Check out our updated map showing all of the locations in the U.S. where GE has announced the creation of jobs, over 10,000 total since 2009.

GE chose Colorado primarily because the location will allow for accelerated speed to market: GE expects the first panels to come off the assembly line in 2012, with commercial availability in the second half of 2013. The factory will be constructed in an existing building in Aurora, where equipment installation will begin in January 2012. Once it reaches full capacity, the new plant will make enough solar panels per year to power 80,000 homes. Colorado is also home to GE Energy’s thin film solar pilot line, where joint technology from GE Global Research and PrimeStar Solar, which GE acquired earlier this year, has been validated and tested.

“We are moving ahead with the first phase of building a global solar business now because of our technology leadership and economics. We remain on track to deliver the most affordable solutions for our customers as we continuously improve this technology,” said Victor Abate, vice president of GE’s Renewable Energy business.

A rendering of the GE/Inovateus Solar carport.

The concept, as installed in Plainville, is holistic and simple: solar panels generate enough energy to offset the power needed to charge—with 6 Level 2 GE DuraStation1 EV charging stations—up to 13 EVs a day with enough juice left over for the parking lot’s overhead lighting. The new partnership will replicate that model, scalable to differing needs, at a variety of sites, from universities to municipal and office buildings to sports complexes. Inovateus will incorporate GE’s EverGold* Solar combiner boxes and safety switches, DuraStation and WattStation EV charging stations and its more traditional electrical distribution panels and switches into the carports.

“This agreement is a fantastic opportunity that will help us bring to market and develop new systems for generating renewable energy,” said T.J. Kanczuzewski, the president of Inovateus.

Yesterday, GE Energy Financial Services (GE EFS), along with Western Australian state-owned power utility Verve Energy and solar company First Solar, announced that the building of the 10-megawatt AC facility is underway and will be fully operational by the middle of next year. Once complete, Greenough will be ten times larger than any other operating solar project in Australia.

First Solar’s 30MW solar plant in New Mexico that will power 9,000 homes and displace more than 45,000 tons of CO2 per year.

Greenough’s clean and affordable solar energy output will displace 25,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions from the Southern Seawater Desalination Plant, near the town of Binningup, the equivalent of taking 5,000 cars off the road. Southern Seawater produces about 50 gigaliters of potable water annually. Its operator, the Water Corporation, will purchase the Greenough power under a 15-year contract.

GE EFS has built a global portfolio of more than $400 million of solar power equity and debt investments in 42 projects, but Greenough is its first renewable energy investment in Australia. In addition to bringing its expertise to a new and growing market and expanding on its portfolio of projects with First Solar, “This project also will support GE’s ecomagination program, in our aim to help customers meet their environmental challenges,” said Jason Willoughby, the Australia business leader for GE EFS.

Released last week, the New York City Solar Map, which calculates the available area for solar on any given building, confirmed that the Big Apple is well-suited for rooftop installations. New York rooftops could accommodate enough solar to meet half the city’s peak energy demand, according to the New York City Solar City Partnership, led by Sustainable CUNY, the map’s creators.

And who better to make the (admittedly steep) up-front investment in solar than the icons and celebrities who call New York home? The Txchnologist ran the addresses of prominent movie stars, athletes, CEOs, politicians, and even an economist, into the Solar Map to see how much solar their homes could take. For some, the limited rooftop space or shading makes an installation impractical. For others, notably JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, the size and location of their building’s rooftops suggest the potential to generate up to 100 kilowatts of clean energy. (A typical single home array is about 5 kW).

Check out the Txchnologist gallery:

Of course, new technologies aren’t much good unless they can be used on a large scale. With this in mind, GE Energy just announced a new investment and licensing deal with eSolar, a California-based company that specializes in tower-based solar technology. The significance of the deal is that it will help GE deploy ISCC to customers worldwide.

ISCC tech (also called the “Sun Tower”) works using a combination of a gas turbine, a steam turbine, generators, and a heat-recovery steam generator. On sunny days, a field of mirrors – called “heliostats” – catches sunlight and sends a concentrated sunbeam to a tower, creating steam. The steam is then fed into the combined-cycle plant, increasing the steam turbine’s power and creating extra megawatts of electricity, all without using any extra natural gas.

In itself, ISCC tech is extremely efficient, but when combined with the Flexefficiency gas turbine, the results are incredible — uniting the two will increase the FlexEfficiency’s fuel efficiency to 70% from 61%. The new agreement will give GE an exclusive license to sell eSolar’s technology and FlexEfficiency as a package deal.

A deal with the first customer, Turkish project developer MetCap Energy Investments, was announced today in Milan, Italy, at Power-Gen Europe 2011. MetCap will build the world’s first Integrated Renewables Combined Cycle (IRCC) Power Plant – what you get when you add ISCC tech to FlexEfficiency tech – a super plant mixing thermal, wind, solar and gas to achieve 69% plant efficiency under the chosen site’s conditions. That’s called a game changer.

Check out our time-lapse video of construction and operation of eSolar’s Sierra SunTower Plant.

