GE Plans Freight-Use Battery Facility

GE Transportation plans to build a $100 million factory to make high-power batteries that it says are a key to putting hybrid-drive power systems into heavy freight locomotives, harbor tug boats and mining trucks.

The plant will be near Albany, N.Y., and the state is pledging more than $15 million in incentives for a facility that will create 350 manufacturing jobs, the company said. It will also seek federal economic stimulus funds for the project through the Department of Energy, and expects to have the plant fully running by mid-2011.

The company estimates these “green technology” battery operations could become a $1 billion business in the next decade, as they help curb industrial use of oil-based fuels.

GE Transportation, a unit of General Electric, is already one of just two major builders of freight locomotives in North America, a market it shares with Electro-Motive Diesel. While some others build smaller yard locomotives or the lower horsepower engines that pull passenger trains, these two make the world’s most powerful units needed for line-haul traffic by North American railroads.

Last year GE unveiled a prototype of the planned “Evolution” series hybrid locomotive, which recovers some energy from braking and stores it into a package of high-capacity batteries for later use as pulling power.

It said storing the braking energy and drawing on it to pull trains can cut a locomotive’s fuel use and diesel emissions by 10 percent. GE plans to market the hybrid engine in 2010.

But a key to making this and other heavy-industry products work well has been to build up the battery power. GE said it has already spent more than $150 million to develop advanced battery technologies and continues to work on them. “This battery technology will allow GE to be the first manufacturer to introduce a hybrid, heavy-haul locomotive,” the company said.

Its announcement included a comment by Matthew K. Rose -- the chairman, president and CEO of BNSF Railway -- that hybrid locomotives “could be an important part of how we ship goods by rail in the future.”