At GEreports, we come across interesting numbers every day — from patents applied for (more than 2,500 last year) to how much water would be saved if every U.S. household using a non-Energy Star washer replaced it with a GE front-load washer (9 trillion gallons over 12 years). Sometimes these get overlooked or drowned out by other news.
Seeing green: These wind turbines in The Netherlands are part of the clean energy solutions that make GE the largest supplier of wind turbines in the U.S. and the second largest supplier in the world.
In our new occasional series, By the Numbers, we’ll give one of these standout numbers their proper due. Since today’s St. Patrick’s Day, we’ve picked an appropriately green number: 12,000, which is the number of GE wind turbines installed worldwide. They produce enough electricity to power nearly 5 million U.S. households annually.
In Europe, GE Energy sees 2009 as a year of opportunity. As Victor Abate, vice president for the renewables arm of GE Energy, told Reuters in an interview yesterday: “Last year we announced the introduction of our 2.5 megawatt machine which we think will adapt well in Europe.” As the Reuters story notes, GE’s goal is to increase capacity in Europe in 2009 by 800 MW — which is the size of a nuclear reactor — to 1,000 MW.
“And after that we see continued growth in Europe notably because of the EU’s legislation to source 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources,” Abate added.
* Read the Reuters story.
