The Mountain Peak Power (MPP) plant will be built in Weld County, Colorado and is expected to come online in 2025. The 162 MW plant is will be operated by Kindle Energy and serve the United Power electric cooperative.

Each LM2500XPRESS power package includes an LM2500 aeroderivative gas turbine, a distributed control system (DCS) and a Dry Low Emissions (DLE) combustion system, which can reduce emissions without the use of water, a scarce resource in northeast Colorado. 

GE said the units can perform multiple daily starts and stops and start in as little as five minutes from cold iron. These units will be assembled at the company’s Gas Power Manufacturing Excellence Center in Veresegyhaz, Hungary.

In addition to the power generation equipment, GE has provided co-development funding to speed up development and construction.

Colorado has committed to reducing overall GHG emissions 50% below 2005 levels by 2030 and 90% by 2050. This includes exiting coal by 2031. As of early 2023, seven coal-fired electric power generating facilities were operating in Colorado — until one was retired and converted to natural gas. The remaining plants are scheduled to either close or be converted to natural gas to provide peaking power.

“In a region with an increasing power demand due to planned coal-fired plants retirements and increased renewable energy generation, a mix of flexible and efficient energy sources will be necessary to achieve the carbon emissions goals of Colorado, while ensuring the reliability of power supply,” said Lee Davis, CEO of Kindle Energy.

GE Vernova said the MPP plant is the company’s second dispatchable peaking project in Colorado.

Kindle Energy currently manages and operates nearly 10.2 GW of generation located in Indiana, Maryland, New Jersey and Ohio, according to the company’s website.

The New Jersey-based company is currently building a 700 MW natural gas-fired combined-cycle plant in Iberville Parish, Louisiana. The Magnolia Power Generating Station will provide electricity directly to five rural utility cooperatives across the state starting in May 2025.

The Magnolia Power Project would include a GE 7HA.03 gas turbine, a GE STF-A650 steam turbine and a triple pressure with reheat Heat Recovery Steam Generator (HRSG). The company’s Mark VIe control system would provide turbine generator control, data collection and performance visibility.

GE has also said the Magnolia plant would have the eventual ability to blend up to 50% hydrogen.

With the latest NRC approval of GNF’s fuel fabrication license amendment, the company said its manufacturing facility in Wilmington, North Carolina is the first commercial facility in the U.S. to hold a license to fabricate fuel enrichments up to 8 weight percent. The NRC issued a Certificate of Compliance allowing GNF to ship nuclear fuel bundles up to 8 weight percent utilizing the company’s RAJ-II shipping container. The NRC has also approved licensing topical reports for advanced nuclear methods that enable GNF to analyze fuel with enrichments greater than 5 weight percent.

GE Vernova said higher enrichment fuels are expected to improve nuclear fuel cycle economics, including power uprates for existing boiling water reactors and also for the next generation of reactor technology including advanced and small modular reactors.

Late last year, GE announced that it plans to spin off its energy business, GE Vernova, in the beginning of the second quarter of 2024, subject to final approval from the company’s board and other customary conditions.

Following the completion of the planned spin-off, shares of GE Vernova will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “GEV.”

GE’s existing energy portfolio will fall under GE Vernova following the split. Its portfolio includes natural gas, hydro, nuclear and steam power technology and services; offshore and onshore wind services and turbine manufacturing; grid modernization software; grid equipment, services, and systems; solar + storage solutions; and accelerator and research services.

The order is the largest single onshore wind turbine order ever received by GE, both in terms of number of turbines and gigawatts of power generation.

The over 3.5 GW SunZia Wind project is expected to be the largest wind project in the West. Construction began in late-2023 after more than 17 years of navigating permits and approvals. The project also includes a 550-mile ± 525 kV high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission line between central New Mexico and south-central Arizona with the capacity to transport 3,000 MW across Western states.

GE’s 3.6 MW turbine with a 154-meter rotor is what the company refers to as the 3.6-154. GE said its 3.6-154 turbine delivers the highest efficiency in the market and is built on the back of the 2.8-127.

