April 23, 2019
BLADE RUNNERS
Many of the people who celebrated Earth Day Monday did so with climate change in mind. This planet-size problem is requiring the world to rethink how it gets its energy. Engineers at LM Wind Power and its parent, GE Renewable Energy, believe that it’s time to think big — say, to the tune of 107 meters. That’s the length of one blade on the Haliade-X 12MW, GE’s largest and most powerful offshore wind turbine. Just one of these machines will generate enough sustainable energy to power 16,000 European homes.
The leading edge: Possibly representing one of the largest single machine components every built, the Haliade-X blade is longer than a football field and 1.4 times the length of a Boeing 747 — and workers just popped one out of its factory mold for the first time. The blades are being built at a plant in Cherbourg, France, by LM Wind Power, the world’s largest designer and manufacturer of wind turbine blades, which GE acquired in 2017. In Holland, GE recently laid the foundation of an onshore prototype of the Haliade-X, which will stand 260 meters tall in its full glory, with a rotor diameter sweeping 220 meters. That machine is expected to start producing electricity later this year.
How long would it take Usain Bolt, the world’s fastest human, to run from one end of a Haliade-X turbine blade to the other? Find out here.
IT TAKES GRID
The green juice being generated by GE’s wind turbines — and by solar technology — needs an electrical grid capable of handling it. At the same time, when Thomas Edison switched on the first electrical grid in Manhattan in 1882, he couldn’t have conceived of today’s diverse ecosystem of energy sources. “The grid is the smartest and most complex machine that humans ever built,” said Jamshid Sharif-Askary, chief architect at GE Renewable Energy’s Grid Solutions. “But we are pushing it beyond its limits.” Understanding this problem isn’t just Sharif-Askary’s job — it’s his obsession, one he’s been working away at since the 1970s. Three years ago, he went to his boss at GE with a proposal: an in-house “startup” seeking to create an “innovative digital grid infrastructure” that GE and power utilities could use to incubate their ideas for reimagining the grid.
Plug and play: Today, that startup is the Digital Energy Innovation Lab. The lab is filled with millions of dollars’ worth of equipment and software that help engineers test how tomorrow’s tech might work on today’s grid. “What we have built is really a technology motherboard that allows utilities to plug together new technology with their legacy systems from various manufacturers like Lego blocks, and see how they all work together,” Sharif-Askary said. One of the companies that visited the lab at the DistribuTECH energy conference in New Orleans in February was Duke Energy, one of America’s largest power companies, which is adding renewables to its energy mix and connecting more and more digital devices to the grid.
Duke and a coalition of other companies, including GE, are developing a framework to ensure that these devices are speaking to one another in the same digital language — and helping utilities speak to customers, too, with real-time information on events like outages. Learn more here about the future of the smart, digital and highly communicative electrical grid.
CELTIC INSPIRATIONS
The Boston Celtics swept the Indiana Pacers on Sunday in the first round of NBA playoffs, but the team’s players have also been sweeping through Boston-area schools promoting another surefire winner: STEM education. For the past three years, a partnership between the Celtics, Fab Foundation and the GE Foundation has been exposing Boston-area schoolchildren to the possibilities of STEM, or science, technology, engineering and math. That’s manifested in the Brilliant Career Play mobile lab, a roving suite of cool tech — think laser cutters and 3D printers — that middle school students get exposed to. It’s a version of the GE Brilliant Career Lab, created for Boston high schoolers as part of GE’s $50 million commitment to support the development of the next-generation digital workforce.
Full court press: Recently the lab swept through George Keverian, a school in Everett, Massachusetts, bringing with it local hoops legend Dana Barros and Celtics center Aron Baynes, who talked up the importance of STEM education. “I wish when I was in school I had the STEM lab you guys have,” Baynes said. Educators thought it was pretty cool too: Eighth grade science teacher Jacey Vaughan said, “Every time we learn any fact, I show them how somebody uses that fact in the real world. To be able to do this right now in a STEM unit, a technology-immersive unit, really brings what they’re doing to life in a way that we wouldn’t be able to do.”
The Celtics are on the move and so is the Brilliant Career Lab, which is currently visiting Boston’s Snowden International School. Learn more here.
COOLEST THINGS ON EARTH ?
1. Foal’s Errand
Scientists continue to pull more crazy stuff out of the Siberian permafrost: This time it’s the remains of a 42,000-year-old foal — who’s aged remarkably well. Plans are to try to clone the extinct creature.
2. Heart On Demand
Researchers at Tel Aviv University 3D-printed a heart using biological materials from a human patient. The prototype is a few sizes too small, but scaled-up technology could one day help solve a shortage of donors for patients who need heart transplants.
3. Material World
Cornell researchers created a DNA material “with the capabilities of metabolism, in addition to self-assembly and organization — three key traits of life.” Next thing you know it’ll be asking for a ride to the high school dance.
Read more about this week’s Coolest Things on Earth here.
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“After a hard day, I remind myself: If breaking a world record was easy, then everybody would do it, right?”
— Lukasz Cejrowski, project director at LM Wind Power
Quote: GE Reports. Image: GE Renewable Energy.
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