Power Games: How General Electric Exports Privatization

Power Games: How General Electric Exports Privatization

By positioning itself as an expert partner in international climate efforts, GE gains access to developing economies, propping up a system that pushes countries deeper into debt and increases their reliance on unsustainable fuels.

Last February, when President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan looked all but dead, General Electric joined twenty-six other U.S. companies to call on Congress to salvage a climate deal. On its website, GE stressed that tax credits and grants to boost clean energy would advance U.S. interests in the global energy transition, generating domestic jobs in the wind industry. Filings compiled by the watchdog group OpenSecrets show that the negotiated successor to BBB, the Inflation Reduction Act, was the biggest target of GE’s lobbying efforts in 2022. These efforts paid off. In August, Biden signed the IRA, securing exactly the kinds of lucrative tax credits GE had trumpeted. Yet less than two months later, the company laid off 20 percent of its U.S. onshore wind workers.

If GE’s commitment to U.S. jobs is tenuous, its commitment to international climate action is only more so. In 2020, GE rebranded itself as a climate-friendly company, citing its investments in wind turbines. But as its renewables portfolio has clocked up more and more losses, GE has looked to dirtier forms of energy generation to offset the costs. Developing economies offer the company new pastures to profit from fossil fuel exploration. While GE was lobbying the U.S. government to pass incentives for renewable energy, it was building the first oil refinery in Uganda and opening the first brown coal power plant in Pakistan.

By GE’s own account, the company is responsible for a third of the world’s electricity; almost 90 percent of power transmission utilities are equipped with its technology, and it leads the global gas turbine market. As such, it has enormous influence over energy policy—and changing the way we generate electricity is key to reaching global climate goals. When a company like GE enters a country with an appetite for fossil fuels, it can turn back the clock on decarbonization efforts. For example, while GE partners with the U.S. government to supply turbines for Vietnam’s first wind farm, it also supplies turbines for the country’s first private and foreign-owned power plant, which will run on liquefied natural gas.

By positioning itself as an expert partner in international climate efforts, GE gains access to developing economies, thereby propping up a system that pushes these countries deeper into debt and increases their reliance on unsustainable fuels. Activists that focus their attention on oil and gas giants like Shell and ExxonMobil should also put energy equipment companies like GE in their crosshairs—because as long as there are power plants running on fossil fuels, fossil fuel exploration will continue.

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