Welcome to the Age of Gas: New Report Says Natural Gas Is Becominga "Focal Point" of Global Energy Supply and Demand

A century ago, Edison’s electric light bulb switched off millions of gas lamps illuminating streets, squares and railway stations around the world, and put gas works effectively out of business. But a new GE study titled the Age of Gas says that gas is back and becoming a focal point of global energy supply and demand. “Natural gas… is positioned to rival coal consumption as well as take share from oil on the global stage,” say the study’s authors Peter C. Evans and Michael F. Farina. They write that gas will also increasingly complement wind and other renewable energy sources in power generation.

Evans and Farina say that utilities, global businesses, homes and also trains, trucks and other means of transportation have already embraced natural gas. The analysts expect that gas consumption will grow by more than a third from its current level by 2025. They estimate that international trade in liquefied natural gas (LNG) will increase by 70 percent in this decade alone.

Natural gas will account for 26 percent of primary global energy production by 2025, up from 20 percent in 1990.

The authors point out that natural gas has “significantly lower environmental emissions relative to other fossil fuels.” The "flexibility" of natural gas power plants - they can start up is less that 30 minutes and increase power output at 100 megawatts per minute - can also help utilities incorporate wind and solar power in the grid, which vary with the weather.

The latest flexible combined cycle power plants are reaching thermal efficiencies in excess of 61 percent. That means almost two-thirds of the energy in the natural gas is converted into electricity. The Department of Energy has reportedly likened such efficiency to running a four-minute mile. “The future of gas is not going to be the same as the past,” Evans and Farina write.

In the Middle East, the share of natural gas in power generation already stands at 60 percent. (It is 28 percent in the U.S. and 20 percent in Europe.)

Land-based gas pipelines transport 89 percent of the gas consumed today. They authors say that gas network growth, innovation and new supply options like shale gas are helping create greater gas network density and resilience, and improve economics. “Denser networks contribute to making energy systems more robust and therefore more resilient to disruption and less likely to exhibit extreme price volatility,” they say.

Evans and Farina write that “gas networks, which are often underground, in contrast to road and power grids, can often provide stable service during severe weather events. In this way, gas can contribute broadly to economic resiliency by providing diversification, redundancy, and backup systems.”

The advantages of such distributed power came to light last year during Hurricane Sandy. While large parts of the Northeast were in the dark, a gas turbine located at Princeton University kept the campus lit and warm.

The authors write that innovations like floating LNG technologies and small gas gathering, conversion and transportation systems will also have “dramatic impact” on gas network growth. “The new technologies that help integrate and transform small-scale LNG and CNG [compressed natural gas] systems into ‘virtual pipelines’ will be important to the rapid development of new gas markets like the transportation sector,” they write.

They also believe that the Industrial Internet, which links data from machine sensors to people and software, will bring new tools for monitoring, control and analytics of pipelines, generators and other technology.

“One defining characteristic of networks is that they become more valuable with size as more entities join the network,” Evans and Farina write. “These characteristics facilitate the development of adjacent networks, uncovering hidden opportunities to create value as new links are established.”

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Postcards from Tatooine: Modified GE Jet Engines Give Algeria’s Desert Province Power Lift

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This image shows a typical GE mobile power plant installation. This Algerian plant includes four TM2500 aeroderivative turbines. They can generate more than 70 megawatts of power.
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Workers in the control room are calibrating controls, and testing and checking the equipment.
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Before power reaches consumers, workers need to assemble transformers, put up transmission lines and connect the mobile electricity generators to the grid.
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The Tatooine-like landscape of the M’Sila province in northern Algeria provides the country's Mediterranean coast with a rugged bulwark against the encroaching Sahara desert. Despite the arid conditions (M'Sila is quite close to the original Star Wars set), the province is home to 1 million people who need electricity, especially in the summer when temperatures easily top 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Earlier this year, GE started shipping to the area mobile power plants designed to “fast-track” power production and make sure that locals have enough power to turn on their ACs and meet peak electricity demand. Each of the mobile power plants rides on a trailer and holds a modified jet engine that burns natural gas to generate power. The engines are manufactured by GE workers in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the power plants are assembled for shipping by a GE team in Houston, Texas.

The technology, which GE calls aeroderivatives, serves on all continents, with the exception of Antarctica. GE usually sends the plants to their destination by ship, but they can also fit inside huge AN-124 transport planes for immediate delivery. If gas pipelines, concrete support pads and other infrastructure are already in place, workers can get the plants running in just 60 days.

Algeria’s Société Algérienne de Production de l’Electricité (SPE Spa), an affiliate Algeria’s national electricity and gas company Sonelgaz, has ordered 24 such plants from GE. They will generate a combined 538 megawatts of electricity.

The mobile plants are part of a $2.7 billion power generation technology deal announced last Monday. Taken together, the technology, which includes massive gas turbines for co-generation power plants as well as the aeroderivatives, will supply Algeria with nine gigawatts of electricity.

