At the European headquarters of GE, the global engineering powerhouse, there are many irons in the fire. Scientists ponder ways to get more out of renewable energies like solar; how to make components lighter and more energy efficient; and experiment with techniques to feed electricity to subsea oil compressors that are busy extracting hydrocarbons from hard-to-reach deposits.
When it comes to the future, which will no doubt be rich in major discoveries of new energy resources - and of abrupt depletion rates, there is clearly a need to hedge bets. If the shale oil and gas boom in the US has taught those in the energy game anything, it is that forecasts can be quickly confounded.
“[We’re] in all the [energy] businesses where there’s actual demand in the world right now,” said Carlos Härtel, managing director of GE’s R&D Laboratory in Garching, near Munich. “We’re in gas, coal and nuclear to some extent, and big in renewables.”
But what about tomorrow? It is not clear where the next technology breakthrough is going to come from. Härtel, who took the helm at GE’s European research facility in 2007, has a plea to make to policymakers. “If you want [new technologies] to go out on the market, you have to make it profitable for those who invest in development and deployment. Otherwise they’re going to sit in the lab,” he said.
There should be no illusion that there is a cheap, alternative form of energy lying in wait somewhere. Advancing nascent technologies to the point of cost-efficiency might be too much of a slow-burner for many politicians, but it can never be an automatic process, said Härtel, who before GE held positions as a scientist and manager in gas turbine development at Alstom AG and as university lecturer at ETH Zurich.
Learning curve
The wind industry is his case in point. Investment in turbines and the development of wind energy over the last 20 years was not a smooth, straight line. “What comes out of the lab is an option that has to prove itself in practice and go through the learning curve and scale effect that takes the cost out,” he said.
“So the longer we hold back and say ‘ah the lab guys are going to find a much cheaper way of doing it’, the longer we wait for deployment and future benefits,” Härtel said.
“The changes you’ve seen in the last 20 years in the energy arena – a lot of that has been driven by new technologies. There’s a lot of people out there with smart ideas; if the environment is right we’re going to get there,” he added.
In 2010, GE added a global research centre in Brazil, its fifth such centre in the world. Others are in India, China and the US. Together, these facilities employ almost 3,000.
The GE lab in Garching is so successful it has run out of room. Already home to 200 researchers and a further 70 students and other staff, the centre is about to increase its capacity to almost 450 scientists and researchers.
GE research factsheet here
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