Edison's Legacy Has No Place for Wind Power
online.barrons.com
GENERAL ELECTRIC HAS A NEW MEDIA campaign called "ecomagination," designed to improve its reputation with environmental lobbying groups and their followers in the general public. CEO Jeff Immelt came to Washington last week to announce it, and he harked back to Thomas A. Edison, who said, "I find out what the world needs and proceed to invent it." The world, said Immelt, needs cleaner, more efficient sources of energy with reduced emissions and it needs clean water.
Those are areas GE is working in already, so the company is promoting itself by promoting growth, vision and inventiveness in such areas as coal gasification, high-efficiency locomotives, fuel-saving jet engines, energy-efficient appliances, recyclable wiring insulation and solar power panels.
Shareholders may applaud at this point: Immelt is positioning GE as a good citizen and a good business strategist, making sound research and development investments to sell new environmentally sensitive products at a profit because its customers want and need them. "This is not about feeling good or doing good; it's about growth for the investors," said Immelt.
It's good sense and good business to have an ear for the customer's needs: Airlines need less thirsty airplanes; railroads would like to get more power from each gallon of fuel; electricity users are eagerly awaiting the development of better batteries; utilities want cleaner technology for generating electricity; parched regions need to clean the water they have and make more fresh water from salt water.
The ecomagination slogan may keep environmental pressure groups off the company's neck, and it may be a good way to package what the company is doing anyway, but GE's ecomagination also has a flaw.
Perhaps a company that makes a big part of its living selling turbines can't be faulted for selling them for any use, even one that's as much of an impractical fantasy as wind energy. GE uses its ecomagination to create giant offshore windmills: "With blade rotors that sweep an area as large as a football field and an overall reach as tall as a 30-story building, these wind turbines can be developed in large-scale 'farms' to provide power for large coastal-population centers where available land area is limited."
This is green and red power -- the red is the blood of sea birds hacked to death by the spinning blades. In addition to environmental damage to bystanding species, wind power has an economic flaw that any GE engineer ought to be able to imagine: Since no human power can turn the wind on and off when it's wanted for electricity, every bit of wind power capacity must be backed up by another generating source. If that backup source is reasonably efficient, the wind turbine is superfluous -- a waste of money expended to indulge a sentimental preference for so-called 'renewable' energy.
Immelt, an engineer, understands this but he provided the executive's counter-argument: The customers want it, so it's GE's job to produce it.
Immelt danced around the issues of whether global warming is real, whether human activity plays a major part and whether the Kyoto protocols will be of much use. It's just a political fact to deal with in the marketplace: "In the future, we are going to be carbon-constrained," he said. European regulations implementing the flawed and futile Kyoto protocols are already influencing GE's product designs, regardless of how the U.S. government may refuse to go along.
To stay ahead of the power curve, GE has ecomagined reducing its emissions. The company will cut its greenhouse-gas emissions by 1% by 2012, compared to the 40% increase in emissions that would have occurred if GE had done nothing about it.
Some environmental groups reacted with great pleasure to GE's announcement. But the customer is not always right and GE ought to be more careful whom it attempts to please. Edison was proud of making useful products; selling snake oil and wind power are not in the best GE tradition.
Editorial Page Editor Thomas G. Donlan receives e-mail at tg.donlan@barrons.com. |
