GE's 2022 Sustainability Report: A Transformative Era of Action

As someone who has focused their career on the environment, energy, climate and sustainability for almost 30 years, I’ve never experienced so much consensus from governments, companies and NGOs around one common theme—action.

2022 marked a tipping point toward accelerating action. Throughout the year, we’ve seen three key transformations that are helping to solve some of the world’s most pressing sustainability challenges. And GE’s own transformation is perfectly timed and aligned to ensure success.

First, the relationship between governments and companies is rapidly reconfiguring toward partnership of shared goals. One key catalyst: the United States’ passage of its first climate change law—the Inflation Reduction Act—is one of the most impactful energy policies in decades and is bringing the government and companies together to solve for climate change, energy security and supply chain together. Another is the European Union’s RePowerEU package, which is helping address the energy market disruption caused by Russia’s invasion and promote energy security while accelerating the energy transition. Importantly, this is not just a

U.S. and Europe transformation. We are rapidly expanding our engagement with governments—across the Middle East, South America, Africa and Asia—to help build a clean energy supply chain across the communities in which we operate.

The work our GE Vernova team has done together to provide emergency power to Ukraine, documented on page 14, is perhaps the best example of a public-private partnership I’ve seen.

At GE Aerospace, we’re working with the European Commission’s Clean Aviation program and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s Continuous Lower Energy, Emissions and Noise (CLEEN) program to innovate jet engine technologies and help decarbonize the aviation industry.

Second, the urgency of electrification and energy security is creating additional incentives to act on climate change. In the last 12 months, we’ve seen more severe weather events threatening energy reliability, risks from cybersecurity, growing variability from renewable energy and the need to harden the grid so that other sectors can decarbonize through electrification.

All these factors have ignited a sense of urgency of acting today on both power generation and grid modernization. While doing so within the context of electrification, these investments ?bring equal benefits to decarbonization and climate change goals. Thus, we are increasingly seeing action that solves both climate change and the energy trilemma—growing access to more sustainable, reliable and affordable electricity for the nearly 775 million people who lack access. We launched GridOS?, the world’s first grid orchestration software, which is designed to enable secure and reliable grid management while delivering the resiliency and flexibility needed by utilities worldwide.

Third, we’ve seen a transformation and increasingly unified global action plan for climate change. For example, countries like Egypt and the United Arab Emirates ?(UAE) are now putting their climate commitments front and center in their economic plans. They are aggressively pursuing climate change investments as ways to advance their economies and inspire a new generation of diverse leaders and workforce. We were honored to work in Egypt to run a gas turbine on a hydrogen blend for the first time for the African continent in 2022, and we’re prioritizing our partnership with the UAE, which I believe ?will emerge in 2023 as one of the world’s leaders on innovating technology to decarbonize industrial and energy sectors. In addition, members of Air Transport Action Group, including GE Aerospace, previously adopted a goal of net zero CO2 emissions by 2050, confirming the aviation industry’s support of the Paris Climate Agreement. We want to enable the world to be invested both in cleaner and more affordable energy, and the economic benefits with it.

As I reflect on these transformations, I feel fortunate that GE’s most significant transformation is aligning at this pivotal time.

With our announcement in 2021 to launch three companies focused on critical, growing sectors in energy, aerospace and healthcare, we used last year to the fullest—preparing each company to independently continue and build upon the legacy of GE’s established ESG program, including our climate commitments and ambitions. All GE companies operate from the principle that sustainability is a business imperative and a necessary condition for long-term growth and success. That includes GE Vernova and GE Aerospace, which are, respectively, uniquely positioned to lead the energy transition and the future of flight, and GE HealthCare, which successfully completed its separation in

January 2023 and will release its own sustainability report detailing and further developing its own ESG strategy and goals.

I am already a witness to how each of our three businesses are more strongly positioned to serve these three critical areas of energy, aviation and healthcare through focus. And, importantly, I’m confident in their success both for their shareholders as a business and for sustainability in innovating the solutions the world most needs to accelerate action.

2022 marked the beginning of a transformative era not only for sustainability, but also for GE. One where we are unleashing our full potential as three independent industry leaders. With a continued commitment to our sustainability priorities and innovation, and technology as our North Star, I am optimistic about the path to improve our impacts on our people, communities and planet.

Learn more at www.ge.com/sustainability.