Newswise — General Electric, one of the biggest of big businesses, has entered the alternative-energy field with all guns blazing, intent on taking over the wind and solar markets. But other leading energy companies have done the same, only to retreat at the first sign of resistance. Will GE stick with its newly unveiled "Ecomagination" initiative long enough to make a real difference?
So far, the relationship between big energy companies and alternative energy technologies have been a lot like the marriages that unite Hollywood stars. Begun amid lofty promise and swooning media, all too often they soon descend into dysfunction and divorce.
Five years ago, oil giant British Petroleum parlayed its corporate abbreviation into a catchphrase promise to go "Beyond Petroleum." Having acquired a small company in Maryland that happened to be the largest maker of photovoltaic cells, BP started to bill itself in ads as the world's biggest solar manufacturer. But just two years later, it ditched production of the next-generation thin-film photovoltaic panels it had been developing, abandoning a key effort to finally make solar cells widely affordable--and raising further doubts as to whether it would be moving beyond petroleum any time soon.
Meanwhile, the Swiss-Swedish engineering giant ABB--which until a decade ago was almost GE's equal in the electric power business--announced it was abandoning the construction of big power plants and instead plunging headlong into alternative energy. Never before had a leading energy corporation so eagerly embraced the "small is beautiful" philosophy. Yet today, ABB has little to show for what seemed to be a bold strategy, in part because of technical troubles and slower-than-expected growth in demand. In the global power business, the once-mighty company is marginalized.
Now comes General Electric Co., a pioneer of the fossil-fired and nuclear technologies that powered the twentieth century--but also, with a legacy of pollution stemming from its use of polychlorinated biphenyls, a symbol of corporate denial. After largely ignoring alternative energy for most of its existence, GE has jumped in headfirst, unfurling on May 9 what its CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt is calling its "ecoimagination" initiative: it's "a growth strategy, driven by our belief that applying technology to solving problems is good business . . . . We are launching ecomagination not because it is trendy or moral but because it will accelerate our growth and make us more competitive."
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