Making good on their nickname, Sunbelt States from Georgia to Arizona are building lots of new solar these days. Texas is currently leading the way, but plenty of other states are cranking up their growth. In the past 12 months, Mississippi has grown solar 73%, and Louisiana has been even more aggressive, hitting 90%, according to the Energy Information Administration.

How does one of the world’s fastest-growing economies keep the lights on while rewiring its future to meet the needs and goals of a net-zero world? This is the question being asked today in Vietnam, a nation at an exciting crossroads, balancing rapid economic growth with the imperative to build a cleaner, more resilient energy system.

Tucked away on Tanzania’s southeastern coast, not far from the border with Mozambique, Mtwara is a region with vast potential. Rich in both onshore and offshore natural gas, it has become central to government plans for long-term economic growth. Yet, until recently, power demand was outpacing the available power supply in the region.

The world’s demand for energy shows no sign of abating.

In 2025, as GE Vernova celebrated one full year as a standalone company, the company took ideas that were only recently on the drafting board and put them into action. From small modular nuclear reactors to advanced grid software to a high-voltage superhighway on the Baltic Sea, a new world of innovations is emerging to electrify and decarbonize the world. Take a look at how 2025 was the year GE Vernova began making the future come alive today.

Earlier this year, GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik wrote that helping to solve the energy challenges of tomorrow depends on the “gritty, never-give-up” hopefulness of its 75,000 employees. “What we’ve learned in our first historic year as GE Vernova is that the best way to do this starts on our factory floors, at the installed base, and in our research centers, all guided by a relentless sense of optimism in our capacity to create and lead positive change.”

Neha Joshi first heard of ANYbotics in 2024, from a colleague who’d just deployed one of the Swiss company’s four-legged robots at a power site in Israel. Little did she realize that the next few weeks of her work life would involve taking data recorded in Israel, testing it in Schenectady, New York, where Joshi is based, and deploying a robot to another site in Ireland to confirm the findings.

This past May, 12 U.S. military veterans joined forces to carry an American flag 3,000 miles from San Diego to Washington, D.C. Team Red, White & Blue completed the Old Glory Ultra Relay in a record time of less than 17 days, raising more than $1 million for the cause of veterans’ health and wellness. One of those dozen men and women was Jordan Buck, an Army vet and steelworker in lean operations at GE Vernova’s manufacturing facility in Schenectady, New York.

Veena P. has learned in her 14 years at GE Vernova that earning patent recognition for her inventions isn’t a matter of waiting for lightning to strike. Instead, the technology manager in electrical systems at GE Vernova’s Advanced Research Center in Bengaluru, India, has developed a systematic process that has helped her successfully register 30 patent applications so far, with more in the works all the time. Her innovations support GE Vernova’s mission to accelerate the energy transition, making power systems more efficient and reliable.

When Kassy Hart was a teenager, she thought the life of an engineer was a bit like a newspaper cartoon she used to read. “You’re just sitting at a desk not talking to anyone, and this boss will yell at you for no reason,” says Hart, who is now a data center and hydrogen commercialization manager at GE Vernova. “That was before I got to design something.”