KARACHI: GE hosted ‘GE Technology Day’ seminars in Karachi and Islamabad under the theme ‘Powering Pakistan, Fueling Progress’. The events welcomed a select group of government end users, engineering, procurement and construction contractors, industry experts, power plant owners and operators.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts that the total electricity demand in Pakistan will increase to more than 49,000 megawatts (MW) by 2025. The government has laid out ambitious goals under Vision 2025 to increase access to electricity from 67 percent to over 90 percent of the population and to reduce average cost per unit by over 25 percent by improving the generation mix. GE highlighted the company’s extensive breadth of advanced digital industrial technologies, solutions and services that can help meet these goals.
A special highlight of the events was GE’s leading HA technology, the world’s largest and most efficient gas turbine, which has set industry benchmarks in the cost-effective conversion of fuel to electricity. The turbine helped EDF’s power plant in Bouchain, France, achieve a world record in combined cycle efficiency of 62.22 percent. It has undergone full-speed, full-load validation tests at extreme conditions well beyond those encountered while in service and completed more than 12,000 operating hours. Sixty HA units have already been ordered to date by more than 15 customers across 15 countries, including Pakistan, the US, Brazil, Japan, Bahrain, China and others.