GE startup injects life to efficient-energy efforts

Eight months in her new job as head of a start-up at General Electric hasn't spoiled Maryrose Sylvester's positive attitude about tackling the challenges she faces.

“One of the things about being a good business leader is you have to be incredibly optimistic and paranoid at the same time. I’m both of those things,” says the president and CEO of GE's new division Current, laughing at GE’s office in Washington the other day.

Sylvester's optimism and paranoia now will hinge on how well Current does in its mission to help banks, hotels, department stores and other big businesses go green. Current advises companies how to switch to energy-saving technology like light-emitting-diode (LED) bulbs, produce and store energy on-site and harness data to improve performance energy management.

“What could go wrong is we can’t get that payback fast enough,” said Sylvester, a 29-year-veteran of GE who headed the company’s LED lighting division before Current launched in October with her at the helm.

That said, Sylvester is optimistic that Current will succeed, given GE’s longstanding experience in energy businesses, including LED lighting, solar power, storage and electric vehicles, plus its more recent investments in a cloud-based program for industrial Internet applications.

In February, Current announced its first major deal, with JPMorgan Chase, to install LED lighting at 5,000 of the company’s bank branches across the U.S. It is a deal that GE called the world’s largest single-order LED installation, one that would cut the facilities’ lighting-related energy use in half.

“We’ll have some other customer announcements in the next 60 days,” Sylvester said in an interview.

Current’s emergence comes as the concept of energy as a service rather than a product takes on increasing appeal, with technology providing consumers with options to cut their energy use substantially, and even produce and store power themselves, all the while making consumption patterns easier to monitor and adjust through computer networking.

For Current, the focus now is on commercial and industrial operations such as JPMorgan, with multiple locations and high energy costs. Several other companies, including Walgreens, Hilton Worldwide and Hospital Corporation of America, are running pilot programs using Current’s expertise.

“JPMorgan is an expert at banking,” Sylvester said. “They don’t want to be experts in energy. They could never be experts in energy. But they spend a lot of money on energy because they have a lot of sites to keep lit and cooled and heated.”

Current offers LEDs and other devices that save energy compared to conventional technologies, like fluorescent lights, but also come with sensors that can monitor a building’s temperature, occupancy and other activities.

“We want them to understand what else they can do,” Sylvester said.

Among the options are tying the various sensor-equipped devices together through a computer network that automatically controls lighting and temperature, depending on the level of activity in a building.

Current also provides on-site generation, such as solar and combined heat and power, as well as energy storage, electric-vehicle charging and conservation programs to reduce energy costs and carbon emissions.

If all goes well, the customer will recover its initial investment in two to four years, Sylvester said.

“We’re trying to get this right. We’re going to test a lot of things. We’re going to do some things tremendously successfully, and we’re going to fail at some things. And when we fail, we want to fail fast, learn from it and get it right the next time.”

Current got off to an ambitious beginning in the fall, with $1 billion in revenue from the combination of its LED lighting, solar power, storage and electric-vehicle businesses, and a goal of reaching $5 billion by 2020.

“At GE, we’re a test for how you can create new business models, try something new,” she said.

Looking further ahead, Sylvester said Current may offer services to electric utilities interested in information on the energy-use patterns of large commercial and industrial sites.

“We’re trying to run this thing as a start-up,” she said. “We’re creating a new market, investing in new technologies and trying to bring that all together under a new business model. There’s a lot of new there.”

Bill Loveless — @bill_loveless on Twitter — is a veteran energy journalist and podcast host in Washington. He is the former anchor of the TV program Platts Energy Week.