GE’s “FlexEfficiency 60” Truck Tour, an 18-wheeled tractor trailer containing state-of-the-art displays of future energy technology, rolled into the Salem GE plant last Friday. The tour began in San Francisco on September 26th and has stopped at 25 cities since then in the U. S., Canada, and Mexico.
G. E. Controls Product Marketing spokesman John Plenge travels with the rig and says the purpose of the tour is to introduce the FlexEfficiency portfolio to the marketplace.
“We go to certain cities and we invite our customers, engineering and construction firms, but also our employees. . . This facility, and its engineers and its manufacturing staff played such an important role we wanted to dedicate a day for them where we can kind of share something that our customers have really given us [which is] good, positive feedback.”
The “flex” part of the program means they can operate in different ways, efficiently, and without a change in emissions. One such example is a gas turbine built for a power plant.
“It takes gas, we burn it, and we’re able to take rotating energy that then connects to a generator that makes electricity that goes on the grid. Hot exhaust comes out “and versus throwing that away, we get an opportunity to eke out or extract some more energy. The way we do that is we pass the hot air through a heat exchanger to make steam. Then that steam is directed to a steam turbine where again we have an opportunity to convert some of that thermal energy to mechanical, then to electrical energies and put that on the grid. It’s has a 61 percent efficiency rating.”
Plenge says the turbine is manufactured in North Carolina, “but all the brains – we call it the controls and automation, the central nervous system to operate this – is both designed and manufactured here (in Salem).”
He feels natural gas will be abundant in the future and is part of the world’s “fuel portfolio”.
“This machine is not only efficient in terms of how it converts that energy. In fact, it’s capable of breaking some more records which is that 61 percent total combined cycle efficiency. But the other thing it does is – particularly in the modern smart grid where there’s a lot of renewable penetration – is that it allows other people to add to it, modernizing different parts of it. This system has the ability to react to a grid that has things that are coming and going. It can bridge the gap between solar and wind power. It ensures we have a reliable grid.”
GE already has $1.5 billion worth of orders for the FlexEfficiency 60 gas turbines which will begin shipping out later this year.