The new centers of excellence will be located in Louisville, Kentucky; Bloomington, Indiana; Decatur, Alabama; and Selmer, Tennessee.
In Louisville, G.E. will spend $194 million to construct a center for bottom-freezer refrigerators, which is expected to create 300 green jobs for the local community.
Meanwhile, a $93 million investment will be rolled out to revive the company’s facility in Bloomington, which was once slated for closure, to become a center for side-by-side refrigerators. This new venture, which will create 200 jobs, will augment a previous $68 million investment in the plant’s current product lines, bringing the company’s total investment through 2014 to $161 million.
G.E. also allocated $43 million to create a center for top-freezers and green manufacturing at Decatur, adding to an earlier $16 million funding pool that will help the facility transition into a new product insulation process. The total investment will help retain over 1,000 jobs in the area.
Finally, the company will inject $32 million into its subsidiary Monogram Refrigeration Operation L.L.C. in Selmer to redesign its built-in refrigeration line and develop a new configuration for the high-end market, saving 166 jobs in the process. A significant chunk of the investment will be used to minimize the environmental footprint of the refrigerator manufacturing process.
Refrigerator units redesigned at the Louisville, Bloomington and Decatur facilities will be manufactured using a more ecologically sound foam insulating process to cut down greenhouse gas emissions at these sites by 90 percent or 687,000 metric tons annually.
Furthermore, the new product design is set to meet 2014 Energy Star standards and will bring improved efficiency and reduced power bills to customers.
G.E. (NYSE:
GE
) also plans to embed its smart grid technology into majority of the new refrigerator products, which will allow users to manage their energy consumptions and save money in areas where dynamic pricing options are available.
“This type of investment would have been impossible without the tremendous work underway at these plants to drive down costs and improve productivity and efficiency,” said James Campbell, president and chief executive of G.E. appliances and lighting.
“With the new center of excellence model, the adoption of lean manufacturing and agreements by employees and unions to freeze current wages and adopt competitive wage rates for new employees, these facilities are evidence of a growing American manufacturing renewal,» he noted.
