By Nick Zieminski
NEW YORK, Sept 26 (Reuters) – General Electric Co’s
power and water division said on Wednesday it won $1.2 billion
in contracts from power producers in the United States, Japan
and Saudi Arabia for newly-developed heavy-duty gas turbines.
The deals for 19 turbines to be manufactured in Greenville,
South Carolina, reflect a gradual, global shift toward using
inexpensive natural gas rather than coal or oil to generate
power, GE said.
“Natural gas is more and more becoming a fuel of choice
around the world,” said Paul Browning, who heads GE’s thermal
products division, the biggest within the industrial
conglomerate’s $28 billion power and water business.
GE says its new technology is more fuel efficient, enables
power plants to ramp up and down faster, and incorporates energy
from renewable energy sources.
GE will supply six heavy-duty gas turbines to Japanese
utility Chubu for a 2,300-megawatt plant, and eight gas turbines
for a Saudi Electric Co project in Riyadh.
The new turbines were developed, and will be manufactured
and tested, at GE’s facility in Greenville. Though GE did not
break down the value of the Saudi and Japan orders, it said they
represent a significant GE export to those countries.
“A lot of the power in Saudi is produced from crude oil, but
more and more they want to preserve that for petrochemical
export markets,” Browning said in an interview.
GE expects to deliver the turbines between 2013 and 2016.
The remaining orders are for projects in the United States,
including the Cherokee project near Denver owned by a subsidiary
of Xcel Energy, that is converting from coal to gas. The
transition is expected to cut in half carbon dioxide emissions
from the Colorado plant.
GE will also supply two gas turbines and a steam turbine to
Hess Corp, and one turbine to an unspecified U.S.
industrial client.
It forecasts that more U.S. power plants will be fueled with
natural gas than with coal by 2017.
GE declined to forecast growth rates for its turbines
business but said demand for power generation equipment is only
partly affected by economic ups and downs.
“We are impacted by the global financial crisis of a few
years ago,” Browning said. “We’ve bottomed and are coming out
the other end of that. We’re feeling pretty good about the
prospects.”
