GE had built the first natural gas turbine to run a power plant in the United States in 1949. The first unit, which pumped out even more electricity than the planners had hoped for, wouldn’t be decommissioned until 1980. The first gas turbine ever was run a decade earlier in Switzerland by a company that, through a series of acquisitions, ended up being acquired by Alstom in 2000. Now it too was part of GE.
