Siemens 2008 Annual Report Download - page 20

14 At a glance – Our innovators and innovations
Many of our innovations are included in our Environmental Portfolio (see also page 24) and focus
specically on reducing harmful CO2 emissions. By 2011, we intend to enable customers who are
beneting from the Portfolio’s products and solutions to cut their CO2 output by 275 million tons a
year – an amount equal to the total annual greenhouse gas emissions of New York, London, Tokyo,
Hong Kong, Singapore and Rome. It’s here that solutions from our Energy Sector are playing a
vital role – setting new efciency standards with record-breaking, high-efciency gas-and-steam
turbine power plants, high-capacity wind turbines and super-low-loss power transmission technol-
ogies. We’re also developing solutions to ensure tomorrow’s energy supplies. Our innovations
include oating wind turbines for operation on the high seas, where winds are considerably stron-
ger than near the coast, and coal-red power plants that – with an efciency of 50 percent – emit
40 percent less CO2 per kilowatt hour than the industry average. We’re also testing various ways of
separating CO2 both before and after fossil-fuel combustion so that it can be captured and stored
underground.
In the area of power transmission, we’re developing smart grids – highly efcient, extremely reli-
able intelligent power networks that don’t shut down even when subjected to wide uctuations in
power input or demand and are capable of linking a large number of decentralized power genera-
tion systems. Energy efciency is one of our top priorities. When outtted with frequency convert-
ers, our energy-saving industrial motors consume up to 50 percent less electricity than conven-
tional drives. Our high-efciency light emitting diodes (LEDs) use only one-fth the power of
equally bright incandescent lamps and last 50 times longer. For their work in developing a process
to manufacture bright white LEDs, a team of OSRAM researchers and a partner at the Fraunhofer
Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering in Jena, Germany received the German
Future Prize for 2007.
How Siemens innovators are mastering
the challenges of the future
Innovation has always been the key to our success. Building on our
tradition of innovative strength, we have 32,300 researchers working
on new solutions for energy, industry and healthcare and more than
1,000 research partnerships with universities, research institutes and
industrial companies around the world.