A year ago in Paris, almost 200 countries adopted the historic COP21 agreement and pledged to hold the increase in global average temperature to less than 2 degrees Celsius above where it was before the Industrial Revolution. “Now we need to get the job done,” says Steve Bolze, president of GE Power, which makes technology that generates one-third of the world’s energy.
Bolze, who spoke Monday at the World Energy Congress in Istanbul, says that power generation contributes 40 percent of the global emissions of carbon dioxide — the chief global warming culprit. He says that “decarbonization across the entire energy ecosystem” is a way to start.
The WEC’s theme this year is the Grand Transition, which implies that there is more at stake than just rising levels of CO2. Global warming is also taking place during an unprecedented population growth. The number of humans is expected to top out 9 billion around the year 2050. They will all need access to electricity and require new power plants, not to mention cars and air travel.
Take Indonesia, for example, the world’s fourth most populous country and Southeast’s Asia’s largest economy, which is growing at a 5 percent annual clip. Experts calculate that every 1 percent rise in Indonesia’s economic output increases energy demand by 1.8 percent.
President Joko Widodo has made increasing power generation capacity by 70 percent over the next three years a key goal of his administration. At the same time, the country still uses coal to generate half of its power supply. “You really have to look for some ingenious solution that includes a combination of renewables like wind and solar, mobile power plants that can be quickly deployed pretty much anywhere, as well as software to make traditional power generation sources run more efficiently,” Bolze told GE Reports last month in Jakarta.
While most of the energy-demand growth will take place in Asia and Africa, the United States and Europe will need to upgrade it post World War II-era power generation infrastructure. “There’s no single silver bullet, but there are multiple paths that could lead us to a good place,” Bolze says.
Here are some of the examples of the technologies that GE has already rolled out around the world.
The Digital Power Plant
In April 2016, GE Power acquired the Boston-based machine learning and data analytics startup NeuCo Inc., which uses software and artificial intelligence to improve the efficiency of coal-fired power plants. NeuCo’s systems are now a key part of the world’s first “Digital Power Plant for Steam,” a set of technologies that can dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions of coal-fired power plants by improving their performance and efficiency. Customers such as the Italian utility A2A have used Predix — GE’s cloud-based operating system for the Industrial Internet — to revive an idled gas-fired power station near Turin and make it competitive again. The software enables the turbine to work in combination with renewables and quickly respond when the wind stops blowing or the sky grows overcast.
Natural Gas
GE spent three years developing its HA-class of gas turbines. This spring, the first one started generating electricity in Bouchain, a city in northern France, and immediately entered the Guinness World Records as the most efficient combined-cycle power plant on the planet (see above). The turbine — called 9HA.01 in GE nomenclature — weighs as much as a fully loaded Boeing 747 and can generate enough power to supply more than 680,000 French homes. It can go from off to full throttle in less than half an hour, enabling the plant operator, EDF Energy, to respond quickly to changing demand.
Distributed & Fast Power
Rice fields surrounding the GE’s “fast power” power plant in Lombok. Image credit: GE Reports
When Hurricane Sandy slammed into the East Coast in 2012, millions of customers lost power. Princeton University, however, stayed bright and warm because it had its own power source made from a converted GE jet engine that could disconnect from the grid and operate in an island mode. Similar solutions are becoming common. For example, Indonesia’s 18,000 islands make building large power plants impractical. This summer, GE Power installed on Lombok— an island right next to Bali — two “fast power,” truck-mounted mobile gas turbine generators similar to the machine at Princeton. They can start producing more than 25 megawatts each in less than a month after delivery.
Renewables
Rotor blades heading for the Block Island wind farm. GE just announced plans to acquire the Danish maker of the blades, LM Wind Power. Image credit: LM Wind
Just last week, GE announced that it would use software to connect to the internet and help optimize New York’s largest hydropower plant below Niagara Falls. In Nice, France, GE helped build the world’s first smart solar grid, a system that could one day enable cities to generate more renewable energy closer to customers. The software made it possible for the operators to offer a subsidy via text message to a local coffee roaster if the company fired its ovens when neighbors’ solar panels were generating excess electricity. “We load up, and the coffee roaster roasts their coffee at a cheaper price because they get a subsidy from the grid operator to consume during this period,” Laurent Schmitt, smart grid strategy leader at GE Grid Solutions, told GE Reports.
Bolze is at WEC with Jerome Pecresse, CEO of GE Renewable Energy, and Lorenzo Simonelli, president and CEO of GE Oil & Gas this week. Follow the conversation online with #WECCongress.
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