PA Energy & Innovation Summit: Spotlight 3 - Conversation with Scott Strazik

Yeah. No, I mean I think when you think about the prior 25 years or even if you go back further than that, a lot of things that may have been compressing the demand in the US for electricity, whether it be globalization, whether it be the productivity that came with software, those are the exact same drivers that are now leading to more need for electrons, right? Because we're going to re-industrialize this country. And as we do that, that requires more electric power. We've reached a tipping point with technology where the next tranche of productivity is going to come from data centers and AI that require a much healthier level of electron growth. And GE Vernova produces today more than half of the electrons in the US through our customers. So for us, it's really our obligation to meet this moment and to meet this load growth. And that's exactly what we're going to do. And it probably does start with gas turbines. We build most of our gas turbines in Greenville, South Carolina. We're on about a 36-month cycle time right now from when we take an order to when we deliver it. But at the same time, what I would tell you is last year we did 30 heavy duty gas turbines in Greenville and in 2027 we'll do 80. So we're readying ourselves to substantially ramp up our demand.

You bet. And I think we've got a project here right in our backyard, Homer City Energy Center, that's a perfect example of this. This is a project that was originally a coal site that was commissioned in 1969. It was decommissioned in July of 2023. Two years from now, it'll be recommissioned with 4 and a half gigawatts of gas turbines with gas from the Marcellus. This is a great outcome for the state and for the region economically, for the environment. And there's a lot of that that can happen. And there will continue to happen. In this area, we're really investing in Western Pennsylvania. We've got a circuit breaker factory here. I was there this morning. This year, we'll make about 500 circuit breakers at this factory. Most of them attach to the data center buildout. By 2027, we'll build a thousand. We'll double our output in the next two years. And we're in a routine at that factory that we basically add 12 new blue collar jobs every Monday for the next year. And that's how we're going to drive the ramp up in a community that deserves it and really sees this as their moment to play a real role in US competitiveness and national security for that matter. So there's just a lot of stuff to be excited about right now and I've got a lot of optimism that we can meet this moment.

Yes, at least a hundred million dollar investment.

By you and others.

Well, I do think in the end we're going to spend more money on the grid than we are on even new power generation capability. But we're going to do that because we can make it a lot smarter and make it a lot more productive to build its capability to manage electrons flowing in different directions, to be smarter with the variable power generation sources that require AI as an example to point them in the right direction where they're needed. We do have a lot of good projects that can be built in this country that, as Secretary Bergam was just saying, need permitting reform to allow us to connect very economical power generation with where it's needed. We also need to connect more natural gas power projects with pipelines that need to get built. And that's a trade that needs to get done in this country for us to meet our potential. And I have a high expectation we can pull that off as a country, frankly. So, is the grid going to need to be invested into? Definitely. But do we have a lot of the technology that we need to position what is probably one of the more sophisticated machines we have in this country to manage the demand and the variability? We know how to do this. We just have to go do it. But it's something we've got to do together as a country for competitiveness.