Our Key Take Aways from NY Climate Week: Accelerate, Electrify, and Challenge Ourselves

GE Vernova was proud to join our public and private sector stakeholders at NY Climate Week with more than 100 engagements focused on delivering and innovating solutions to address climate change, growing demand for #electrification, and #sustainability.?As one of the leading private sector entities focused on these issues globally, we saw three themes across our diverse set of engagements:

1) The priority for the private sector is to accelerate and catalyze: Over the last few years, the partnership between the public and private sectors has fundamentally transformed. At #NYCW, the public sector is no longer calling on the private sector just to act, but to act faster. Our first Sustainability Report , released the week prior to Climate Week, demonstrates how we are deploying technologies today and innovating the breakthrough technologies of the future, to meet the growing demand for electricity and decarbonization solutions while improving our impacts as we operate as a company. In the six months since we became a standalone company, the stakes have only gotten higher, and we share and rise to the challenge of acting with urgency.

2) Utilize the electrification imperative to solve for climate: The overarching theme of climate week was on addressing the growing demand for cleaner electrons, whether from data centers, onshoring of manufacturing, economic development and competitiveness goals, and/or energy security.?We see the push for electricity infrastructure as a pivotal catalyst for solving for climate change simultaneously.?As our CEO Scott Strazik said "the current electrification demands are not something the world should shy away from; rather, we should lean into them. These demands will facilitate the scaling of renewables and other key decarbonization technologies like our breakthrough innovations". Our Sustainability Report documents first-of-their-kind metrics we’ve introduced to demonstrate our efforts to both add capacity to the grid while at the same time improving the trajectory of carbon intensity as we do.

3) Challenging us to focus not just on what we know, but what we don’t know: Much of what we heard from the public sector was deep decarbonization requires more than what anyone is doing today.?Success requires a commitment to the breakthrough technologies of the future.? At GE Vernova, we are innovating breakthrough innovations: small modular nuclear reactors, carbon capture and sequestration, hydrogen as a fuel for our turbines, and direct air capture.? But beyond technologies, success also requires a focus on emerging economies.?As a company that helps generate approximately 25 percent of the world’s energy in more than 100 countries, we recently included a leading goal in our sustainability framework specifically to address electrification in regions underserved by reliable, affordable and sustainable electricity.

As we turn our attention toward #COP29 in just a few weeks, our journey toward the Conference will be accompanied by our COP Collection . An effort that brings together diverse voices from around the world; from countries who are pioneering the way forward, companies who are innovating and collaborating differently and the communities that are adapting and embracing this transition.

Coming out of NYCW, it was promising to see the alignment between policy makers, industry leaders, academia, multilateral, community organizations, on the necessity to continue pushing the progress on the energy transition, is stronger than ever.?Our focus on adopting a systems-wide approach is crucial in unlocking the opportunities both in the work we are doing, and how we are doing that work.

The momentum toward building a more sustainable electric power system is palpable and GE Vernova is in a strong position to lead and drive this effort forward.