Connected: GE Software Gives New York City’s Largest Power Plant New Brain

A GE software and hardware upgrade has increased electricity output by 5 percent at TransCanada’s Ravenswood power plant in New York City, enough to power 10,000 New York households. Read the story behind the The Future is Now TV ad.

When Woody Allen declares his love for New York City on a bench under the Queensboro Bridge in the movie Manhattan, another New York mainstay makes a quiet cameo. Looming in the morning dusk just across the East River is the Ravenswood Generating Station, New York’s largest power plant with enough capacity to energize a fifth of the Big Apple.

New Yorkers have been using power generated by Ravenswood’s machinery, which includes a massive GE gas turbine, to meet peak demand during sweltering summer weather for decades. But last year the plant’s owner, TransCanada Corp., decided that it was time to add brains to Ravenswood’s brawn. “We wanted to bring cleaner, more efficient power generation to the marketplace,” says John McWilliams, vice president of energy operations at TransCanada.

Rather than spending hundreds of millions on new equipment, TransCanada used GE’s latest software, control system and combustion hardware to upgrade the existing turbine. Workers connected sensors to software and replaced key turbine parts with new components made from advanced materials developed for GE jet engines. “We were basically able to plug-and-play the latest and greatest technology into our existing unit,” says McWilliams. “GE has helped us find ways to be quite competitive with our infrastructure for much, much less.”

McWilliams says that in the past, control systems regulated power plants by looking at a few discrete data points such as firing temperatures, discharge pressures, the ambient temperature and humidity. “It’s not the best, it’s not the worst, you are in an acceptable range of operations,” McWilliams says. But the new technology, which GE calls “FlexEfficiency Advantage Advanced Gas Path,” is constantly gathering and analyzing data critical to performance of the turbine. A multitude of sensors is checking gas flows, temperatures, pressures, humidity and other variables, and feeds it back into the control system. The system is using the data to fine-tune the turbine to make sure that it is always running at its optimal level. “It’s real time and it’s interactive,” says McWilliams. “As things are changing, the control system is responding and always optimizing the unit.”

McWilliams says that the upgrade gives TransCanada “the flexibility to actually make some decisions on what we want to optimize. We can optimize for fuel efficiency, we can optimize for output, we can optimize for reduction of environmental emissions, or we can balance and see improvements of all three.”

The GE software installed at Ravenswood reaches beyond a single plant. It connects to the industrial Internet, a digital network that links people, data and machines, and taps pools of data generated by the entire GE turbine fleet running the same software. “We have access to the global view of power generation,” says McWilliams. “It allows us to improve or at least benchmark our performance. For example, if a power station in Pittsburgh is having an issue, we are able to quickly assess and analyze whether we are facing the same risks and then make some decisions to eliminate the problem before it occurs.”

McWilliams is quick to point out that the information provides a global perspective that is not specific to any turbine. “I can’t look across the East River at another New York plant and see how they are operating,” he says. “It’s not specific to that plant, it’s specific to that technology. We have service agreements in place, so much of the information is already at GE’s fingertips because they are directly connected to the units and receive the data continuously.”

On the hardware side, GE has supplied Ravenswood with new turbine blades, shrouds, and nozzles using advanced materials like single-crystal alloys and coatings originally developed for jet engines. They allow TransCanada engineers to fire the turbine at hotter temperatures, which make combustion more fuel efficient and power generation more productive.

As a result of the upgrade, Ravenswood is using less fuel to produce the same amount of power, making electricity cheaper and, relatively speaking, cleaner. TransCanada says that the upgrade has increased output by 5 percent. That's enough electricity to power 10,000 New York households. Says Adam Addesso, manager of engineering projects at Ravenswood: “These upgrades displace more expensive megawatts on the system. It’s a win for everybody, and those are rare.”

Desert Water Project Wins Rookie of the Year Award

The Ak-Chin Indian Community in Arizona’s Santa Cruz Valley has a history that stretches back centuries. But these days, the Community is both thriving and strikingly young, with many members under the age of 21. Add to that the presence of a successful casino and an active farming community that tills more than 70 percent of the land within the 22,000-acre tribal boundaries and it’s clear that the water needs of this desert community will only grow.

It was with those pressures in mind that the community turned to GE’s ZeeWeed 500 technology to provide up to 2.25 million gallons of drinking water per day to the community as well as Harrah’s Ak-Chin Casino. The resulting plant won the 2013 Water Project of the Year award from the AZ Water Association, a non-profit organization comprised of 2,700 water and wastewater professionals dedicated to preserving and enhancing Arizona's water environment.

Slaking the Thirst of A Thriving Community: The Ak-Chin Indian Community used GE’s Zeeweed technology in two plants to meet growing water needs.

GE also provided its ZeeWeed technology for the community's nearby membrane bioreactor water reclamation facility, which produces Arizona Class A+ effluent for water reuse and recharge, and won an international and multiple state awards. Both of the plants helped the community support the recent expansion of its casino/hotel and family entertainment center. The Ak-Chin project is one of nearly 1,000 plants worldwide that use GE's ZeeWeed technology to produce superior quality water.

