- 13 December 2006 -

GE to develop renewable powered water purification

GE Global Research, the centralized research organisation of GE, is to partner with Texas Tech University to develop affordable water desalination systems to increase the quantity and quality of clean water available in arid areas around the United States and globally.

The GE-Texas Tech partnership will focus on the integration of renewable energy systems, such as wind turbines, with membrane desalination processes. The development of the integrated renewable energy-water system has the could significantly reduce the cost of creating new sources of freshwater from impaired resources, such as brackish water, by directly addressing the major component of operating cost of desalination systems - energy.

The partnership is part of GE's ecomagination initiative, in which the company is working closely with its customer and other key partners to aggressively drive and bring to market new technologies that address pressing environmental challenges and growing water scarcity concerns. Under the initiative, GE has pledged to more than double its level of investment in the development of cleaner energy technologies, from US$700 million to US$1.5 billion over the next five years.

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