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The accolades keep rolling in for Colin Parris. In January, the GE senior vice president and GE Digital chief technology officer won a 2022 BIG Innovation Award from the Business Intelligence Group. In February, he was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineers.

Next week the 197 signatory nations of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will convene in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, for the 27th annual meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP27). It’s the largest gathering of governments, businesses, NGOs, and civil society groups coming together to tackle the climate crisis and push forward on goals to protect the planet.

Every day, the world’s power grids are adapting to bridge the gap between the fossil fuel era and the renewables age. Instrumental in building that bridge are the 700 operators and managers who work at GE’s Grid Solutions Advanced Manufacturing Facility in Clearwater, Florida, and produce thousands of components such as capacitors and power sensors, which help the grid absorb wind and solar generation smoothly and safely.

One day in March, Walid Kodia and his team got an alert about a possible problem in one of the power plants he helps oversee at Tunisia’s state-owned electricity and gas utility, Société Tunisienne de l'Electricité et du Gaz (STEG). Gas turbines, which provide most of the power to STEG, are complicated machines that have an array of sensors to tell their operators when something’s off. This alert came from software running at GE Power’s monitoring and diagnostics center in Atlanta, staffed by engineers and data analysts.

The 150,000 blades spinning away on GE Renewable Energy’s onshore wind turbines might all look the same, but one has a special backstory. It rolled off a production line staffed by women. Every inventory controller, molding technician, and supervisor on the shop floor that made the component was female.

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.

Blessed with hundreds of high Alpine lakes, Switzerland gets nearly 60% of its electricity from hydropower, with another 30% coming from nuclear and the rest mostly from renewable sources. This year, to help meet the expected electricity demand during the winter, the country has turned to GE technology.

On Tuesday at Climate Week NYC, GE Chief Sustainability Officer Roger Martella said that the $369 billion in clean energy and climate provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, signed by President Biden in August, are “a game changer” for GE. By “driving energy innovation and security while addressing climate,” the bill puts the company in a position to deploy technologies and innovate breakthroughs to solve the world’s most pressing climate and sustainability challenges.

For the first time in more than 100 years, the global energy landscape is undergoing a massive transformation. The way we generate, transport, distribute, and consume electricity will change more in the next 10 years than it did in the previous 125. What was once an orderly, monolithic system pushing power out to the people, the electric grid is transforming into a two-way highway of energy from diverse sources — including wind and solar — which present new challenges to grid stability and reliability.