What Goes Around

General Electric appears to be on a power trip of late. First, there's its emerging leadership in renewables. Over the past two years, it has purchased the skeletal remains of a bankrupt wind company (Enron Wind) and a bankrupt solar company (Astropower). Both acquisitions are now part of the company’s $18 billion GE Energy unit. The wind business unit has become one of the world’s largest producers of turbines, while the solar operation is poised to be a leading player in that fast-growing market.

But renewables, as everyone knows, aren’t enough. As several pundits have put it, there's the equivalent of several Saudi Arabias worth of oil to be found in energy efficiency -- of vehicles, buildings, and industrial processes.

Toward that end, GE has announced a three-year partnership aimed at dramatically increasing the efficiency of American industry by developing wireless sensor networks and systems to improve the efficiency of electric motors, which account for nearly two-thirds of total U.S. industrial energy consumption.

The company claims the projected savings of this effort "exceeds 120 trillion BTUs," though it doesn't elaborate on how long it will take to reach that milestone.

In any case, with numbers like that, GE’s effort is well worth watching. According to my colleague Daniel Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at U.C. Berkeley, 120 trillion BTUs is the energy equivalent of about 200 million barrels of oil or 8.4 billion gallons of gas -- not quite a Saudi Arabia (whose reserves have been conservatively estimated at 260 billion barrels), but more than enough to power the imagination.