General Electric Company (NYSE: GE) moved up 6 cents, or 0.17%, to end the day at $35.53. GE has a big industry milestone to announce today, some 5000 1.5 megawatt wind turbines have been installed by the company.

GE's investment in wind power has been a big winner in GE's energy division. It even merited several mention during the last earnings call with its over 200% growth. Though GE doesn't expect it to continue that dramatically, GE is banking on solid demand for windpower to continue. By the end of 2008, GE is saying it expects to have 10,000 1.5 megawatt wind turbines worldwide.

Though, for comparison, a single nuclear plant is capable of putting out thousands of megawatts, and turbines offer megawatts in the hundreds. A city like Austin has almost 3,000 megawatts of power generation on its grid. Therefore, GE has sold enough windpower turbines to run a decent sized city.

My inability to get the webcast to work properly on my machine led to no liveblogging of today's live webcast of GE's CEO talking about the company, but you can find the webcast up at the company's investor relations site still.

Much like Douglas Adam's riffs on how freaking huge space is in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I'm always struck by how large GE is, and nothing hammers that home more than listening to CEO Jeff Immelt spend an hour giving an overview of where the conglomerate stands today and where he sees it headed.

Jeff reaffirmed that GE has "never been in better shape" and went on to emphasize what he called the company's 'broadness' and the fact that is has positioned itself to rise on growth from several 'tailwinds,' which was the word he used for trends that GE was trying to harness for growth. Jeff said they continued to expect a $1.94-$2.02 earnings per share, as well as good growth throughout the company. Jeff made the point that throughout the last few years GE has invested in a lot of fundamental building of the platforms for technology and practices that will begin to pay off in a big way starting the next couple of years.

Some areas that Jeff saw GE harnessing right now: