GE unveiled a new building for it’s renewable energy global headquarters on Monday. The project, which is estimated to cost $45 million, was announced 2 years ago and has turned the hundred year old building fifty three on Schenectady campus into 1 of the best environmentally friendly buildings all over the Capital region. This building is also going to be the home of six hundred and fifty employees, most of them to be hired from the local colleges to work for GE. Paul Tonko, the U.S. Representative D-Amsterdam, said, “This is the day we all should celebrate as change has finally been brought upon us.”

Apart from the engineers who are designing and servicing wind turbines for GE, the facility is also going to be the home of one remote operations center, where the technicians are going to be watching carefully the 1000′s of wind turbines which have been installed by GE all arounf North America. This is 1 of the major reasons why the equipment from GE has a reliability rate of 98%, saif the vice president of the renewable energy for GE’s water and power unit, Victor Abate. “We have invested $1 billion in the technology just to ensure that you can rely on the wind turbines,” he said.

The renovation of this building had been announced by GE more than a couple of years ago and they even had $5 million which was committed from the state of New York. The project was also a recepient of $750,000 in the form of grants from the state energy development and research authority of New York and also got local incentives to the tone of $2.8 million. The terms in this deal needed GE to provide jobs for 500 people by 2011. Then, the size of this project, which included around eighty contractors and far more than two thousand workers also increased by around $5 million. ” Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch said, “This is the type of things that we should invest our hard earned money in.”

This new facility is located close to where GE plans to build a $100 million battery manufacturing plant which is going to be employing around 350 people. At this moment, GE provides jobs to around 7,000 people out of which 4,000 jobs are located on the Schenectady Campus. This campus is the one where the steam turbines & generators are produced by GE.

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