Comments on: Stirring GE's Ecomagination

Lorraine Bolsinger, who heads a major energy-efficiency initiative at General Electric, says companies can make green while being green.
Photos: Inside GE's clean-tech labs

[Manhattan2]

GE needs to re-think residential solar photovoltaic programs

Photovoltaic panels should not be installed on fixed angle rooftops. GE should know better! Maybe they do but they just want to keep selling products? A rush to go green using residential photovoltaic panels could prove to be half if not one third as efficient as a Solar Transfer solution. The million solar roofs program is a mistake. Green people think twice before you go solar. There is a better way. Have GE call email us. We think we can take Solar power from the under 1 % production it currently holds to 10% to 20% on just a few years. Run the numbers. Then tell GE to head down the right path with solar. A Solar Transfer solution can produce more energy and reduce CO2 emissions 2-3 times better than existing solutions for the 20-30 year life of the panels! That is significant! Time is Critical!

[Jamie_Foster]

GE is worse than the mafia.

The mafia pay their people well and look after their own. CNET
has much to answer for running this glorified advertisement as a
kosher story. In the US you have thousands of brownfield sites
that have been polluted beyond repair. They are called
superfund sites. More of these sites were once GE plants than
any other corporation. Then look at the hudson river PCB fiasco
that GE refuses to take responsability for. Then think about the
environmental devastation GE has inflicted on overseas countries
, most of which have weaker environmental laws than GE, think
PRC, India etc.
GE was once a great company. It looked after its people and
focused on making world beating "made in the USA" products.
Then a greedy ******** called John F Welch changed all that. He
once said that an ideal factory was one which was on a barge
and could float across the seas looking for the lowest taxes and
cheapest workers. He used GEs AAA credit rating to raise billions
and billions of bonds and then lent that money at sky high rates
to consumers via GE Capital.
GE today only spends $2.3bn in R&D. Siemens spends about
double that. And the only reason you still have any GE factories
in the US is because some Unions have fought tooth and nail to
stop those jobs being exported to the PRC or Thailiand or the
Phillipines.
Eco-magnination is bollocks, all smoke and mirrors. It is just a
marketing gimmick. The US does have some great companies
like Microsoft, Merck, 3M and Catepilliar. Google will soon
become a great company because it cares about its people,
products and the customer. And it invests like crazy. GE is a
company that has nothing to offer the man on main street.

[spothannah]

Hey G.E.

Can you invent a material to put on surfaces that increases its albedo when warm and decreases its albedo when cold?