“For what this community has been doing economically, both of these plants have been key in their economic growth and expansion,” says Jayne Long, capital project manager for the Ak-Chin Indian Community.

In addition to driving economic growth, the technology is also helping keep the community’s environmental footprint small. For example, the water from the reclamation plant is reused in the community in a number of different ways, including for irrigation, fire hydrants and sprinklers, in a central cooling plant for the casino, and for watering the grounds. “All the reclaimed water from that facility is going out and being used,” Long says.

The ZeeWeed technology is also notably efficient, allowing the facility to utilize a smaller footprint than conventional plants and keeping energy and chemical usage low.

“Ak-Chin is definitely one of the more progressive communities when it comes to opportunities to re-use water, and to protect and preserve their water resources,” says Dave Sobeck, senior vice president of Carollo Engineers in Phoenix, which designed the two projects. “We enjoyed working with the Community to identify the most cost effective and flexible opportunities to produce high quality water for reuse throughout the area.”

Tell Me What You Eat: Omnivorous Jenbacher Engines Use Whisky Mash, Manure, Old Lunches to Power Farms, Plants and Neighborhoods

What do you do when you run a growing business in a booming country in Africa and Asia but run out of electricity? What if your plant in America or in Germany gets slammed by a big storm or a heat wave and grid goes down? One answer is to build your own power plant.

This solution, which once looked expensive and preposterous, is not far-fetched at all. GE calls a network of small, independent power plants that can power farms, companies and even entire towns distributed power. The workhorse in GE’s distributed power portfolio is a family of Jenbacher gas engines. The engines often work with technology that turns a source of abundant waste including cheese whey, whisky mash, discarded school lunches, and sewage sludge into biogas. The Jenbachers then convert the biogas into electricity. Take a look at our infographic that explains the scope and spread of Jenbacher-powered power plants.

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Supersize Me: GE Takes 3D Printing to Massive Gas Turbines

A new 1-kilowatt 3D laser printer is finishing the GE monogram. (Our video below has the final result.)

Over the last decade, engineers at GE Aviation have been experimenting with a new way to make jet engine parts. Rather than cutting, milling and drilling engine components, they weld together thin layers of powdered metal with a 200-watt laser and build parts from the ground up. Now, other businesses are supersizing 3D printing and pushing the technology into new areas.

GE Power and Water recently acquired a laser printer that is five times as powerful as the GE Aviation machine and can work with two lasers at the same time. “We are learning how to use this technology,” says Jon Schaeffer, senior manager for materials and processing engineering for Power and Water. “We’ve got to spread the word and change the design paradigm that metallurgists, designers and manufacturing teams have had for a long time.”

Schaeffer says that the 3D printer will help speed up innovation and test new ideas and designs faster. “We’ve been able to embed new technologies into our components without the messy manufacturing steps normally required,” he says. “We are cutting out months in the development cycle with this technology.”

The printer’s build area is almost a cubic foot, large enough to print gas turbine parts. “The biggest thing that was holding us back was the size of the chamber,” Schaeffer says. “But the chamber volume has grown 50 times over the last five years. It’s almost like Moore’s law for 3D printing.”

Schaeffer, who started at GE two decades ago in GE Aviation, points to his former colleagues as a model for making advanced technologies work. GE Aviation is already printing nozzles for the next-generation LEAP jet engine. Each nozzle used to made from 18 parts welded together. It is now grown as a single piece that is 25 percent lighter than its predecessor.

David Joyce, president and CEO of GE Aviation, says that the technology liberated his business from the limitations of machining. “It gives the designer a whole different palette of colors to paint with, and truly on a whole new canvas,” Joyce says.

Engineers at Power and Water have already used their new machine to design and print a cooling shroud for GE’s latest gas turbine. “There was a time when we could not test new designs and technologies in new parts because we were not able to make them,” Schaeffer says. “3D printing is pointing engineers in the right direction to see if they’ve got a successful concept. It’s really quite exciting.”

Don’t Sweat It: High-Tech Fabric Takes Climbers to the Top of the World

Climber Januzs Gołąb on top of Gasherbrum I. His red climbing suits was lined with eVent, an innovative GE fabric.

In the 1990s, engineers at BHA Group, an innovative maker of industrial air pollution filters, were experimenting with Teflon membranes for cement kilns and coal-fired boiler chimneys. They noticed that when they stretched the material in the lab into a thin film and applied a special coating, it became both waterproof and breathable. “The process created millions of microscopic pores too small for water droplets to get through, but large enough for vapor to escape,” says Daniel Burch from GE Power & Water, which acquired BHA in 2004.

GE now calls the material eVent fabrics. It has shielded climbers and athletes in the harshest conditions. In March 2012, a pair of Polish mountaineers wearing eVent climbing suits reached the top of Gasherbrum I, a lethal Himalayan peak more than 26,500 feet high. They were the first humans to scale the mountain in the winter, braving temperatures of minus 76 degrees Fahrenheit and winds topping 75 miles per hour. “It was the first time our down suits were dry during the whole climb,” said expedition leader Artur Hajzer. When climber Adam Bielecki melted snow in the death zone at Camp 3 and then spilled the cup by accident on his suit, “what normally would have been a catastrophe simply wasn’t problem at all,” Bielecki said.

