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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.

Hello, Hydrogen

GE Digital’s thousands of customers are among the best-known brands in the world, including Procter & Gamble, Subaru, Qantas and Southern California Edison. In each case, GE Digital’s teams are helping to transform and speed up how those companies use data to help their operations — call it the industrial internet. Now GE Digital has a new leader: Scott Reese, an executive at Autodesk, will become chief executive officer effective Feb. 22. He replaces Patrick Byrne, who will continue at GE as chief executive officer for the Onshore Wind business at GE Renewable Energy.