Quoted Text

General Electric Co. says it is dialing down production and headcount at its Durathon battery plant in Schenectady in the next few months and moving a “significant portion” of  hourly plant workers at the plant to its steam turbine and generator operations nearby.

The move impacts roughly 400 jobs, although GE says there will be no layoffs.

The move appears to indicate GE has concerns about its energy storage enterprise, which had once been considered a $1 billion business only two years ago.

GE said in a statement Tuesday that the market for its batteries is still “evolving” and customers are still evaluating the technology.


Bill Acker, the executive director of NY-BEST, a statewide battery and energy storage consortium, said that GE’s decision should not be interpreted as the company abandoning battery technology.

Rather, he said that new regulations being considered in New York and other states that would open up the market for the use of batteries on the electrical grid are still a year or more away from being put into place.

What we are seeing now, Acker said, is just a pause as companies like GE adjust their expectations of the growth of the battery market.

“We’re in this transition period to get the rules right to make this happen,” Acker said. “What you’re seeing is companies not wanting to get to far ahead of themselves.”

GE originally developed the sodium nickel batteries for use in locomotives but found a market for on-demand energy storage and backup power. Target customers were utilities, facilities managers, telecom companies and wind farm owners.

“GE is still committed to the energy storage business,” GE said in a statement. “Our goal is to build a long-term product and commercial strategy that better serves our customers’ evolving energy storage needs.”

GE invested heavily in the business, hiring 450 people and spending $170 million on the factory, which began production in 2011.

That was beyond GE’s initial plans for $100 million and 350 jobs.

GE emphasized Tuesday that it is not closing the battery plant, located in Building 66. The company has not been afraid of quickly pivot and close or scale down businesses when the market changes. GE previously shut down plans for a massive solar panel factory in Colorado a few years back.

On the flip side, Immelt has been pushing the company to quickly launch businesses based on technology coming out of its labs, although that new strategy, called FastWorks, has employed start-up principles using small pilot production facilities instead of large factories.

About 50 employees will remain at the factory long-term, with the first wave of 50 people moving to the steam turbine operations in Building 273 on Feb. 2.

Both buildings are located on GE’s sprawling downtown Schenectady campus, which is the headquarters for GE’s largest division, GE Power & Water.

“More will follow after that, but we don’t have exact numbers or timing on those yet,” GE spokesman Nik Noel said Tuesday.  “That transition will happen in phases over the coming weeks and is expected to be complete by the end of March.”

At one point, GE envisioned 450 workers as it decided to quickly ramp up the business, which serves industrial customers.

At the $100 million facility’s 2012 opening, GE CEO Jeff Immelt announced plans to spend another $70 million to expand production and add 100 workers to the initial 350 hires.

Immelt believed the business would reach $500 million in revenue by 2016 and $1 billion by 2020.

“We should all be disappointed if we don’t accomplish those goals,” Immelt told GE workers when he visited the 200,000 square-foot plant in July 2012.

The state and the county pledged $20 million to GE for the enterprise. Of that, $5 million came from the Schenectady Metroplex Development Authority, which issued bonds to raise the money.

“GE has exceeded both job and investment commitments related to the Building 66 project which transformed an empty warehouse into a state of the art 190,000 square foot manufacturing facility,” said Metroplex chairman Ray Gillen. “We appreciate  GE’s commitment to retain jobs in Schenectady.”

The battery plant’s initial customers included Megatron Federal, a South African company that signed a $60 million deal to use the batteries in telecom installations in Nigeria.

Another one was a Rochester company called Arista Power that agreed to buy Durathon batteries for the use in its own energy storage device.

Arista, however,  has been going through struggles and has been cutting staff and research spending lately.

Quoted from TakingItBack

...Niskayuna site is almost fully taxable.  Why??

Quoted from joebxr

If you are referring to KAPL,
"KAPL is operated for the Department of Energy by Bechtel Marine Propulsion Corporation."