Energy

The annual Super Bowl broadcast must be the one time every year when viewers don’t automatically change the channel during commercials. Who can forget E*Trade’s chimp “wasting $2 million” or Apple’s iconic “1984” spot? Joining brands from Budweiser to Bridgestone, GE will run two ads during the big game on [...]

Five hundred years ago, Florence native Leonardo da Vinci sketched perhaps the world’s first gas turbine. The device, called “chimney jack,” was a pair of curved blades attached to a rod and placed inside a chimney. Hot air rising through the chimney spun the blades and powered a roasting skewer [...]

Don Quixote in his madness tilted at windmills but wind turbines also exhibit their own kind of capricious behavior. In a wind gust they spin away, churning kilowatts of electricity. But in a breeze they turn slowly, eking out a fraction of that output. If you sent such variable power [...]

General Electric reported fourth quarter financial results this morning. One number that jumped out was the staggering size of the company’s backlog: $200 billion in orders and commitments, the largest in GE history.
What are some of the products in high demand? Start with GE Aviation. The world’s largest and most [...]

The National Academy of Engineering named electrification as the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century. Started by Thomas Edison in the 1880s, the U.S. electrical grid is so massive today that the 6 million miles of transmission and distribution lines that link power plants to consumers could span the [...]

In 2011, GE scientists, makers and business leaders created products, provided services and launched research projects that took on a wide range of global challenges. Here is our pick of the top five:
1. Reducing the High Cost of Solar Power: In April, GE announced that its thin film solar panels [...]

Russia’s largest island, Sakhalin, snuggles up to the motherland’s Pacific coastline just north of Japan. The island, about half the size of Florida, has long been known for its dense evergreen forests and wildlife where bears and foxes rub against fur seals and sea lions. But since the collapse of [...]