Clothing manufacturers have been paying attention. GE just signed a deal to supply eVent fabrics to Dishang Group, China’s largest garment maker and exporter of clothing and textiles. Dishang will set up a special unit making eVent apparel. It will start production by the end of this year. Chad Kelly, GE’s global product manager for eVent fabrics, says that the arrangement will simplify and streamline product development and provide a channel for eVent fabrics to launch new designs more rapidly.

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Janusz Gołąb on the mountain wearing a climbing suit protected by GE’s eVent fabrics
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eVent fabric does not need to get wet to let moisture out. GE calls it "a dry system."
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eVent uses a proprietary technology that coats the ePTFE membrane but does not cover the pores.
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Other manufacturers use stretched Teflon, the proper name is expanded polytetrofluoroethylene (ePTFE), to make waterproof fabrics. They typically protect the ePTFE film from from oils, sweat, sunscreen and other sticky residue with a polyurethane coat and sandwich it between a tough outside waterproof layer and a soft inside lining. But the polyurethane layer effectively blocks the ePFTE pores and traps sweat inside the garment until body heat pushes it through.

Garments made from eVent fabrics, however, do not use this polyurethane shield. GE engineers developed a technology that covers the ePFTE membrane with a special proprietary coating that protects the layers and keeps the tiny pores open. “Because eVent doesn’t block those pores, sweat immediately escapes and you stay cooler and dryer,” GE’s Burch says. “We say that eVent let’s the sweat out. We call it the dry system.”

Talking Trash: One Man’s Garbage, Another Man’s Megawatts

Parts of continental Europe can’t get enough of it. Norwegians are begging their neighbors for more. They’ve even considered shipping it from the U.S.

What they want is garbage, simple household trash and solid town waste. From Sweden to Spain, innovative power producers have learned to make electricity from waste. The movement is now spreading west and picking up steam in the United Kingdom and the U.S.

Green Waste Energy (GWE), for example, will soon hitch its innovative waste-to-gas technology to powerful GE gas engines from the Jenbacher family. They will power a new electricity plant in Theddingworth in central England and similar projects may soon move ahead in other parts of the world.

Got Garbage?: GE and Green Waste Energy developed technology that turns household trash into electricity.

GWE calls the garbage-gulping technology Advanced Recycling and Energy Conversion. One plant can take 1,000 tons of household trash per day, about 8 percent of what New Yorkers generate daily, and turn it into 600 megawatts of electricity. That's enough to power 24,000 U.S. homes.

Unlike the European incinerators, however, GWE’s technology does not burn the garbage. James Burchetta, the CEO and founder of GWE, says that the process starts with the unsorted, or “black bag,” garbage being fed into a pressure cooker called an autoclave in batches of 29 tons. Workers sort out the recyclables and turn the remaining cellulose-based feedstock into synthetic gas, or syngas, through a process called pyrolysis. “We not only meet the UK and EU [environmental] standards, we eat them for lunch,” Burchetta says.

Syngas has high energy content and burns efficiently in the sturdy Jenbacher J620 engines. “GE gas engines are known worldwide as the leaders in syngas engines,” says Richard Bingham, the chief technology officer of Prestige Thermal Equipment, which developed the garbage-gasification process and licenses the technology through a joint venture with GWE. “We’re not going to take our technology that we’re proud of and put it at risk by using it with another engine.”

GWE is now in talks to build similar facilities around the world. “The world is looking for an advanced thermal conversion technology,” Burchetta says.

Here's to making garbage a hot commodity.

Ich Bin Ein Jenbacher: Massive Gas Engine to Help Germany Power Through Energy Transition

Europe’s beating industrial heart, Germany, will lose as much as fifth of its lifeblood electricity over the next decade as the country pulls the plug on nuclear reactors. A process called Energiewende will replace nuclear power with a combination of electricity from natural gas and renewables.



The idea is simple, but not the execution. Nuclear plants feed the electrical grid with crucial “base load power,” the minimum amount of electricity that must flow through the grid for the country to run. Unlike wind or solar electricity, which ebb and flow with the whims of the weather, base load power must remain reliable and always on. “Germany has to make up for all that base load power generation,” says Scott Nolen, product line leader for power generating gas engines at GE Power & Water. “The country also has very high targets for renewable power. But we’ve built a new engine that can take care of both.”

Nolen is talking about a new J920 FleXtra gas engine from GE's Jenbacher line. It is the largest and most-efficient engine GE has ever built. At 9.5 megawatts, the engine, which is part of GE's ecomagination portfolio, generates more than twice as much power as other GE Jenbacher gas engines. It converts nearly half of the energy from burning gas to electricity (48.7 percent), another company record, and can supply customers with heat and hot water. The engine’s combined power and thermal efficiency can reach as high as 90 percent. “This is the first blank-sheet-of-paper engine design that GE’s Jenbacher business has done in a long time,” Nolen says. “This is not a scaled up engine, this is not an improvement on an engine. This is the most efficient simple cycle engine in GE’s portfolio.”

