ONE INNOVATION AFTER ANOTHER:

Yesterday GE officially opened a sprawling, $100 million battery factory in Schenectady, New York, with a dramatic battery-powered show of lights, music, and pyrotechnics. The factory, which will eventually employ 450 people, makes a new kind of battery--based on sodium and nickel. GE says the technology, which is more durable and charges more quickly than lead-acid batteries, will make off-grid power generation more efficient and help utilities integrate power from a wide range of sources, including intermittent ones such as wind and solar power.

While GE will have strong competition for new grid battery technologies from companies such as Aquion Energy and Liquid Metal Battery, the manufacturing giant clearly has high ambitions for its technology, recently forming a new business unit to commercialize the battery technology. Indeed, at the factory opening, the company announced an additional $70 million investment to increase its capacity to help meet a backlog of orders. "The cost of electricity over time is going to go down because [GE's battery] is going to give utilities the ability to use a multitude of different technologies at the same time," GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt told a group of reporters at the plant opening.

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