The GE Brief: February 17, 2021
HARVESTING NORTHERN WINDS
A remote, forested rise in northern Sweden, some 500 miles from Stockholm, is poised to become the largest single onshore wind farm in Europe. When completed, Önusberget wind farm is projected to have the capacity to generate 753 megawatts, enough to supply the equivalent of more than 200,000 Swedish homes. Luxcara, an asset management company focusing on renewable energy, is developing the wind farm with GE Renewable Energy, which will supply 137 Cypress 5.5 MW wind turbines, the most powerful onshore turbines made by GE. The project is GE’s largest onshore wind farm contract outside of the U.S. (Earlier this year, GE signed a deal to supply turbines for a 1 gigawatt wind farm in New Mexico.)
Nordic power: Luxcara has already started infrastructure work and GE is planning to begin installing turbines as early as July of this year. “We are proud to work with GE to build Europe’s largest onshore wind farm in the resource-rich north of Sweden,” says Alexandra von Bernstorff, co-founder and managing partner of Luxcara. “We were among the first to enter the Nordic wind market back in 2015 and this project reaffirms our position as the region’s largest long-term investor in the sector.” The Nordic wind market is already big and poised for more growth; as of 2019, 48% of Denmark’s electricity demand was supplied by wind, and in Sweden, it was 15%.
Click here to learn more about plans for Europe’s largest wind farm.
NEW ENGINE ORDER
Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) announced on Monday that its fleet of 35 new Airbus A320neo passenger jets will be equipped with fuel-efficient LEAP-1A jet engines from CFM International, a 50-50 joint venture between GE and Safran Aircraft Engines. The deal, which combines engines and maintenance services, is valued at $2.9 billion at list price. “Our goal is to be industry leaders in sustainable aviation, and we are to reduce emissions by 25% by 2025, in comparison to 2005,” said Magnus Örnberg, executive vice president and CFO of SAS. “This will mainly be enabled by using state-of-the-art technologies allowing for lower fuel consumption and an increase in use of sustainable aviation fuels.”
Another leap forward: CFM started developing the LEAP jet engine about a decade ago. The engineers were able to lower fuel consumption by 15%, lower CO2 emissions, and make the engine quieter than its predecessor, the CFM56, by using breakthrough materials and technologies — such as parts made from ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) that can handle temperatures approaching 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit.
Click here to read more about efforts by SAS to reduce its carbon footprint.
LETTER TO SHAREHOLDERS
In his annual letter to shareholders released on Friday, GE Chairman and CEO Larry Culp praised the resilience and passion of GE employees and the progress they made in 2020. “Last year was marked not only by its challenges but by how the world met them. I'm proud of the meaningful progress GE made in 2020. We have momentum and intend to build on it,” he wrote. “I often have witnessed our employees’ battle-tested commitment and grit over the past two-plus years. Nowhere was this clearer than in the face of the pandemic, and I am profoundly thankful to them... Together with our customers, the GE team kept power flowing, hospitals operating and planes flying.”
The power of three: Culp went on to point out how GE adjusted its operating model around three principles during 2020, which helped it emerge from the year stronger. First, embrace reality: "We needed to think about the unthinkable and prepare for a range of outcomes, meeting daily, sometimes hourly, to gather information and adjust.” Second, redefine winning to focus and motivate our teams: “In 2020, this often meant simply getting safely to a customer site, completing an outage, or shipping one more ventilator off the line. It also meant focusing on what we could control, including in our operations.” Third, execute the plan: “We moved quickly to reduce costs, preserve cash, and manage our debt obligations.”
Culp said that “these steps, combined with the headway we already had been making to improve execution, strengthened our capacity to work through the uncertainties triggered by the pandemic. And they helped us move faster on our journey to transform GE’s performance and culture.”
Click here to read an excerpt of the shareholder letter and here to read the full letter.
COOLEST THINGS ON EARTH ?
1. Lunar Factories
The U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is calling on the private sector to explore large-scale technologies that could help build a manufacturing location on the moon.
2. Bug Blaster
Researchers at the Baylor School of Medicine have discovered a novel phage — a virus that infects and destroys bacteria — that may help prevent infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria in the human gut.
3. Continuous Learning
An MIT researcher has developed a neural network that could point to artificial intelligence for applications like medical diagnostics and self-driving cars.
Learn more here about this week’s Coolest Things on Earth.
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“Our goal is to be industry leaders in sustainable aviation, and we are to reduce emissions by 25% by 2025, in comparison to 2005. This will mainly be enabled by using state-of-the-art technologies allowing for lower fuel consumption and an increase in use of sustainable aviation fuels.”
— Magnus Örnberg, executive vice president and CFO of SAS
Quote: GE Reports. Images: GE Renewable Energy, SAS, GE.