August 1, 2019
STEADY PROGRESS, MORE WORK TO DO
In its second-quarter earnings released this week, GE reported progress across businesses at the midpoint of what the company has called a “reset year.” “We made steady progress on our strategic priorities in the second quarter,” Larry Culp, GE’s chairman and CEO, said in a press release. “We will continue to take planned actions to improve our businesses and monitor some market headwinds. We remain focused on driving continuous improvement and delivering for our customers, and I am encouraged by our team’s progress and dedication to date.”
Powering up: Due to improvements in GE Power, lower restructuring, higher earnings and better visibility in the first half of 2019, GE also announced adjustments to its full-year outlook. The company also announced that Chief Financial Officer Jamie Miller, who’s been with GE for 11 years, will be leaving the company. Miller, Culp said, “has been instrumental in developing our portfolio strategy, furthering our efforts to make GE a more focused industrial company, and spearheading our de-leveraging plan during a challenging period.” She’ll stay on as CFO while the company searches for her replacement.
Click here for more highlights from GE’s second-quarter report.
SMALL BUT MIGHTY
Jet-setters making the trip from New York to Paris usually do it on one of those big old wide-body airliners — powered by two or four engines, they’re the workhorses of long-haul and overseas flights, leaving the single-aisle jets to handle the shorter flights. But that distinction isn’t as hard and fast as it used to be. In May, French airline La Compagnie started operating a daily business-class-only flight between Newark Liberty and Orly, two airports close to major hubs in New York and Paris, that makes use of a smaller, single-aisle, next-generation Airbus jet, the A321neo. What’s powering this achievement? The LEAP engine by CFM International, a 50-50 joint venture between GE and France’s Safran Aircraft Engines. It provides double-digit gains in fuel-efficiency and allows planes to fly further on a single tank of fuel while lowering carbon emissions, oxides of nitrogen emissions and noise.
Punching above their weight: A trans-Atlantic voyage is no mean feat — but it might just be scratching the surface of what these single-aisle wonders are capable of. Last April, an Airbus A321neoLR powered by a LEAP engine completed a test flight from Seychelles in the Indian Ocean to Airbus headquarters in Toulouse, France. Clocking in at 11 hours and covering 5,466 miles, it was the longest-distance flight in the certification process of the A321neo. According to the International Air Transport Association, single-aisle jets are the fastest-growing segment of the airline industry, and it’s believed that a majority of single-aisle aircraft on order today will be using LEAP engines. The engines succeed due to CFM’s combination of engineering expertise and new materials and technologies — like 3D printing, which allows for the creation of terrifically complex parts. “This is an engineer’s dream,” said Mohammad Ehteshami, who retired as CEO of GE Additive in 2018 and was in charge of developing the part. “I never imagined that this would be possible.”
Learn more here about the tech that is making engineers’ dreams come true.
THE CUTTING EDGE
In Barcelona’s industrial Poblenou district, a former cutlery factory now shines with a different kind of promise: digital promise. These days the old knife works is home to GE Renewable Energy’s Barcelona remote operations center, or ROC — a high-tech nerve center that monitors and controls a decent chunk of southern Europe’s burgeoning wind energy sector. Even passersby can get a glimpse of the action, with a digital ticker tape offering up-to-the-minute updates of the wind turbine fleet that the ROC monitors, the number of European households the wind energy can support, and the estimated amount of carbon dioxide emissions saved. But that’s just the view from the sidewalk. Inside the facility, GE technicians have got their eyes on a whole lot more.
Troubleshooting the breeze: On a recent visit to the ROC, GE Reports found engineers huddled in front of laptops in a room that looked like a NASA mission control center, while a huge TV screen showed a map of Europe peppered with turbine icons. Human and artificial intelligence allows GE to continuously fine-tune the operations of more than 2,000 European turbines, performing instant software analysis on millions of data points to catch issues as soon as they crop up. “The software is the first line of defense against operational problems,” said Jose Miguel Garate, senior engineer at GE Renewable Energy — in fact, it helps the ROC solve 80% of wind turbine issues in less than 10 minutes. The Barcelona location is the fourth ROC that GE Renewable Energy has established around the world; together, they keep tabs on more than 15,000 wind turbines and have been able to increase the productivity of the assets they monitor by 20%.
ROCs can help technicians fix problems immediately — but they also offer long-term insights into how to maximize fleet performance. Learn more here.
— VIDEO OF THE WEEK —
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“We are supposed to live in a digital world, and the customers are always expecting more — and we’re ready to deliver.”
— Jose Miguel Garate, senior engineer at GE Renewable Energy
Quote: GE Reports. Image: GE Renewable Energy.
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