Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [69]
United Technologies is not the only big company investing in a clean energy future and betting it will be profitable. Whirlpool, DuPont, and more than forty other companies, including Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum, several major utilities, two big forest products corporations, high-tech firms, and engine manufacturers, have been united by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change to lobby the federal government for limits on CO2 emissions. One of the largest is GE, which, under its new chairman, Jeff Immelt, has decided to join the green revolution and do it in a profitable way.
Most Americans think of GE in terms of consumer products like lightbulbs and appliances, but most of its revenue comes from supplying large equipment to utilities, railroads, other industrial companies, and governments—all large energy users. GE calls its new commitment “ecomagination.” Launched in 2005, it includes commitments by GE to reduce greenhouse gas emissions one percent by 2012 through improvements in energy efficiency (they could otherwise have increased by 30 percent due to growth); double annual research in cleaner technologies from $700 million to $1.5 billion by 2010; and double revenues from ecomagination products to $20 billion by 2010.
The research agenda includes the development of more efficient wind energy, including offshore wind turbines; less costly solar panels; a greater variety of biofuels; cost-effective electricity generation from biomass, heat, and geothermal energy; cleaner coal technology that could generate electricity as cleanly as natural gas production and emit only water vapor; advanced fuel cells; commercially viable hydrogen energy; a 30 percent reduction in energy consumption for waste water reuse and recycling; and affordable LED lighting for homes and businesses.
GE has already certified more than forty-five ecomagination products, with more in the pipeline. It is now selling three thousand wind turbines per year, making it the world’s second-largest manufacturer of windmills after Denmark’s Vestas Wind Systems. It sells an organic waste reuse project that burns waste to generate energy, a Solar Water Filtration system, and the LED lighting Wal-Mart is installing in its refrigeration units. It is also developing cleaner jet engines that use 15 percent less fuel and more fuel-efficient locomotives, which burn 5 percent less fuel and emit 40 percent less pollution. China has already bought three hundred of them and there is a backlog of fifteen hundred more orders from around the world. Locomotives made in Erie, Pennsylvania, are also being sold to Mexico, Brazil, and Kazakhstan because they are the most energy-efficient in the world, costing more in the short run but less over the life of the engine. GE’s consumer products include compact fluorescent lightbulbs and energy-efficient washing machines that utilize less water. GE markets its green products with a report card that shows prospective customers exactly how much money and CO2 they will save from greater efficiency and lower emissions. By its sheer size and serious commitment, GE has the ability to create markets for green products, vastly expanding the potential for greenhouse gas reductions as old technologies are replaced with new ones. GE CEO Jeff Immelt calls the rationale “green is green”: that developing advanced, efficient technologies can help cleanse the environment—and the company can make money selling them. As the strategy makes money, its competitors will likely emulate it. What is good for the environment can be good for business.
Across the Pacific, the Japanese electronics giant Sanyo is also remaking itself as a green company. The company has adopted a new philosophy: “Think Gaia” (Gaia was the ancient Greek goddess of the earth). Sanyo’s change was part innovation, part necessity, due to competition in conventional consumer electronics