The company said the product is expected to bring recent innovations in turbine and blade design, including the digital blade certificate, an AI-trained blade manufacturing process designed to produce industry leading quality.

GE Vernova and Pattern Energy’s collaboration on SunZia spans the last 18 months and has included collaborative development and supply chain work to optimize site layouts and performance. GE also provided Pattern Energy with consulting and financial services in support of this deal.

The project will be supplied through GE Vernova’s nacelle facility in Pensacola, Florida, as well as tower manufacturing facilities in Belen, New Mexico, Pueblo, Colorado, and Amarillo, Texas.

The company announced the limited early release of its CERius software as a pilot for its current customers. The software uses reconciliation algorithm and Digital Twin technology powered by machine learning and data analytics.

GE Vernova said CERius is engineered to more accurately calculate greenhouse gas emissions and suggest recommendations for reduction efforts by offering scenario analysis, team collaboration and standardized reporting based on emission protocols.

“We’ve had the opportunity to directly validate that CERius provides 33% greater accuracy for scope 1 emissions on today’s gas turbines,” said Scott Reese, CEO of GE Vernova Digital. “That direct validation gives us great confidence that we can help utilities in reporting and reducing their emissions.”

The company said CERius will be more widely available in early 2024.

More on the software here.

GE Vernova will lead the pre-feasibility assessment under an award announced by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Regional DAC Hubs program. The funding comes from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). GE will enter award negotiations with DOE to finalize the terms and the scope of the study.  

As part of the proposed study, researchers will evaluate using GE Hitachi’s BWRX-300 small modular reactor (SMR) to power the DAC system.

“Integrating the heat and power from the 300 MWe BWRX-300 with the DAC system has the potential to achieve the lowest cost of carbon removal,” said GE Vernova in a statement.

Direct air capture (DAC) technologies extract CO2 directly from the atmosphere at any location after which the carbon can be stored in geological foundations or used in a variety of applications such as a feedstock for sustainable aviation fuels.

DAC is unlike carbon capture which is usually carried out at the point of emissions.

According to the International Energy Agency, DAC is significantly more expensive than carbon capture and is a highly energy-intensive process. A great deal of land and water are also required for DAC projects.

When completed, GE Vernova said the project could remove 1 million tons of CO2 from the air per year.

GE Vernova is also part of two other teams selected for award negotiations that support early-stage project development of DAC regional hubs. The two other projects GE Vernova will be partnering on will be led by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois (Urbana, Illinois).

These projects intend to promote technologies that can capture CO2 from the atmosphere and store it underground in the Tuscaloosa Group in Florida and in the Denver-Julesburg Basin in Colorado.

Both studies aim to develop relationships between DAC technology providers, green energy providers, CO2 transportation networks and companies seeking to store CO2 underground.

GE Hitachi’s BWRX-300 is the 10th evolution of GE’s boiling water reactor design. The 300 MW water-cooled reactor design is based on the company’s Economic Simplified Boiling-Water Reactor (ESBWR), which is already licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

According to a signed MOU, both companies will develop technical and logistical solutions to capture, transport, and store carbon dioxide crucial to the development of an effective CCS supply chain.

Carbon capture technology could be a viable option for fossil-fired power plants to reduce their emissions. But while industry groups say the technology is crucial to America’s overall decarbonization efforts, opponents note that it’s costly and far from scale.

In 2022, GE’s front-end engineering design (FEED) study “Retrofittable Advanced Combined Cycle Integration for Flexible Decarbonized Generation” received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management to develop a detailed plan for integrating carbon capture technologies with a combined cycle plant to capture approximately 95 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. The goal for commercial deployment would be 2030.

In March 2023, GE also announced a collaboration with Svante to develop and evaluate innovative solid sorbent technologies for carbon capture from natural gas power generation.

Northern Lights is a Norwegian company developing infrastructure for cross-border CO2 transport and storage in Europe