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This is the first story in a series showcasing how software accelerates the energy transition and sustainability for customers across industries.

Colin Parris, the chief technology officer at GE Digital, has spent his career helping companies gather data and find ingenious ways to analyze it and get smarter. He has helped pioneer technologies like digital twins — digital models of real-world machines like jet engines or turbines that can be used to model and predict the outcomes of possible future situations — and “humble AI,” a concept that aims to bring the human and the AI together.

The United States, like many industrialized countries, has pledged to reduce its net carbon emissions, and, like others, the U.S. has been boosting renewables, exploring the use of hydrogen for power generation, switching to natural gas and modernizing its grid. Now the Tennessee Valley Authority plans to add to the mix a powerful new source: small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs, which can be deployed faster than conventional ones and at a lower cost per unit of output.

It’s well accepted that natural gas power plants are an important part of the energy transition in support of more renewables being added to the grid. They can reliably generate hundreds of megawatts of baseload electricity with a relatively low carbon intensity and quickly adjust their output to match changes in demand and in supply from weather-dependent renewable sources like wind and solar farms.

Offshore wind has come to America. Now new research funded by the government and led by GE aims to make it grow.

The northern Appalachian region, covering Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, has helped America tap its energy reservoir over the past 150 years, supplying the country with its first oil and coal. Now the area’s industry is seeking to pivot, lead the country to a lower-carbon future and create new jobs along the way.

Wind power is a fast-growing source of renewable energy, but that doesn’t mean the industry isn’t trying to lower its carbon footprint. One way to do it involves recycling wind turbine blades.

Workers at GE Renewable Energy’s plant in Pensacola, Florida, have a reason to feel good about their work. They make some of the most popular onshore wind turbines on the planet. The GE unit’s 2-megawatt (MW) onshore wind turbines reached a mind-blowing milestone in 2020 — a combined 20 gigawatts of installed capacity in 23 U.S. states and 10 countries. That’s enough to power the equivalent of 12.9 million homes around the world.

The 1980s are back in fashion, according to Harper’s Bazaar, but in some corners of industry, they never left. “Nobody’s wearing big hair and shoulder pads, but it’s all very pencil and paper,” says Jeremiah Smedra, an operations director at FieldCore, GE’s field services company. Smedra is talking about maintenance workers trudging into power plants with thick binders filled with drawings and instructions to make sure outages are performed according to plan.

When GE released its Sustainability Report last June, it made a commitment to becoming carbon neutral in its own operations by 2030, and announced an ambition to be net zero by 2050, including Scope 3 emissions from the use of sold products. GE’s technology and its long innovation tradition are already helping customers find new ways to deal with looming challenges like the energy transition to address climate change. Take a look at our list.

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