A Drive to Generate Cleaner, More Efficient Power

Good is not good enough for engineer Pratyush Nag. That drive for perfection led the Siemens Executive Vice President and his natural gas turbine development team to strive for a “Roger Bannister moment.” The British runner became the first to achieve a sub-four-minute mile in 1954; Nag and his engineers wanted to push the limits of fuel efficiency.

The goal: Break through the 60% efficiency mark — the measure of how much useful energy a fuel source provides.

Natural gas can produce the same amount of energy as coal while emitting less than half of the CO₂, nitrogen oxides and other particulates. Nag wanted to create a power plant gas turbine that could run even more efficiently — a goal of engineers for decades, as combined cycle power plants have inched from 45% toward 55% efficiency. 

“The air gets thinner as we go toward the top,” Nag says of the challenge. “It takes an incredible amount of technological advances to get to these last digits of efficiency improvements.”

Nag and his Orlando, Florida-based team poured countless hours into their eventual solution, developing the H-class gas turbine, which is capable of 60% efficiency. Never satisfied, the team then topped themselves by creating the next-generation HL-class of gas turbines, which are smarter and even more powerful than their predecessors. These latest gas turbines operate at more than 63% efficiency, and a single HL-class combined cycle power plant provides enough electricity to support the needs of about three million people. 

Nag’s work epitomizes how the energy industry’s ongoing effort to develop state-of-the-art electricity generation technologies fueled by natural gas has helped people’s health and pocketbooks. This energy revolution is one of the many reasons Americans today are breathing cleaner air, and it’s why we’re also paying less for the electricity that keeps our smartphones charged and our lights on.

Natural gas is also an essential partner in helping communities that are moving toward renewable energies such as wind and solar. The HL-class turbines developed by Nag and his team provide flexible baseload power so that when the renewables are offline, the electricity that enables our modern way of life keeps flowing to the grid.

“This product is designed to meet the changes of the market dynamics while complementing the world’s future energy mix,” Nag says.

He points to his colleagues as the ones who help make this mission possible.

“The technology is cool,” he says, “but my passion is the people.”

For nearly two decades, in fact, Nag has recruited and developed a diverse group of individuals across Siemens in a variety of roles. Watching them grow, he says, is his “greatest reward.”