Gas Turbines

GE Vernova signs 9 GW of gas turbine reservations in past month

The customers include data center developers as big tech names move to secure generation for their power-hungry campuses.
GE Vernova signs 9 GW of gas turbine reservations in past month
(Credit: GE Vernova)

GE Vernova has signed 9 GW of reservations for gas turbines with customers in the past 30 days, GE Vernova Chief Executive Officer Scott Strazik said in an interview with Bloomberg this week.

GE Vernova did not disclose any of the customers it had signed reservations for, but Strazik noted they include data center developers. Big tech names are moving to secure generation for their power-hungry campuses, with some facilities eying launch dates as early as 2028, Bloomberg reports.

GE Vernova has generated $4 billion in cash since its split from its parent company GE nine months ago. All of the new orders will be built out of the company’s South Carolina factory. The company expects to see 20 GW of gas turbine orders each year until 2028, with at least half of those orders coming from the U.S..

Order numbers from GE Vernova’s latest 10-Q in October (Credit: GE Vernova).

“We are very well positioned to serve this market,” Strazik told CNBC’s Jim Cramer this week. “We see it every day in both our grid and our gas businesses – a substantial increase in demand.” Strazik also told Cramer the company is poised to upgrade existing nuclear plants “this decade,” while SMRs aren’t expected to become a reality until roughly 2032.

While business is booming on the gas side, GE Vernova also laid out some troubling indicators for the already-struggling U.S. offshore wind industry. “The reality is, the economics of this industry don’t make sense,” Strazik told Bloomberg. The company said it is no longer seeking new sales for its offshore turbines in the U.S., and hasn’t sold one in nearly three years.

Certainly not helping the situation was the incident at Vineyard Wind offshore wind farm, in which a GE Vernova blade broke off of the installation, causing fiberglass and other debris to wash ashore for weeks on Massachusetts beaches. GE Vernova’s offshore wind turbine manufacturing plant in Quebec, Canada fired or suspended several workers in November following a probe into the incident.

In September, GE Vernova said it planned to cut up to 900 offshore wind jobs globally in a move to reduce its offshore wind footprint. The move came not only amid uncertainty and supply chain constraints in the offshore market but also another incident involving a GE Vernova Haliade-X turbine blade – this time at the Dogger Bank Wind Farm off the northeast coast of England. However, in this case, GE Vernova said its analysis showed that the blade event was not caused by an installation or manufacturing issue but instead occurred during the commissioning process, when the turbine was left in a fixed and static position, rendering it vulnerable during a subsequent storm with high winds.

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