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GE Secures First g³ High-Voltage Equipment Orders for Industrial Usage

GE Secures First g³ High-Voltage Equipment Orders for Industrial Usage
 

Paris, FRANCE July 02, 2020 — GE Renewable Energy’s Grid Solutions business (NYSE:GE) has secured its first “Green Gas for Grid” - or “g3 (pronounced “g-cubed”) – industrial orders. Together, German’s specialty chemicals leader Evonik and UK’s Omexom, an Engineering Procurement and Construction (EPC) company, recently ordered a total of 18 g 3gas-insulated switchgear (GIS) bays.

g3 is GE’s game-changing alternative to sulphur hexafluoride (SF6), the world’s most potent greenhouse gas widely used in high-voltage equipment, including switchgear bays. Switchgear bays are found at substations and help dispatch or cut electrical power in case of a problem on the grid.

g3 products feature the same high performance and reliability as SF6 equipment but have a gas mass with more than a 99% reduced equivalent value. More importantly, life-cycle assessments (LCAs) have shown that g3 products have a greatly reduced CO2 impact on the environment compared with SF6 products. Additionally, g3 products do not cause pollution transfers to other environmental indicators because they have the same compact dimensions as traditional SF6 products.

Evonik signed a contract for 10 F35-145kV g3 GIS bays for its Marl Chemical Park in western Germany.  Commissioning is estimated for June 2021. Omexom selected GE as its 132 kV GIS supplier for an industrial customer’s waste plant in the UK. The contract for eight 145 kV GIS bays using g3 was signed in March, with commissioning estimated for September 2021.

Commenting on its g3 order, Jürgen Bücker, Head of Regulation Management Energy Networks at Evonik said: “g3 was a natural choice for Evonik. Not only do the g3 products offer us the same reliability and ease of handling as our previous SF6 equipment, they will go a long way in helping us reach our goal of halving our absolute Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 2025.”

“Our industrial customer chose g3 due to its drastically reduced impact on the environment,” said Christopher Niven, Operations Manager at Omexom. “Our customer was particularly impressed by the fact that g3 offers the best overall environmental life-cycle assessment of SF6-free gas-insulated switchgear equipment,” he added.

“We are delighted to have received our first industrial orders for our g3 high-voltage equipment. This demonstrates customers’ confidence in g3 products as a game-changing alternative to SF6 products beyond the transmission and distribution industry,” said Emanuel Bertolini, Chief Commercial Officer at GE’s Grid Solutions.

With these two industrial orders, GE has now sold more than 100 g3 GIS bays since launching g3 on the market in 2016. Eighteen transmission and distribution utilities have installed g3 equipment at a total of 26 sites across Europe. Together, these utilities have avoided the use of more than 565,000, tons of CO2 equivalent on the grid, With the largest 145 kV GIS SF6-free installed base, g3 is the leading SF6-free solution for high-voltage equipment.

SF6 is estimated to contribute 23,500 times more emissions than CO2, if leaked, and can remain in the atmosphere for up to 3,200 years.

The development of g3 has taken more than ten years of dedicated work by GE’s research and development teams in France and Switzerland in collaboration with 3M.

For more information on GE’s high-voltage g3 substation equipment and roadmap to 2025, visit our website.

Click here for GE’s g3 interactive application.