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.

Many of our innovations are included in our Environmental Portfolio and focus specifically on reducing harmful CO₂ emissions. By 2011, we intend to enable customers who are benefiting 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 efficiency standards with record-breaking, high-efficiency gas-and-steam turbine power plants, high-capacity wind turbines and super-low-loss power transmission technologies. We’re also developing solutions to ensure tomorrow’s energy supplies. Our innovations include floating wind turbines for operation on the high seas, where winds are considerably stronger than near the coast, and coal-fired power plants that – with an efficiency of 50 percent – emit 40 percent less CO₂ per kilowatt hour than the industry average. We’re also testing various ways of separating CO₂both 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 efficient, extremely reliable intelligent power networks that don’t shut down even when subjected to wide fluctuations in power input or demand and are capable of linking a large number of decentralized power generation systems. Energy efficiency is one of our top priorities. When outfitted with frequency converters, our energy-saving industrial motors consume up to 50 percent less electricity than conventional drives. Our high-efficiency light emitting diodes (LEDs) use only one-fifth 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.

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Around 1,900 scientists are conducting basic research at our Corporate Technology Department. Current projects range from the simulation of water networks and the resource-saving optimization of industrial systems to the development of new materials for LEDs and coatings for gas turbine blades. All these innovations aim to increase efficiency. A special project is focused on maximizing the long-term efficiency of building technologies. Accounting for about 40 percent of global energy consumption, buildings harbor particularly high energy-saving potential. Here, too, we specialize in ecofriendly technologies – from energy-saving lamps and intelligent building management systems to the financing models of efficiency-enhancing performance contracting, which enables customers to pay off investments through energy savings. Thousands of such projects have demonstrated that – when the right measures are implemented – a building’s energy consumption can be cut 20 to 40 percent. To cite just one example, we’ve equipped Lisbon’s new Hospital da Luz with high-efficiency building technologies. The installed systems feature 13,000 sensors that optimize lighting, ventilation and climate control.

However, our involvement in the hospital project didn’t stop there. We also provided leading-edge healthcare technologies, encompassing everything from imaging and healthcare IT systems to workflow optimization solutions. The Hospital da Luz underscores our innovative strength as an integrated healthcare company. In diagnostic imaging, we’ve recently rolled out a new CT scanner that allows various types of tissue to be automatically differentiated in a single scan. In laboratory diagnostics, we’ve developed a new device that combines several different measurement systems into one. Capable of accommodating up to 200 samples an hour, it can perform a large number of tests simultaneously. And in the area of healthcare IT, our intelligent systems are helping doctors make complex diagnoses. The linking of patient information stored in different databases is enabling clinicians to recognize interconnections sooner and deliver more efficient patient care.