New Portland partnership pushes sustainable growth

Environmentally minded Portland, Oregon is already on a pioneering path toward sustainable growth — and that journey got a boost this week when Portland entered into a strategic partnership with GE that will focus on a range of collaborative sustainable development projects. GE will work with Portland as it establishes EcoDistricts throughout the city; increases residential and commercial energy efficiency; and as it completes the groundbreaking Oregon Sustainability Center. That Center, which is described below in a video from their website, will serve as a technology model and as a hub for sustainable practices, policy, education, research and entrepreneurship. The center itself is being designed to achieve triple net-zero performance in energy and water use and carbon emissions — which means that it will generate all of its energy on-site, use only the freshwater that falls on the site and will process all of its wastewater.

The Oregon Sustainability Center project echoes the goals of GE’s work in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi — which aims to be the world’s first carbon-neutral, zero-waste city completely powered by renewable energy. It also has thematic elements in common with GE’s Net Zero Energy Home, which is a plan to use smart technologies in tandem to achieve net zero energy costs.

Likewise, GE’s new agreement with the city of Portland, which takes the form of a “Memorandum of Understanding,” or MoU, is the same type of partnership that GE has forged globally in places such as Rotterdam, which is the second largest city in the Netherlands. In Rotterdam, the alliance with GE focuses on using our ecomagination technologies and solutions in areas such as water management and re-use, energy efficiency, and emissions reduction. The first effort out of the gate in Rotterdam will involve creating a pilot smart grid project.

In Portland, which is the first city in the U.S. to have an MoU in place with GE on sustainable economy efforts, GE will also be engaging with local companies to help them develop and expand into new markets via global product licensing. And, GE will also help explore city finance needs via municipal, state and GE resources. As Portland Mayor Sam Adams and others explain in the video below, which was taken during this week’s signing ceremony, the new agreement is also about creating jobs by using green technologies; attracting clean economy investments into Portland; and using GE’s scale to help distribute some of the clean tech ideas that local businesses and university labs in Portland are producing.

GE’s partnerships in Portland, Abu Dhabi, Rotterdam and elsewhere are designed to leverage GE technologies and areas of expertise and create a coordinated solution on a large scale. It’s then hoped that successes in one city can then be applied to other cities facing similar issues. GE also has projects in France, Italy, Spain and Hungary that are among the first to be awarded “Benchmark of Excellence” status under the European Commission’s sustainable energy technology initiative. A Benchmark of Excellence is an example of world-class sustainable energy technologies in an urban setting.

* Read the Portland MoU announcement
* Learn more about the Oregon Sustainability Center
* Visit Mayor Sam Adam’s website
* Visit our Sustainable Cities website

Learn more in these GE Reports stories:
* “Sustainable cities: Lighting up schools in Hungary”
* “European Alt Energy Summit: Tailoring tech by region”
* “Port of Rotterdam sailing to sustainability on tech wave”
* “GE’s “sustainable cities” road show tours Europe”
* “Google & GE call for home energy info in Copenhagen”