OREANDA-NEWS.    GE announced today the renewal of its ecomagination initiative, including new commitments and partnerships, as the company initiative reaches its ninth anniversary.

Since its 2005 launch, ecomagination – the company’s commitment to technology solutions that save money and reduce environmental impact for its customers and GE’s own operations – has generated more than USD 160B in revenue. GE’s own operations have seen a 34 percent reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions since 2004 and a 47 percent reduction in freshwater use since 2006, realizing USD 300M in savings.

Jeff Immelt, chairman and CEO, GE said, "ecomagination is one of our most successful cross-company business initiatives. Bold investments in ecomagination research and development have resulted in strong returns for shareholders and improved cost and emissions savings for our customers."

GE’s new ecomagination commitments include:

1. Investing USD 10B in cleaner technology research and development by 2020. To date GE has invested USD 12B in ecomagination R&D, on track to meet the commitment of USD 15B through 2015. Today ecomagination announced the continuation of GE’s R&D investment committing to invest USD 10B additional to reach a total investment of USD 25B by 2020.

The new investment will advance research in:

Natural Gas: develop alternative technologies to replace water in the hydraulic fracturing process
Renewable Energy: reduce the cost and increase the output of GE wind turbines to lower wind power generation costs
Power Plants: innovate and advance solutions to increase power plant efficiencies
2. Reducing GHG emissions, freshwater use and improving energy efficiency of GE operations. GE has reduced GHG emissions by 34 percent since 2004 and freshwater use by 47 percent since 2006. Building off this success, GE is committing to reduce GHG emissions and freshwater use by 20 percent, from the 2011 baseline, by 2020.