Shares of General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE) surges in early trading session On Friday after the firm said that it has resolved all of its remaining patent challenges with Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy S.A. over wind turbine technology in the United States and Europe.
In 2020, Siemens Gamesa filed a patent infringement lawsuit against GE regarding the latter’s Haliade-X turbines. After a jury determined that GE’s Haliade-X wind turbines violated a Siemens Gamesa patent, a federal court in Boston forbade GE from producing and marketing them in the United States.
There was no disclosure of the settlement’s terms.
Yet thanks to royalties paid to Siemens Gamesa, GE was permitted to continue producing and managing the turbines for ongoing projects off the shores of Massachusetts and New Jersey.
The same judge decided in February that GE must quadruple the patent royalty payments it makes to Siemens Gamesa for the turbines it employs in a project to generate renewable energy off the coast of New Jersey.
The agreement announced on Friday lifts a cloud off GE’s renewable business, which has recently struggled to earn a profit owing to a confluence of sluggish demand, rising labor and raw material prices, and supply-chain concerns.
GE Renewable Energy Contracts
As part of a specially formed consortium with Sembcorp Marine for TenneT’s ground-breaking 2GW Program in the Netherlands, GE Renewable Energy’s Grid Solutions business (NYSE: GE) announced that it has been awarded three High-Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) contracts worth a combined total of about 6 billion euros. The contracts were given out as part of a Framework Cooperation Agreement with a five-year term that may be extended by an additional three years.
Also, an agreement between TenneT and a partnership made up of GE and McDermott was signed, and TenneT intends to award this consortium two more HVDC contracts in Germany with a combined total of about 4 billion euros in April 2023.
In order to link 40 GW of offshore wind farms to the high voltage grids in the Netherlands and Germany, the Dutch-German Transmission Systems Operator (TSO) has granted 11 two gigawatt (GW) contracts to HVDC vendors, with five of those contracts going to GE consortia. The Esbjerg Declaration in May 2022 at the North Sea Energy Summit led to TenneT’s large-scale project. At that summit, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Belgium agreed to install at least 65 GW of offshore wind energy collectively by 2030 – up from 20 GW today – to advance Europe’s energy security in light of recent geopolitical developments. TenneT intends to deploy 20 GW in the German and Dutch North Seas, respectively.