* Read about GE Energy’s FlexEfficiency 50 deal with China’s Harbin Energy, announced last week.
* Read about another exciting gas-renewable mash-up in California, where GE Energy will provide eight Ecomagination-certified aeroderivative LMS100 gas turbines – tech that offers benefits similar to FlexEfficiency – that will help integrate renewable power from nearby wind and solar sources into the grid.
* Learn more about the technology.

Today in Plainville, Connecticut, GE unveiled a new solar-powered electric vehicle carport that boasts parking space for 40 vehicles, six Level 2 charging stations and enough power to fully charge 13 electric vehicles per day – making it one of the largest in North America.

CT Governor Dannel Malloy and GE Energy Industrial Solutions CEO Luis Ramirez at the carport ribbon-cutting in Plainville today

It’s by powering the carport with solar energy, though, that GE is doubling down on renewable, clean energy – and helping innovate what is the future of transportation in America.

It’s the same type of bet as the one made last week in Durham, North Carolina, where GE Aviation opened a new seven-acre solar field that will supply a third of the daytime electricity for its facility there. And as the one made by GE Energy in announcing the result of a $500 million R&D investment in Paris yesterday: a more flexible and efficient gas turbine that will make the integration of power from renewables into the grid more seamless by adjusting more quickly to periods of intermittency – for those times when the sun doesn’t shine, and the wind doesn’t blow.

“We are creating something extraordinary in the EV world,” said Luis Ramírez, the CEO of GE Energy Industrial Solutions, at the launch event attended by Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy. “We see any place where you park your car for a time period as a great opportunity for charging infrastructure.”

* Read about GE’s big push to manufacture more efficient solar panels.
* Read about the EV Tour.

The way that natural gas turbines work to support renewable energy in a power grid is simple: when a period of intermittency begins, the gas turbine is capable of firing up quickly to continue supplying power to the system without interruption. In designing the FlexEfficiency 50, GE drew from its jet engine expertise to engineer a plant that can ramp up at twice the rate of today’s industry benchmarks – and just as quickly and efficiently, ramp down again when the renewable sources come back online. That ability to ramp down quickly is what makes the new technology flexible – and when combined with high efficiency, it results in big cost savings and emissions reductions.

Check out the infographic and schematic below to see how the FlexEfficiency 50 works:

With the new tech, a utility will save approximately $2.6 million per year under typical operating conditions, and each plant will cut annual CO2 emissions by more than 12,700 metric tons — equivalent to removing more than 6,000 cars from EU roads. They’ll have annual fuel savings of 6.4 million cubic meters of natural gas, which is equivalent to the annual natural gas consumption of more than 4,000 EU homes.

* Read today’s announcement.
* Watch a webcast from the Paris event at 8 a.m. ET
* Read about GE’s recent big investment in solar energy, the deployment of which will be aided by the new natural gas tech announced today.
* Read about GE’s new wind turbine, the most efficient ever.
* See why FlexEfficiency is part of GE’s ecomagination portfolio.

* Trademark of the General Electric Company

GE recently partnered with the Hawaiian Electric Company and the Hawaiian Natural Energy Institute at the University of Hawaii, with help from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, on the Oahu Wind Integration Study, described in this infographic.

* Read about New York City’s solar energy boom in GE’s new online magazine, The Txchnologist.
* Read about GE’s big investment in new cheaper, more efficient solar technology.
* Watch the latest installment of the GE Show on the Power of the Sun.

As explained in Txchnologist, a new online magazine presented by GE, Solar 2 will mark a sustainable building milestone. It will be a structure that generates every watt of power it needs from a 96-kilowatt (KW) canopy of solar panels, perched like a beetle’s black carapace above its roof. Ground source heat pumps will warm the structure in the winter, and heavily insulated walls will keep hot air out in the summer.

Solar 2, a green energy education center for the nonprofit group Solar One, won’t be built in the Sunbelt or in an off-the-grid national park. Instead, it will occupy a contaminated landfill site on Manhattan’s East River, near some of the most densely packed streets in the world. Solar One is currently raising money to construct the $12 million building, which has qualified for a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum award from the U.S. Green Building Council.

Less than 20 years ago, a “net-zero energy building” building wouldn’t have stood a chance on New York’s mean streets, according to Gregory Kiss of Kiss+Cathcart Architects, the building’s designer.

At the time, buildings outfitted with photovoltaic solar panels — called building integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) — were coming into vogue in California and Northern Europe, but New York developers and homeowners wouldn’t bite. Solar panels were too expensive, there were no financial incentives to installing them, and the approval process was cumbersome. It was, in some circumstances, even illegal to install solar panels on a building and then try to connect to the grid, according to New York energy experts.

Times have changed.

“Now every project [we design] that is highly sustainable is right in New York City,” said Kiss.

In the past five years, solar photovoltaic capacity in the Big Apple has almost quadrupled from about 1.5 megawatts (MW) to 5.7 MW, according to a recent report called New York City’s Solar Energy Future (pdf). The growth rate is accelerating and the city could add another 45 to 70 MW of solar capacity by 2015, according to the New York City Solar America City Partnership.

* Read the full story, “New York, Solar City,” on Txchnologist