THAT'S NOT COUNTING the energy efficiency technology market aimed at reducing power consumption. GE has identified 17 products worth $10 billion in annual sales, including jet engines, locomotive engines, consumer appliances, plastics and water treatment plants as part of the Ecomagination platform where it could embed a greater amount of eco-friendliness. GE has a put in place a system for certifying process and a scorecard for product that can be part of the Ecomagination platform. This provides the company a consistent standard to evaluate a product's potential for Ecomagination branding and also provides an important sales tool to quantify the environmental benefits of a product. The scorecard also helps the R&D teams and GE's clients to evaluate Ecomagination's efficacy. "When you look at where the world needs to be by 2050, we have to have 80 percent lower (greenhouse gas) emissions. Our jet engines will be 15% more efficient, our locomotive engines will have 40 percent lower nitrogen oxide emissions. And this is just the beginning,' she adds. In the absence of this i n i t i a t i v e , Bolsinger says that GE's emissions in the past three years would have gone up by 30%. Instead they are actually down by 1%. In these years, GE's energy costs too have come down by $100 million. But are customers, a lot of them small and mid-size companies in emerging markets whose current priority is to drive topline growth and expand capacity, ready to fork out a substantial premium for green products? "Customers aren't dumb. They do extensive lifecycle analysis for every little piece of machine they buy. They understand that the commercial paybacks even on a two-year time horizon is pretty high with our new product line. The awareness and desire to use green technology in India is very good, in fact better than China. Very soon most of our customers will say we don't want anything but an environmentally friendly product. Cheap but dirty will not be acceptable,' explains Bolsinger. In India the national carrier Air India, a large repeat customer for GE, is the latest convert to Ecomagination products. With Ecomagination being closely integrated with GE's brand, realistically how many of its products can be turned green? "Yes it's difficult to make a greener credit card, but Ecomagination will be part of our DNA. We already have brown and green asset valuations. There really is no end to this,' say Bolsinger. tr.vivek@timesgroup.com