Advanced Wind Turbine Program Next Generation Turbine ... - NREL

5 Commercialization of GE NGT Technology
GE Wind Energy commercialized the NGT Proof of Concepts (POC) turbine as the GE1.5s. GE
Wind commercialized the NGT Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) turbine as
the GE1.5sle. As of December 31, 2003, GE had manufactured and deployed 902 GE1.5s turbines
in the U.S. alone. As of April 2004, when technical work on the NGT project was completed,
an additional several hundred turbines of both configurations were on order for delivery
during 2004 and 2005.
GE Wind has been the beneficiary of several R&D contracts from the U.S. Department of Energy
during the past decade. Figure 44 shows how USDOE funds were leveraged by GE internal
R&D funding. Over the course of the last decade, GE matched with internal resources nearly $6
for every $1 of USDOE funding. Figure 45 shows the overall return on that investment to the
U.S.: $98 million worth of R&D, of which DOE contributed 15%, has translated into $1.9 billion
worth of wind turbine hardware manufactured and deployed in the U.S., with nearly four-fifths
domestic content.
40.0
35.0
30.0
25.0
20.0
15.0
10.0
5.0
0.0
1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
GE Wind Energy's Product Development Budget
MW 900
800
700
600
NREL/DOE
GE Wind Budget
(1994-2003)
Figure 44. Leverage of USDOE R&D Funding by GE Wind Energy
550kW
750kW 750kW
1.5MW 1.5MW
$1.9 Billion Total
21%
500
79%
Foreign Content
Domestic
Content
400
300
200 (1994-2003)
100
0
'94 '95 '96 '97 '98 '99 '00 '01 '02 '03
Figure 45. Return on Investment of NREL Funds in GE Wind
74
$98 million
85%
15%
NREL/DOE Share GE Wind
Total GE Wind Product
Development Budget
Cumulative Total/U.S. Production