Nolen says that the new engine is “a great power generation innovation” because it can start up and shut down quickly, and allow utilities to meet the challenges that renewables, with their power fluctuations, impose on the grid. (Energiewende set renewable energy targets at whopping 60 percent of Germany’s total electricity needs by 2050.) “Let me tell you, living in Germany, the sun isn’t out all the time,” Nolen says. “With this engine, you can really have that flexibility, to be able to start up, meet the demand and then shut down quickly without wasting a lot of fuel when the sun does come out.”

Nolen says that clusters of the new engines could generate over 100 megawatts of power and still retain their high efficiency. “This is why distributed power is so attractive,” he says. “You have the capability to supply the engines all over the place where people need heat and power and get maximum efficiency out of every precious hydrocarbon molecule you have to burn.”

In Europe, the new engine will sit at the core of a municipal power plant in the Bavarian town of Rosenheim, population 61,000. The engine, in combination with four smaller Jenbacher engines and a waste incineration plant, will supply Rosenheim burghers and businesses with 40 percent of their electricity needs and a fifth of their heat. “The energy transition plant Energiewende can be achieved only if there is a cooperative effort, including contributions by municipal providers,” says Marcel Huber, Bavarian minister of state for environment and health.

But the engine has applications around the world. GE engineers designed a special two-stage turbocharger for the engine, similar to what you might find in Formula 1 race cars. It uses exhaust gas to compress the air flowing inside the engine and achieve the maximum power. One benefit of the design is that the engine can work efficiently in higher altitudes where the air is thinner, like in Mexico City. “A gas engine in Mexico City would be able to put out close to 90 percent of its rated power,” Nolen says.

Besides locations like Mexico, where it can be used to “firm up” the grid when base load starts to sag, the engine will have applications in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where even people in cities often lack power. “They can use these engines in a distributed fashion to supply the grid, or operate in an island mode when there’s no grid.”

From Energiewende to energy for the world, the new engine will help keep the power on.

Going Dutch: GE Starts Testing Giant “Intelligent” Wind Turbine in the Netherlands

Wieringermeer is why the Dutch call their country the Netherlands. The area sits on a polder of reclaimed coastal flatland 13 feet below the sea level, sheltered by a series of dikes keeping out the cold, grey swells of the North Sea. The tallest hill in Wieringermeer is a terp, a modest man-made mound built by locals as a refuge during flooding. (Storms and, in 1945, German bombs have repeatedly breached the dikes and briefly turned the farmland into sea again.) That terp, however, now has a tall new neighbor.

GE has erected nearby one the world’s largest and most efficient high-output wind turbines. GE says that the turbine, which the company calls 2.5-120 (that’s for 2.5 megawatts in output and 120 meters (395 feet) in rotor diameter, is 25 percent more efficient and generates 15 percent more electricity than comparable GE models.

The turbine performs so well because of its size, but also because of the way it works with data.

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Size obviously matters. The rotor is so large that the wind whips the blade tips at different speeds when one is 650 feet high and another 25 stories below. This could be a problem, but GE engineers found a way to alter the pitch of the blades as they spin. “Think about it like sails on a sailboat,” says Vic Abate, vice president of GE’s renewable energy business. “The fuel is free and you take this fuel and you concentrate it so that machine can produce more power more often.” This comes handy when the wind is not blowing so much.

But the turbine is not just big, it’s also got brains. Dozens of sensors inside the rotor, the generator, and on the blades gather tens of thousands of data points every second, and feed them to powerful algorithms for analysis.

GE’s Industrial Internet software can bring the entire wind farm together and make the turbines signal to each other like a flock of birds. They can even talk to other wind farms, compare data about wind speeds and wind direction, and store excess power in batteries to cover spikes in demand. “With this technology you are able to say to a utility, I am going to give you 70 megawatts over the next 15 minutes and with 99 percent accuracy,” Abate says.

The site where GE is testing the new turbine is operated by ECN, a Dutch independent research institute for renewable energy. GE expects to complete the testing in the fall of 2013.

The Machines Are Talking: New O’Reilly Report Says the Industrial Internet Turns Machines into Vast, Intelligent Systems, Boosts Efficiency and Innovation

A new generation of jet engines, locomotives, MRIs and other big machines loaded with sensors generating gigabytes of data and linked in networks will become more efficient to operate, easier to deploy, and more accessible to innovators, according a new report on the industrial internet published by O’Reilly Media and sponsored by GE. “The barriers between software and the physical world are falling,” the report says. “It’s becoming easier to connect big machines to networks, to harvest data from them, and control them remotely.”

