What GE Vernova’s First Sustainability Report Tells Us
Equipment manufacturing and services company GE Vernova is one of the world's leading — and most influential — energy companies.
Formed off the back of the merger and subsequent spin-off of General Electric's energy businesses GE Power, GE Renewable Energy and GE Digital in April 2024, GE Vernova leverages more than 130 years of experience while bringing a fresh perspective to energy, decarbonisation and net zero.
In September 2024, GE Vernova released its first sustainability report as a standalone company. The report details how the company is already making progress on its mission to electrify and decarbonise the world.
As well as this, it lays the groundwork of how GE Vernova’s innovative approach to sustainability, putting forward its ambitious goals built around a four-pillar framework — electrify, decarbonise, conserve and thrive.
The report delves deeper into the company’s sustainability initiatives, introducing an innovative management system known as Control Room. Inspired by the intricate nerve centers that oversee the world’s most sophisticated systems, like electrical grids, this platform enhances sustainability operations with precision and efficiency. Control Room is designed to advance objectives that align seamlessly with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).
A pioneer of GE Vernova’s sustainability report and advocate for its success is CSO Roger Martella. Speaking with Energy Digital, he shares how GE Vernova is steadfast on electrification, decarbonisation and sustainability in equal measure, acting as a trailblazer of the industry.
Please introduce yourself, your role and explain how your job relates to electrification, decarbonisation and sustainability.
I'm the Chief Sustainability Officer for GE Vernova and I lead all of our public engagement, government affairs and policy — because at Venova all of that is very closely aligned. We help produce 25% of the world's energy and we are the leading company when it comes to delivering and innovating the technology the world needs to both electrify the planet and decarbonise it at the same time.
With that type of scale, we see a unique imperative for us to not only succeed as a company, but to succeed in our broader sustainability goals of meeting the world's growing demand for electrification, for making sure we can decarbonise the grid — and we have some novel ways of proposing how to do that.
We’re making sure that we're conserving resources and ultimately lifting up people, enabling them to thrive — both our employees and our communities.
Sustainability is core to what we do. Our business purpose is a sustainability purpose – they're one and the same. My role primarily is to take the success we're having as a company for our shareholders and our employees and to align that to success for our sustainability framework, which focuses on electrification, decarbonisation, conserving and thriving. It's this alignment that I try to drive — how do we take our business success and align that to success for our broader purpose in the world?
Is it a balancing act to ensure that your output makes business sense while supporting your customers and those who benefit from your services?
Yes. Focusing on electrification first, we continue to see the world demonstrate an increasing need for energy. How do we meet the growing need for energy so that places can be economically competitive?
We're the first company to put electrification as part of its sustainability framework. In our report we're also the first company to identify metrics to reinforce the importance of electrification. We report on the amount of capacity we're putting on the grid, the amount of transformers we're electrifying and report a breakdown between emerging economies and industrialised nations. We think it's so important that we're not just answering the phone in the order in which it rings, but that we're doing a deep dive into emerging economies so that everybody has access to affordable, reliable and sustainable electricity.
For example, we put 29GW of capacity on the grid in 2023 — that's equivalent to the power of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. But we don't want to just electrify the grid, we need to decarbonise it at the same time.
Like other companies we have a 2050 net zero target, but we don't think that's enough. Instead, we think creatively about how we can reflect some metrics that would demonstrate progress sooner this decade. How can we show that we can make progress to put more capacity on the grid, but improve the trajectory of climate change?
We're proposing first-of-its-kind metrics to demonstrate not only net zero by 2050 but how we can make progress to improve the trajectory of climate change this decade while we're electrifying.
One is carbon intensity. We show that by putting more of our power equipment on the grid. Our equipment is actually bringing down the carbon intensity of the grid as a whole, with new equipment last year boasting 25% lower carbon intensity than the grid as the whole. Other metrics we propose focus on how our technology is avoiding carbon. By deploying our power equipment, you're seeing improvements versus what would've been the next best choice.
