the part on their monitor. Image credit: GE Global Research

The combination of massive computing power, digitized information and connectivity has taken the world into a future few people imagined even just a decade ago. Still, talk to experts and they’ll tell you the commercial Internet, embodied by the smartphone, Facebook, Amazon and Uber, is just the start. The next chapter will belong to the Industrial Internet which connects machines generating rivers of data fueling powerful analytics. The results will give their operators new insights and help them optimize everything from transportation to medicine.

This is already happening. GE, for example, is already connecting jet engines, wind turbines and medical scanners to its cloud-based industrial-grade Predix platform. Jeff Immelt, GE chairman and CEO, expects Predix will have 200,000 such assets under management by the end of the year.

One system using Predix is the GE Health Cloud. Clinicians will be able to access it from their smartphones or tablets. The system will allow developers to write apps that can help doctors arrive at diagnoses faster, alert them to hidden conditions and even handle billing. Additionally, the GE Health Cloud will assist hospitals, health systems and private physician practices with gaining insights into their workflows and operations.

Last November GE Healthcare announced the first four apps, which focused on advanced imaging and clinical collaboration. It just added six more. The new apps will expand to areas of healthcare including life sciences, financial billing and claims management. They will even let doctors create digital twins of patients in the intensive care unit. Here’s the list:

Centricity Insights forIntensive Care

The Centricity Insights for Intensive Care app will use a patient’s data — such things as age, weight, smoking habits, diabetes and time on a ventilator— to create a digital twin of the patient to help doctors predict the average length of stay for that patient in the intensive care unit (ICU) and the probability that the patient will have further specific complications. Patients in the ICU may encounter renal failure, pneumonia or sepsis, for example.

Radiology Insights for X-ray reject/repeat rates

GE has deep domain expertise in X-Ray technology and the app is the latest step. Dr. William Coolidge (above) invented what is considered the modern X-ray tube. He also developed an early portable X-ray machine. Coolidge’s X-ray machine was used in military hospitals during World War I.

The Radiology Insights app is intended to help reduce repeat/reject X-ray rates by using machine data to track and trend such rates. It helps identify follow-up training needs for radiographers.

 Radiology Insights for Modality Utilization

This image of blood vessels inside the skull was captured with GE’s Revolution CT scanner. Image credit: GE Healthcare

This mouthful of a name is a label for a fairly common problem, which involves getting patients quickly scheduled for the scans they need. This Radiology Insights app will use machine data to track modality utilization across a region or hospital system to help care-delivery networks make the most of their modality assets.

CortexID Suite

John Schenck and his team at GE Global Research built the machine that took the first MRI image of the brain. Image credit: GE Global Research

There are no definitive tests to distinguish among the many different types of dementia. This suite of apps may help reveal patterns, suggesting which dementia a patient might suffer from.

The CortexID Suite may provide insights to physicians in the image-interpretation process of amyloid PET studies, which are typically used for patients being evaluated for cognitive impairment or cognitive decline. It’s an adjunct to other diagnostic evaluations.

Centricity Insights for Financial Management

Mountains of denied medical insurance claims are a real headache for both doctors and patients. It’s a problem GE tackled last year when it launched DenialsIQ, which uses analytics to uncover hidden patterns in claims denials so that administrators can proactively fix them. This helped one customer reduce denied charges by 47 percent, saving $93,000 in rework costs in one month, according to a case study from UC-Irvine.

Centricity Insights for Materials ManagementOptimization

The Centricity Insights for Materials Management Optimization app will help analyze healthcare-provider inventory, suppliers and the cost of materials used in cardiology, perioperative and interventional radiology procedures. Materials account for a significant portion of the cost of surgery.

This week’s discoveries include a 3D-printed version of “frozen smoke” that could lead to invisibility cloaks, a mummy with a colon cancer gene mutation suggesting that colorectal cancer may not be solely a product of the modern lifestyle and fungus that may be the very first ancestor of all life on land.

A 3D-Printed Invisibility Cloak?

The world’s lightest material, 3D-printed. Image credit: State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo and Kansas State University

Scientists from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo and Kansas State University have 3D-printed objects from the world’s lightest material, graphene aerogel. Aerogels, also called frozen smoke, are highly porous materials where the liquid has been replaced with a gas. Graphene is a thin film of carbon just a single atom wide. Graphene aerogel is “so light that a large block of it wouldn’t make a dent on a tiny ball of cotton,” Quartz reported. “The minimal density of aerogels allows for a number of possible applications, researchers have found, ranging from soaking up oil spills to ‘invisibility’ cloaks.” 3D-printing the material could speed up prototyping and manufacturing and lead to new engineering applications.

Scientists Use Laser to Open the Blood-Brain Barrier and Fight a Deadly Cancer

Brain illustration. Image credit: GE Global Research

Neurosurgeons at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis used a laser to open the protective blood-brain barrier in 14 patients and then delivered chemotherapy drugs through the breach to attack a deadly cancer. The blood-brain barrier protects the brain from harmful substances — but also helpful drugs. “The laser treatment kept the blood-brain barrier open for four to six weeks, providing us with a therapeutic window of opportunity to deliver chemotherapy drugs to the patients,” Eric C. Leuthardt, MD, Washington University professor of neurosurgery and a co-author of the study, said in a news release. “This is crucial because most chemotherapy drugs can’t get past the protective barrier, greatly limiting treatment options for patients with brain tumors.”

Mummy of a Hungarian Monk Sheds Light on the Origins of Colon Cancer

Top image: The mummy of the Dominican monk was found in an old crypt in Vac, Hungary. Image credit: Tel Aviv University Above: An image of early stage colon cancer taken with GE’s cancer mapping technology, which can display dozens of disease markers in a single tissue sample. It’s not clear whether the Tel Aviv University team used this technology. Image credit: GE Global Research

Scientists from Tel Aviv University found a gene mutation associated with colon cancer in an 18th-century mummy of a Dominican monk recovered from a Hungarian crypt. The team wanted to know whether colon cancer was “a lethal product of modernity? Or is this an open-and-shut case of DNA gone awry?”

The discovery suggests that colorectal cancer may not be solely a product of the modern lifestyle, they say. “Our data reveal that one of the mummies may have had a cancer mutation. This means that a genetic predisposition to cancer may have already existed in the pre-modern era,” said Ella Sklan, one of the authors of the study. “But we’ve found this mutation in only one individual so far. Additional studies with a larger sample size should be conducted in order to draw more meaningful conclusions.”

Antibodies From Ebola, Zika Survivors Could Lead to Speedy Treatment

Zika virus. Image credit: Getty Images

Scientists from Scripps Research Institute studying the blood of an Ebola survivor have discovered a new group of more than 300 powerful antibodies that “could guide the development of a vaccine or therapeutic against Ebola.” The team reported that the approach could apply to other emerging diseases such as the Zika virus (above). “With other outbreaks, we could take blood samples from the first wave of survivors and potentially produce a therapeutic rapidly,” said Zachary Bornholdt, one of the researchers, who is now working as associate director of antibody discovery at Mapp Biopharmaceutical. “That’s the long-term goal.”

Something Rotten in Sweden Gave Rise to Land-Based Life on Earth

Filaments of Tortotubus. Credit: Martin R. Smith

Researchers at Cambridge University say they have identified “the earliest type of organism living on land”: a fungus called Tortotubus that lived 440 million years ago. They found its fossilized remains in Sweden and Scotland. The fungus “likely kick-started the process of rot and soil formation, which encouraged later growth and diversification of life on land,” the team reported.