Ge Is Leaning Particularly Hard into the wind market, the strongest of its clean energy businesses, and it is redrawing the industry in the process. With its financial might, power engineering connections, and global reach, the company has set off a scramble for market share in the consolidating wind industry. Just last year, Siemens AG, in Munich, Germany—GE's main rival in the gas turbine business—snapped up one of GE's increasingly beleaguered competitors, Denmark's second-largest wind power manufacturer, Bonus Energy A/S, in Brande.

While Denmark's Vestas Wind Systems A/S, in Ringkobing, is still the world's biggest wind turbine manufacturer, GE is the player with the greatest potential clout. From that point of view, it stands "head and shoulders above everybody else in the wind business," says Andreas Willi, a London-based analyst for investment banker JP Morgan Chase & Co. who tracks European power equipment firms.

But is GE's embrace of renewables evidence of a long-term commitment to the industry? Or is it just the latest example of "greenwashing" on the part of yet another corporate titan eager to divert attention from its past environmental misdeeds? It's hard to say now, but even die-hard renewable-energy advocates agree that GE has a compelling business model for making wind turbines and photovoltaics and may actually persevere, unlike some predecessors.

"There couldn't be anything more different than selling devices to make electricity on rooftops and selling gas at the pump," says Christopher Flavin, president of the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. "Technologies that generate electricity are really a better fit for a GE [than for oil companies]," he says.

That's how GE executives see it, too. "Renewables are a growing segment of the power-generation market, and we want to be able to participate," says John Rice, CEO of GE Energy, in Atlanta. The power-equipment business unit has revenues exceeding US $17 billion a year. The market numbers support Rice's case for going where the action is. Sales of gas turbines—GE Energy's mainstay in the 1990s—have hit the dumps in recent years, thanks to overcapacity and spiking fuel prices. GE and its competitors sold more than 1400 large gas turbines between June 1999 and May 2002 but only about 300 over the next two years, according to estimates by Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), a consultancy in Massachusetts.

Wind power, the most commercially viable of the renewable energy technologies, is blowing strongly in the other direction. CERA estimates that more than $7.2 billion worth of wind turbines were installed last year, roughly equaling global sales of gas turbines.

What remains to be seen is whether power equipment behemoths like GE and Siemens will stay committed to their clean-energy investments and, if they do, whether they will have any more success than their predecessors in profiting from them. Five years ago, the Swiss power equipment firm ABB Ltd., in Zurich, sold its gas turbine division, which had been its main operation, and plunged headlong into alternative energy.

At that point, ABB seemed to be in a neck-and-neck competition with GE, its chief executive officers regularly ranking in business surveys as the world's most admired. Today, ABB has little to show for what seemed to be a bold strategy, thanks in part to technical troubles and slower than expected growth in demand. In the global power business, the once-mighty company is marginalized.