With Atlanta, Georgia hoping to become the “Silicon Valley” of the energy sector, state leaders, including Governor Sonny Perdue and Senator Saxby Chambliss converged on GE’s new Smart Grid Technology Center of Excellence to celebrate phase one of its development. The center, which will be completed this fall, will create more than 400 new jobs over three years — with more than 150 employees having been hired in the last six months. As speakers at today’s ceremony made clear, one of the biggest hurdles in building-out the smart grid in the U.S. is explaining just what those two critically important words mean. While the video below does run for a lengthy eight minutes, it nevertheless provides a crystal clear explanation of just why the smart grid is so important. It includes perspectives from a who’s who of grid specialists from Google, IBM, Harvard, University of Colorado, Duke Energy, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Xcel Energy, CNT-Energy, National Grid, Pacific Gas & Electric, American Electric Power, The Economist magazine, and GE Energy. As Jonathan Lash, President of the World Resources Institute, says in the video: “We’re going to have a shift to lower carbon energy. That’s absolutely inevitable. The only question is whether it goes relatively smoothly and we have a managed transition to more renewables and more efficiency or whether we have a somewhat chaotic and unpredictable process.”With Atlanta, Georgia hoping to become the “Silicon Valley” of the energy sector, state leaders, including Governor Sonny Perdue and Senator Saxby Chambliss converged on GE’s new Smart Grid Technology Center of Excellence to celebrate phase one of its development. The center, which will be completed this fall, will create more than 400 new jobs over three years — with more than 150 employees having been hired in the last six months. As speakers at today’s ceremony made clear, one of the biggest hurdles in building-out the smart grid in the U.S. is explaining just what those two critically important words mean. While the video below does run for a lengthy eight minutes, it nevertheless provides a crystal clear explanation of just why the smart grid is so important. It includes perspectives from a who’s who of grid specialists from Google, IBM, Harvard, University of Colorado, Duke Energy, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Xcel Energy, CNT-Energy, National Grid, Pacific Gas & Electric, American Electric Power, The Economist magazine, and GE Energy. As Jonathan Lash, President of the World Resources Institute, says in the video: “We’re going to have a shift to lower carbon energy. That’s absolutely inevitable. The only question is whether it goes relatively smoothly and we have a managed transition to more renewables and more efficiency or whether we have a somewhat chaotic and unpredictable process.”
Commenting on the immense potential that the smart grid has when electric vehicles become the norm, GE Energy’s Mark Dudzinski says in the video: “It turns out that if you plug in at night, you can actually charge about 70 percent of all the cars in the U.S. without building any more power plants, or adding any more transmission or adding any more distribution. And if you could get to that number, you’d reduce the amount of imported oil coming into the U.S. by 60 million barrels a day.”
GE’s new facility will serve as a smart grid customer experience center, a smart grid live testing laboratory and worldwide headquarters of GE’s Digital Energy business. For the new smart grid lab, GE is collaborating with the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), which is one of the nation’s top research universities. The partnership will work to develop and test new smart grid technologies that can help improve the efficiency, reliability and environmental impact of energy transmission, distribution and consumption — from integrating more renewable energy sources, like wind and solar, to lowering the peak power demand that lowers the need for new power plants, to improving the ways consumers manage their power usage.
At today’s event, GE Vice Chairman John Rice credited the state’s leaders for “making it easy to do business in Georgia” and creating a “level playing field” that makes launching a high-tech smart grid center possible. It means “we can compete globally from Cobb County,” he said.
* Read the announcement about the Center of Excellence
* See the findings from our smart grid U.S. survey
* Read about our U.S. survey data compiled last year
* Learn about GE’s smart grid efforts in Florida, Oklahoma and Houston
* Watch GE Reports’ videos about our smart grid research labs
Learn more in these GE Reports stories:
* “Powered by innovation: AEP’s gridSMART project”
* “GE teams with Nissan on electric car smart charging”
* “Smart grid survey: Majority Down Under still wonder”
* “Getting smarter about the smart grid”
* “Switching smart grids from ‘demo’ to ‘deploy’ at WEF”
* “GE’s smart grid: Introducing the “Zero Energy” home”