The report points out that “the same changes in software and networks that brought about decades of Silicon Valley innovation are now reordering the machines around us.” It says that new, web-like software interfaces can manage the underlying complexity of machine data, “making it possible for innovators without specialized training to contribute improvements to the way the physical world works.”

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The Power of One Percent: Networks of "brilliant iron," like this aeroderivative gas turbine, could save power companies $66 billion over the next 15 years by cutting fuel use by just 1 percent.
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The GEnx jet engine can collect and analyze 5,000 data points every second, detect problems, and optimize performance.
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Speeding up trains by just 1 mph could save a railroad $200 million in annual capital and operating expenses.
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Two years ago, GE tapped Silicon Valley talent and opened a $1 billion research center in San Ramon in the Bay Area. Engineers at the center are writing code to harvest data from GE machines, build machine networks, and turn big iron like turbines and locomotives into brilliant iron. “Any machine that registers state data can become a valuable sensor when it’s connected to a network, regardless of whether it’s built for the express purpose of logging data,” the reports says. “Once a system of machines is brought together on a network, it’s easy to add new types of intelligence to the system, and to encompass more machines as the scope of optimization expands.”

One such network profiled in the report is the grid. Dennis Sumner, senior electrical engineer at Fort Collins Utilities in Colorado told O’Reilly that a $36 million investment in advanced electricity meters could pay off in 11 years just from operational savings. But since the meters can read electricity usage every 15 minutes, a 2,880-fold increase compared to human meter-readers, they also provide the utility with tremendous resolution and tools to detect outages immediately. “Previously, we didn’t know what was going on at the customer level,” Sumner said. “Imagine trying to operate a highway system if all you have are monthly traffic readings for a few spots on the road.”

Utilities blending power from traditional generation with renewables need to know how much wind electricity they can count on and when. Many wind turbines are already packed with sensors and can talk to each other like a flock of birds. “We have advanced forecasting algorithms that give us power output predictions based on the data they are receiving,” says Vic Abate, vice president of GE’s renewable energy business. “With this technology you are able to say, I am going to give you 70 megawatts over the next 15 minutes and with 99 percent accuracy.” Customers like Boston’s First Wind have already signed up for such technology.

Norfolk Southern is using GE’s Trip Optimizer software as “a kind of autopilot for locomotives,” and Movement Planner software as an “advisor and controller.” Deborah Butler, Norfolk Southern’s chief information officer, told O’Reilly that her railroad has seen a 6.3 percent reduction in fuel usage and 10 to 20 percent increases in velocity from the software.

This is just the start. Besides crunching data from locomotives and signals, Norfolk Southern has used helicopters to map its rail network. “We know where every tree is growing beside the track,” she said. “We aren’t even beginning to use that data in the way we could.”

The full report is available online.

It’s a Small World: GE, Google Maps to Draw a Roadmap for a Better Power Grid

Last month, yet another massive storm gathered over the Northeast, dumped several feet of snow from Connecticut to Maine, and plunged thousands of locals into freezing darkness. Although we can’t yet engineer weather, we can use software engineering to soften its blows.

Internet companies like Google have long known that the value of their networks grows in proportion to the number of their users. This is called Metcalfe’s law. The same logic applies to industrial networks like power grids. The combination of the Internet and infrastructure could now yield billions in savings for utilities and better service for their customers.

Last week GE, which knows a lot about infrastructure, announced that it would feed data from Google Maps to a suite of GE software applications designed to manage power grids, water systems, gas pipelines, telecoms and other industrial networks. The apps suite, called Smallworld, helps customers visualize their network assets, detect vulnerable spots, and cut response times when storms like Nemo strike.

#IndustrialInternet: This screenshot from Smallworld shows an underground medium voltage cable (blue line), meters in homes, a substation, and other connected hardware.

The power grid is a good example of how Smallworld works. GE says that apps tap Google’s rich mapping data environment (Google Maps has 1 billion monthly users), and help utility maintenance teams pinpoint and fix problems before they escalate, and respond to and repair outages faster. GE’s intelligent power management systems like Grid IQ Insight already gather data from smart meters in homes, sensors in transformers, a NASA satellite, and even Twitter to predict and prevent power outages. The Google-powered Smallworld world will provide extra context.

Ordinary consumers can benefit too. Bryan Friehauf, a software products leader from GE Digital Energy, told Wired that utilities could color code outage maps based on estimated repair times and share them with the public. “You’ll know whether to sit tight, or to start looking for a hotel to spend the night,” Friehauf told the magazine.

GE estimates that Industrial Internet tools like Grid IQ and Smallworld could save customers tens of billions by improving performance of their assets by just 1 percent. The Industrial Internet is a global network connecting people, machines, and data.GE is investing $1 billion in Industrial Internet applications.

The beauty of Smallworld is that the apps work with existing network hardware. “Utilities do not need to purchase dedicated equipment to implement the software,” Friehauf says. Field operators can pull up Smallworld on their smartphones. GE will use Google’s Android platform to power the apps.

