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As an electrical engineering major at Howard University in the 1980s, Colin Parris received a tricky assignment: Build a small burglar alarm that would turn on a light when a switch was opened. He painstakingly assembled a board with 300 wires, reattaching them every time they got jiggled out of place in his locker. He estimates the project took 40 to 50 hours.

Then Parris was asked to use an 8-bit microprocessor to complete the same assignment. With 10 wires connected to LED lights and a small amount of programming, he built his second burglar alarm in about three hours.

On an average winter day in Ukraine, temperatures barely creep above freezing. Millions of residents, driven from their homes since war broke out nearly a year ago, huddle against the cold in makeshift shelters and bombed-out buildings. Millions more brace for the blackouts that have become routine since Russian forces began targeting power utilities in October.

Many of the world’s policymakers and major utilities who attended the 27th United Nations Climate Change conference in Egypt last month heard about GE’s LM6000 aeroderivative turbine. GE has shipped 1,300 units to date, and the turbine fleet has clocked more than 40 million operating hours worldwide. The easy-to-deploy LM6000, which is derived from a jet engine, is particularly welcomed in developing countries that need a quick boost in grid capacity.

There are about 7,000 GE gas turbines distributed throughout the world. Each one needs regular maintenance — a few weeks every several years in which a power plant is taken offline for service, repairs, and potential upgrades. This involves a great deal of planning to prepare for the outage. It’s meticulous in nature, due to the complexity of the technology and the environment. All this work requires an encyclopedic amount of documentation to support the activities, including technical specs, equipment lists, safety protocols, diagrams, data sheets, and quality control forms.

Natural gas plants are an important part of the energy transition, as one of the tools to support more renewables being added to the grid. But despite the benefits gas offers in terms of reliability and availability, natural gas is a fossil fuel that produces carbon emissions (though much less than coal). GE Gas Power is working on a variety of ways to reduce the carbon emissions of gas-powered power stations. One of them is tantalizing: capture the carbon that’s emitted at the power station.

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity has really taken off in the past decade, with big players like Australia and the United States getting into the game. More than 500 billion cubic meters of LNG were exported globally in 2021, up 44% since 2016, according to the BP Statistical Review. But with fast growth set to continue, there is a growing urgency to reduce the carbon emissions of LNG production facilities.

In the summer of 2021, the New York Power Authority (NYPA) announced that it would be conducting a pilot project to temporarily replace natural gas with a green hydrogen/natural gas blend at its Brentwood Power Station on Long Island, to explore how varying percentages of hydrogen fuel would perform in the power station’s equipment and what the emissions impact would be. According to findings announced in late September, the results so far are very encouraging.

Natural gas seized a big growth opportunity this past decade when coal growth in power systems started to falter. Since 2011, the use of natural gas to produce electricity globally has expanded by an enormous 32%, more than twice the rate of coal growth, according to BP Statistical Review. GE’s most advanced gas turbines produce less than one-third the carbon emissions of coal-fired power plants of the same capacity.