Veena P. has learned in her 14 years at GE Vernova that earning patent recognition for her inventions isn’t a matter of waiting for lightning to strike. Instead, the technology manager in electrical systems at GE Vernova’s Advanced Research Center in Bengaluru, India, has developed a systematic process that has helped her successfully register 30 patent applications so far, with more in the works all the time. Her innovations support GE Vernova’s mission to accelerate the energy transition, making power systems more efficient and reliable.
An innate curiosity about how things work has long driven Veena’s creativity. As a child growing up in Hyderabad, she admired the problem-solving skills of her father, a mechanical engineer. She would disassemble household objects to understand, for example, how a calculator performs math. She recalls a female physics teacher pouring a pile of iron filings onto a large pink sheet, then placing a bar magnet in the center of the sheet, which caused the iron filings to line up in a specific pattern around the magnet. This provided an opportunity to teach the class about dipole systems and invisible magnetic fields.
“For me, it was very exciting to know that these things exist in nature, that someone discovered them, and then someone else applied these basic laws of physics to create something as useful as electricity,” says Veena, who joined GE Vernova in 2011. “No one has seen electricity, yet we cannot live without it. It continues to amaze me.”
Always Brewing Up New Ideas
One of Veena’s favorite patents for the company was inspired by a glass of beer. Back in college, a professor had compared the capability of a power system to a glass containing both liquid beer and a top layer of foam. The beer was analogous to the real or usable power generated by an energy source, while the foam was like the reactive power that is necessary for the system to operate but doesn’t deliver energy to customers.
Veena was interested in improving the efficiency of a hybrid power system — one combining wind and solar power — by changing how the real and reactive power are distributed. Working with her team, she considered how to generate reactive power at night, when solar arrays ordinarily would be idle.
Ultimately, they developed a software solution that has been shown to increase energy production from a hybrid plant by up to 0.85%, simply by employing existing infrastructure at times when it ordinarily would go unused. The innovation is now patented and available to GE Vernova customers.
The example shows Veena’s process in action: First, identify a problem that’s causing a bottleneck. Next, review the existing research to identify gaps. Then, in consultation with the product team, determine whether a business case exists for a potential solution. Finally, iterate on ideas to develop a patentable invention.
Another technology Veena contributed to is GE Vernova’s WiSE, or Wind Integrated Solar Energy, designed for power plants that produce both wind and solar. The interface accepts direct current from solar panels without having to convert the voltage, enabling the panels to be plugged directly into the circuitry of the wind turbines.
“Patenting is one of my primary priorities,” says Veena. “Research is about creating things that will, in the future, become the regular mode of operation. As we innovate, we have a responsibility to protect the intellectual property of the company.”
Finding Opportunities to Innovate
Veena’s research specialties are improving electrical grid operations and integrating renewable energy technologies. Each new patent leads to a new or improved GE Vernova product, which means not only another satisfied customer but one more advance toward more sustainable energy systems. She and her team move forward with research when customers ask for an innovation, or the business team believes a proposed solution has strong commercial potential.
At the Bengaluru research center, Veena oversees a team of 16 engineers. One of her favorite pieces of advice for her team is to “be scientifically curious about why something is done the way it is. When the answer is ‘This is how it has always been done,’ digging deeper into understanding the drivers for that decision will help validate whether there is an opportunity to innovate.”
Veena is especially delighted when one of the women engineers she works with files a patent application. The share of women inventors in electrical engineering doubled from 2000 to 2022, according to a World Economic Forum analysis of records from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, but women still were named in only 10% of patents in this area.
To encourage more patent applications, Veena schedules time every week or two to talk with her team members about problems they are solving and whether an innovation might be patentable.
She reminds her team that, while they may run into roadblocks, they can work together to overcome them. “An approach that has worked for me is to treat setbacks as learning opportunities and failures as the pauses needed to reflect, pivot, and move forward,” she says. “Understanding the big picture — for example, a system-level overview or the business impact of an invention — approaching the problem with an open mind, and, lastly, never giving up are the things that keep me going.”