Our equipment in 2023 avoided about 20 million metric tonnes of carbon, the equivalent of about 4.8 passenger vehicles.
Finally, we have a third metric called carbon capability. This looks at the future potential of our equipment to continue to drive deeper decarbonisation. So, if hydrogen, carbon capture and other technologies were to become online in the future, we have a calculation that talks about our technology that we installed in 2023 and has the capability of having a lower carbon footprint and reducing emissions even more.
We're proud of these new metrics. We're using them to change the narrative and draw a focus to some of these issues.
What are some of the novel approaches to integrated decarbonisation solutions that GE Vernova has identified in its recent report?
We continue to focus on our 2050 net zero goal. There, we identify four breakthrough technologies that we want to see commercialised later this decade or early next decade. These are small modular nuclear reactors, hydrogen as a fuel, carbon capture, sequestration and direct air capture.
One of our key messages is this is a decade of action. We need to lay the foundation for improving the trajectory of climate change by improving carbon intensity and other metrics.
We know that with technology this decade, we're not going to get to net zero. So, at the same time, we have to be in the labs innovating the breakthrough technologies for the 2030s. We draw an analogy to both and we have two separate goals. How do we improve the trajectory on carbon intensity for the near term? How do we continue to innovate technologies towards our 2050 goals for the long term?
How does GE Vernova envision the role of electrification in accelerating the transition to net zero operations?
Electrification is really becoming the driver and the catalyst for investments and decarbonisation. For decades we've been debating whether we need to take action for climate change, but the level of investment hasn't really lined up to the sense of urgency and the weightiness of the issue.
What's happening now is there's a strong momentum towards investment electrification for a lot of reasons — energy security, national security, growing demand, data centres, more manufacturing and the notion of sustainable economic development. There seems to be more alignment towards making big scale investments in electrification.
What our report shows is the more you electrify, the more you decarbonise, the more you put new electrification equipment on the grid, the more you're lowering the carbon intensity of the grid. This electrification imperative is really yielding benefits for decarbonisation and I think that's really good news. It's great to be doing two things at the same time and achieving two goals — and it doesn't really matter how you get there. The point is you're now finally making the progress that's been long overdue and needed for the climate change side. It has been a game changer.
We're in an unprecedented era of taking action and electrification is yielding very significant benefits for climate change.
Can you elaborate on any new sustainability metrics or frameworks that your report introduces for measuring progress in corporate decarbonisation efforts?
Our novel metrics for electrification and decarbonisation underpin our purpose. We have other metrics under our conserve pillar, for example, which support goals for our operational emissions as well as product circularity.
We report on our Scope 1 and 2 emissions, reporting a 39% reduction versus our 2019 baseline. We share a lot of detail in terms of how we are looking to get to net zero by 2030 on our operational emissions.
For the first time, we shared our product circularity framework and how we're going to incorporate environmental considerations into our full life cycles of our products. There, we have a metric that's going to focus on a goal of 90% of our top products getting into the framework.
A lot of people talk about circularity, but we're trying to quantify that by connecting a metric to our circularity framework and the 90% goal.
I’m very proud that we have a very thick appendix because what it shows is full transparency in our formulas and assumptions. We know some of these metrics are provocative, some of them invite a discussion in a debate, and we don't hold out that we have all the best answers. But at the same time, if we don't invite the debate, if we're not being provocative, who else is going to do it? We're opening the door to starting a conversation with our stakeholders and we want to lift the curtain and show all of our assumptions, show all of our formulas, all of the math. We want people to dig into our assumptions, our formulas, and come back and tell us if they disagree. We'd love to have that discussion and take that input into account. We’re willing to be a little provocative here and start that conversation.
This is just our first sustainability report, so we're looking forward to the discussions and I imagine next year we'll be making some modifications from what we hear from our stakeholders.
To read the full story in the magazine click HERE.
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