Smallworld matters for another reason. The global demand for electricity may grow by as much as 70 percent by 2035, yet few countries are ready to spend many billions of dollars to upgrade their infrastructure. This means that the grid must get more efficient to cope. The Industrial Internet and tools like Grid IQ and Smallworld are helping today’s technology to deal with tomorrow’s demands.

A Light in the Dark: GE Turbine Helps Power Cogeneration Plant at Princeton through Blackout

Hurricane Sandy’s winds uprooted lives and wiped out power lines from Delaware to Massachusetts, breaking branches, knocking down trees, and driving a devastating ocean surge. In New Jersey, which took the brunt of the storm’s fury and saw the largest blackout of all the states impacted, more than 2.6 million outages to homes and businesses were reported.

In the heart of this widespread darkness, though, there was an area where the lights stayed on. The Princeton University cogeneration plant kicked into action when the electricity from the local power grid went out.

The Princeton plant is using a GE “aeroderivative” turbine (it has a modified supersonic fighter jet engine inside.) It began operating in 1996 and on a normal day it is supplying all the steam and half of the electricity to the university community of approximately 12,000 people. (The other half still comes from PSE&G, the local utility.)

Fighter Power: GE's LM1600 aeroderivative gas turbine is based on technology developed for the F404 supersonic fighter jet engine (above). These engines power some 4,000 F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets.

During the storm, when the utility stopped transmitting electricity to the substation that regularly powers the campus, the Princeton plant’s three-person crew sprang into action. They stepped up the facility’s electrical generation and shut down power to a small number of lower-use areas like administrative spaces.

While hundreds of campus maintenance workers were repairing storm damage, three shifts of plant personnel worked through the storm and its aftermath, keeping the electricity flowing throughout the campus while much of the surrounding community remained without power because they had to rely on local utility companies.

"We originally built the cogeneration plant to reduce campus energy bills and provide reliable utilities,” says Ted Borer, energy plant manager at Princeton. “Its ability to serve the campus in 'island' mode made all the difference during the hurricane.”

At the heart of the cogeneration plant is a GE aeroderivative LM1600 gas turbine. Think of the turbine and others in its family as jet engines afraid of heights. GE engineers have built upon the company’s aviation roots and modified the jet engine technology to generate electricity. Instead of pushing a plane, the gas turbine spins a shaft that is attached to a generator. That unit produces the electricity.

But before the hot exhaust can escape, it is marshaled to do more work—heating water to produce steam for the campus’s heating and air conditioning systems.

Plant personnel worked without leaving campus for 56 hours during and after Sandy, according to a report from campus news. They rotated between operating the system, ensuring the campus load didn't exceed capacity, conducting maintenance to prevent problems and sleeping when they could.

By that Wednesday night, two days after Sandy struck, PSE&G had electricity flowing to Princeton again and the next morning saw power fully restored to the campus.

Can You Knit a Wind Turbine?: GE Wind Turbine Blades Made From Fabric Aim To Revolutionize Renewable Energy

Contrary to popular belief, taking a piano to a fourth-story walk up apartment in New York City may not be the toughest moving job. Consider the wind turbine. The stiff fiberglass blades of the largest turbines span half the length of a football field. Moving them from the factory to the wind farm requires custom cranes, oversize rigs, hours of careful route and traffic planning, and expert drivers to execute precarious turns. What if you could do away with all that and also eliminate the million-dollar molds used to make them for good measure?

Blowing in the Wind: A section of a wind blade depicting a new manufacturing concept that covers the blade with a "tensioned" fabric. This new approach could significantly reduce production costs.

Scientists at GE Global Research, Virginia Tech, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have started working on a new blade design using fabric wrapped around a skeleton of metal ribs resembling a fishbone. GE estimates that that the new design could revolutionize the way wind blades are designed, made, and installed, cut blade costs by 25 to 40 percent. “We are weaving an advanced wind blade that could be our clean energy future,” says Wendy Lin, a GE engineer and leader of the three-year project, which the government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) is backing with $5.6 million. “The fabric we are developing will be tough, flexible, and easier to assemble and maintain” than fiberglass, Lin says.

The use of fabrics as a tool to lower weight is not a new idea. Aircraft manufacturers used them to cover the wings of fighter planes in World War I. GE already makes rugged fabrics for wind protection and architectural design.

But Lin says that the new high-tech fabrics, which are based on fiberglass, will help spur the development of larger, lighter turbines that can capture more wind at lower wind speeds. Current technology makes it hard to produce turbines that have rotor diameters exceeding 120 meters (nearly 400 feet) because of design, manufacturing, assembly, and transportation constraints. GE’s new fabric-based technology would all eliminate these barriers.

Experts estimate that in order for the U.S. to generate 20 percent of electricity wind, the currently installed wind blade area would have to grow by 50 percent. Fabric blades can make this possible. “Developing larger wind blades is the key to expanding wind energy into areas we wouldn’t think of today as suitable for harvesting wind power,” Lin says. “Tapping into moderate wind speed markets, in places like the Midwest, will only help grow the industry in the years to come.”

