General Electric : The GE Brief – April 18, 2019

April 18, 2019

What in the world is going on in seat 56F? An analysis commissioned by Qantas Airways found that passengers in that seat, on the Australian carrier's nonstop Perth-London route, watched 9,134 hours of in-flight entertainment in a year: some 100 hours more than any other seat. It's just one stat collected by Qantas to celebrate its first full year of nonstop service between Australia and the U.K., on a flight path called the Kangaroo Route. But passengers have found a reason to be cheerful all year long: In all, they've knocked back 367,000 glasses of wine (including 77,000 flutes of bubbly) and put away 42,000 Tim Tams, the delectable chocolate Aussie biscuits. They've done so on Qantas' fleet of Boeing 787 Dreamliner jets, powered by GEnx jet engines built by GE Aviation.

Data from the clouds: 'This is the flight that Qantas has essentially waited most of its 98 years to take,' CEO Alan Joyce said on March 24, 2018, when a Dreamliner, for the first time, took off from Perth for nonstop service to Heathrow. That flight took 17 hours and 20 minutes, and the airline has since been able to shave a little time off both the outbound and inbound routes: The faster return flight, for instance, takes an average of 16 hours and 5 minutes. The stretching classes Qantas offers inside its lounge at Perth help passengers get ready for what's still a bit of a haul - and the Guinness beef pie with potato mash, a popular dish from the airplane galley, offers an enjoyable way to pass the onboard time, too. Happy customers mean a happy airline, Joyce said: 'It's the longest flight on our entire network but it has the highest level of customer satisfaction.'

But back to seat 56F. Whoever is sitting there, they might be watching 'Mission: Impossible - Fallout,' the most popular film on the Kangaroo Route. What other data did Qantas glean from its first year of nonstop trips to London? Learn more here.

Israel Electric Corp., the country's largest power producer, announced plans on Tuesday to replace two aging coal-fired plants with a pair of combined-cycle power plants that use GE's most advanced gas turbines, as well as other technology from the company. Yuval Steinitz, Israel's minister of energy, said the agreement is an 'important step' in reducing the country's reliance on coal and replacing it with gas and renewables. Israel sits on a narrow strip of land between sea and desert, after all - and has been raising an alarm about climate change. Rising sea levels and more frequent droughts, floods, storms and other extreme weather events 'threaten to have a major effect' on the country's water, agriculture, public health and other sectors, according to the Israel Ministry of Environmental Protection. When the first plant comes online in 2022, it will be Israel's largest and most efficient gas power plant.

Beating back the tide: The beating hearts of the new plants will be GE's 9HA heavy-duty gas turbines, the same model operating inside the world's most efficient combined-cycle power plant in its category. (The plant produces alternating current that oscillates at 50 Hz per second.) GE's HA gas turbines have accumulated more than 270,000 operating hours since their launch in 2016, and the company has received more than 85 orders from over 35 customers in 16-plus countries including the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Taiwan. 'By investing in state-of-the-art technology to transform its infrastructure, IEC will ensure that power is more reliably and sustainably delivered to its customers in Israel,' said Scott Strazik, president and CEO of GE's proposed Gas Power division.

A combined-cycle plant is one that harvests heat from gas turbines to power a steam turbine - and squeeze out every last drop of electricity. Learn more here about this record-breaking technology.

For a while, sustainability experts have been wondering when we'll hit one particularly meaningful green tipping point: when the upfront cost of an electric vehicle (EV) will be lower than that of a car with a gas combustion engine. In 2017, the research organization Bloomberg NEF projected that day would come in 2026. But just as the pace of climate change is accelerating, so is the pace of technology being developed to combat it, and recently BNEF revised its projections. Thanks to batteries becoming cheaper, the organization now expects that we'll hit the EV tipping point in just three years, in 2022. It'll show up in Europe first, starting with large vehicles, before spreading around the world and trickling down into smaller models. That's great news, not just for the environment but for car buyers as well: With price out of the way, electric cars will be able to be purchased according to much more fun metrics - like the driver's preference.

Driving in style: What's driving this trend is the plummeting cost of batteries, which accounted for more than 57% of the total cost of a midsize electric car in the U.S. as recently as 2015, Bloomberg analyst Nathaniel Bullard reports. This year it's 33% and expected to drop to 20% by 2025. Cheaper energy storage technology will be a boon to the transportation sector as it transitions away from fossil fuels, but that's not the only place an affordable battery will come in handy - as GE Renewable Energy's Vera Silva told GE Reports, cheaper energy storage, in concert with green sources like wind and solar, could create a 'whole new ecosystem' on the power grid.

Learn more here about the future of the 'EV revolution,' and more here about how Silva and GE are preparing the electric grid for the 21st century.

A prototype of one of the largest, most powerful wind turbines in the world is finally up and running.

Posted by GE on Wednesday, April 17, 2019

- QUOTE OF THE DAY -

'Above the efficiency and the optimal use of the new units, due to the use of natural gas, the air will be much cleaner.'

- Yiftah Ron-Tal, director of Israel Electric Corp.

Quote: GE Reports. Image: Qantas.

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