The GE Brief: April 8, 2021
PATENTING THE FUTURE
Before becoming a patent expert at GE Renewable Energy, Kavitha Andoji spent her days dreaming up practical inventions that could save her family in Hyderabad, India, time or money. One early idea involved rigging up a stationary bicycle to use the energy from pedaling to power the lights in her family’s home. Another of her handy devices repeatedly hammered a pomegranate to expel its seeds without wasting the juice. When she grew up, inventions became the focus of her professional life. Kavitha has gone on to analyze more than 50,000 patents for the GE unit’s Grid Solutions business and holds six of her own. Her first, awarded in 2011, was for a system that allowed utility service crews to monitor power transmission technology using their mobile devices.
Domain of forking paths: Kavitha found there were two main ways to come up with a patentable invention. The first is to find a customer problem and innovate around it. To stimulate this type of thinking, she believes in talking with customers about their needs. The second approach focuses on getting chief technology officers, product managers — really, anyone touching a product — to develop a vision and make their plans known widely within the company. “Business vision is a must to generate a more advanced level of new technologies,” she says, especially when this vision enables a company to make a market for its products and be an early entrant, rather than just following a market. Kavitha says technology teams deeply focusing on their areas sometimes don’t have enough knowledge "about the market or how it is performing. That information is very useful when it comes to patent ideas.”
To read more about Kavitha’s work patenting inventions at GE click here.
NEW LIFE
LM Wind Power is one of the world’s largest makers of blades for wind turbines. These blades are designed to last for more than 20 years, but what happens to them when they are done spinning? In the past, they could end up in landfills, lined up like dinosaur bones. LM Wind Power wants to change that. The company, which became carbon neutral in 2018, is working with the wind industry to come up with blades that could be 100% recyclable in the future.
Group effort: Last fall, LM Wind Power’s parent company, GE Renewable Energy, partnered with Veolia North America to co-process decommissioned blades in the manufacturing of Portland cement, the most common ingredient in concrete. And in January, a group of Danish companies that includes LM Wind Power won funding from the country’s authorities for a three-year project, DecomBlades. GE Renewable Energy will also collaborate with Carbon Rivers, a startup at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and other partners to develop a system for recycling glass fiber from blade parts. And LM Wind Power also plans to work with its suppliers. “Preventing waste before it occurs is the best way to reduce our impact on the planet, and it’s simply good business,” says Hanif Mashal, vice president of engineering and technology at LM Wind Power. The company’s waste reduction in blade manufacturing has yielded more than $33 million in savings since 2016.
Click here to learn more about efforts to make wind power more sustainable.
Relying on decades of expertise and a tsunami of data, GE Renewable Energy’s Grid Solutions unit is helping make the electrical grid smarter, steadier and more resilient.
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“The wind power industry is committed to finding a sustainable way to dispose of these decommissioned wind turbine blades with respect to the environment, health and safety of workers, energy consumption and cost, and we simply don’t yet have solutions that meet all those criteria.”
— John Korsgaard, senior director of engineering excellence at LM Wind Power who also chairs DecomBlades’ steering committee
Quote: GE Reports. Images: Kavitha Andoji, GE Renewable Energy.