Hybrids of the High Seas: Electric Hybrid Ships Cut Millions from Navy’s Fuel Bill

When the U.S. Navy’s USS Makin Island leaves base, it does not steam across the ocean. It motors. The amphibious assault ship, commissioned in 2009, is the Navy’s first hybrid ship. “It’s like a floating Prius, but much bigger,” says Paul English, a marine leader in GE’s Power Conversion business. “If you consider a hybrid car, it makes sense to run the gas engine on the highway and switch to an electric motor in stop-and-go traffic. It’s the same on the ocean.”

In the Navy: Sailors and Marines with the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit scrub down the flight deck of the amphibious assault ship USS Makin Island. The ship is the Navy’s first vessel powered by hybrid propulsion.

GE gave the Makin Island a new system using a combination of two advanced gas turbines for high-speed sailing (they use the same jet engine technology that powers Air Force One and many Boeing 747 jumbos) and a pair of 10,000-horse-power electric motors that kick in when the vessel slows down below 12 knots. The motors draw power from six diesel generators. “Most ships spend the overwhelming majority of their working life doing something other than rushing from one place to another at top speed,” English says. “In fact, for about 70 percent of their operational life, ships tend to kind of hang around, deploy troops and aircraft, or support marines on the ground.”

English says that when a typical gas turbine falls well below maximum output, it becomes “tremendously inefficient, burning fuel just to turn over.” The GE propulsion system solves the problem and saves millions in fuel costs along the way. The Navy estimates that hybrid propulsion will save $250 million in fuel over the life of the ship. “If you work that up over a fleet of ships, you’ll see that something big is going on,” English says.

The 800-foot long USS Makin Island, which can carry close to 100 helicopters and 3,000 sailors and marines, saved the Navy more than 4 million gallons of fuel worth $15 million during its first 7-month deployment. GE has already received orders for two more hybrid ships, including one for the Navy’s latest large-deck amphibious assault ship, USS Tripoli, announced this week.

Says English: “It’s astonishing, it’s big time, it’s kind of catching on.”

Like Salt in the Wound: Dealing with Sandy’s Salt Water Menace

Hurricane Sandy has cut power to six million homes across the northeast of the U.S. on Monday night, breaking trees and ripping power lines. But also insidious was the surging sea that knocked out electricity across New York City and in many seaside towns. Consolidated Edison had preventively shut down the grid in neighborhoods prone to flooding, but the utility still experienced “the largest storm related outage in our history.”

That’s in part because of Sandy's salty surge. “You can’t just pump the sea water out,” says John McDonald, director of technical strategy and policy development at GE Digital Energy. “Dry salt is an electrical conductor. When it covers insulators, the material that prevents the flow of electricity in transformers, switches, and other equipment, it can make electricity flash over and cause a short circuit. It’s also corrosive.” As a result, utility crews in Manhattan and elsewhere have to first pump out Sandy’s brackish tide, spray the equipment thoroughly with fresh water, and dry it with powerful fans, before they can turn the power back on. The same is true for the city’s submerged subway tunnels.

Water World: The Hugh L. Carey Tunnel, formerly known as the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, connects Wall Street with Brooklyn. It remains filled with Sandy's surge.

Cleanup can be tedious work, especially when salt water seeps through air vents inside transformers and other machinery. “When the equipment is all washed and completely dry, only then you can energize it step by step, test the functions and make sure that it still works,” McDonald says. “The crews do it by experience.”

That's something that McDonald does not lack. He’s is one of GE’s experts on the so called smart grid. He says that during bad storms like Hurricane Sandy, the smart grid, which is a network of smart meters, sensors, and other “intelligent” devices and systems, can quickly detect and isolate the biggest problems so that they do not cascade and cause a blackout. “You restore service to customers on the healthy sections of the system and focus the repair crews on the part of the system that had the disturbance,” McDonald says.

McDonald says that smart meters are an effective tool for scoping out the size of a power outage. “If you have smart meters at homes, you know specifically which customers are without electricity,” he says. A utility can mash the smart meter data with information from a distribution management system, an outage management system, and the geographic information system that includes digitized network maps and facility data. These maps include the geographical coordinates of all the switches, poles, meters and other assets that the utility owns. “The integration of these systems shows you the present state of each asset, whether it’s energized or de-energized, under maintenance or out of service,” McDonald says. “As repair crews work, they know exactly what’s being done, they know exactly how many customers are being affected in each area and whether the problem is a pole that is down, or a transformer that is out of service because of water problems.”

McDonald says that the smart grid also helps utilities “figure out which customers should be restored first, it helps you to prioritize, and verify that customers have had their power restored.”

It also helps power companies and their customers stay in touch, which is key during chaotic storms like Sandy. “With a smart meter in their homes, and with the other intelligent devices and systems, you can let the customer know that we know that there is a problem, that we have a crew on the way or already on site, and that we expect to have power restored in a certain number of hours,” McDonald says. “That’s important.” It may not turn the power on right away, but it brings customers peace of mind.