The GE Brief – December 15, 2021
Meet The Pilot Of Etihad’s ‘Sustainable Flight’
When Mimmo Catalano was 5 years old, his dad took him to work at his office, at an airport in Sardinia, and the boy’s imagination was captured. Today Catalano is a 16-year veteran of Etihad Airways, and in October he captained a long-haul flight from London to Abu Dhabi that was like none before it. The Boeing 787-10 Dreamliner, powered by GE Aviation’s efficient GEnx engines, produced carbon emissions 72% lower than those on a typical flight. How Etihad and its captain accomplished this is a story of many contributing technologies. They include sustainable aviation fuel, contrail mitigation, GE’s Fuel Insight software and a cleaning system that helps make jet engines run more efficiently. The trip showed what a more sustainable future could look like for the airline industry. Meet the captain here.
GE Research And AT&T Partner On 5G
Over the past two decades, four generations of mobile networks have changed how we live, shop and talk to each other. But the next generation of wireless networks, 5G, which can achieve data transmission speeds 10 to 100 times faster than we’re currently used to, could quickly change the status quo again. One industry it could alter dramatically is healthcare. AT&T and GE Research have partnered to bring 5G connectivity to the digital test bed at GE’s Forge Lab in upstate New York so that the healthcare applications of tomorrow can be tested today. Read about it here.
Catching Carbon
Technip Energies and GE Gas Power have been selected by BP for a front-end engineering design (FEED) study for a system that could capture carbon from the exhaust of a proposed natural-gas-fired power plant at Teesside, England. GE Gas Power will provide expertise in natural gas combined-cycle plant engineering, operability and plant integration, while Technip Energies will focus on the carbon capture plant and CO2 compression facility using Shell’s carbon capture technology. “Net Zero Teesside Power is a first-of-a-kind gas-fired power project — fully integrated with carbon capture technology, with emissions planned to be exported and securely stored by the Northern Endurance Partnership,” according to BP. The news release is here.
Breaking The Circuit Of High Carbon Emissions
Most of us know that the energy transition to a less carbon-intensive future involves technologies like wind farms and solar panels. But other components of the electrical grid need attention, too. This week, GE Renewable Energy announced it has been awarded a three-year framework contract with SP Energy Networks in the UK for the supply of high-voltage circuit breakers using a gas insulator developed by GE in collaboration with 3M that has a far lower global warming potential than existing technologies. The insulating and switching gas represents an alternative to sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), the most commonly used insulator for electrical equipment in substations. The news is here, and a story about the gas, called g3, is here.
— Quote Of The Day —
“Imagine what may be possible when millions of medical devices and diagnostics tools can be reliably connected to help doctors deliver faster, more effective patient care.”
— Eric Tucker, senior director of technical products, GE Research
Quote: GE Reports. Images: GE Reports, Getty Images, GE Grid Solutions.