General Electric Co. has filed a federal lawsuit against Siemens Energy Inc. alleging the rival used GE's trade secrets to ultimately land a contract to supply equipment for a Dominion Energy Inc. natural gas peaking plant.

The lawsuit filed Jan. 14 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia (General Electric Co. v. Siemens Energy Inc., 3:21-cv-00025) alleges that a Siemens account manager "knowingly and surreptitiously received GE's trade secrets" through his personal email address.

"Rather than reject or destroy GE's trade secrets, he forwarded them to his Siemens email address and widely disseminated them to dozens of other Siemens employees, including the employees directly responsible for analyzing and preparing Siemens' bid responses, who then — critically — used GE's trade secrets to improve Siemens' own bid," GE wrote in its lawsuit.

The company said Siemens used the information to win a "lucrative contract to provide gas turbine units and maintenance services in Virginia worth at least $225 million, and potentially as much as $340 million."

The complaint stems from a request for proposals issued by Dominion in 2019 "for 'peaker' gas turbine equipment and servicing" in Danville, Va.

GE said it entered into a confidentiality agreement with Dominion before submitting its initial bid.

"After that confidentiality agreement was executed, and in reliance on that agreement, GE submitted a bid package to Dominion that contained GE's confidential trade secrets about four separate gas turbine models, including information about the technical specifications for those turbine models, the pricing structure for different combinations of turbine units, and the proprietary processes by which GE would service and maintain those turbine models," the company wrote. "GE submitted its bid package to Dominion through a confidential online portal to which it understood only the Dominion employees overseeing the Peakers Project [request for proposals] would have access."

Siemens was one of two other bidders for the project, according to GE.

The company alleges that after the bids were submitted in May 2019, a senior Dominion employee began sending GE's trade secrets to a Siemens account manager. The documents also included Dominion's "internal analyses and evaluations of all competitors' confidential bids," the lawsuit states.

"As a result, Siemens was handed the 'blueprint' for how to win the Virginia contract (and other Dominion [requests for proposals]) by tailoring its unit specifications and pricing to most effectively compete against GE, while GE and other competitors remained in the dark," GE wrote.

In its complaint, GE noted that Siemens waited 16 months to disclose to GE that it possessed the company's trade secrets "in a 'nothing to see here, folks' letter, in which Siemens misrepresented and minimized the scope and impact of its unlawful scheme."

"The resulting harm to GE is not limited to the loss of the Virginia contract," the company wrote. "The trade secrets misappropriated by Siemens are relevant to at least eight other gas turbine contracts that Siemens unfairly won over GE's competing bid in the [16-month] period before it first notified GE."

GE and Siemens are both bidding to supply gas turbine units in a request for proposals issued in South Carolina, according to the lawsuit.

"The sprawling and calculated theft of GE's trade secrets has enabled Siemens to win, so far, billions of dollars of contracts and remains ongoing — all at the expense of GE's ability to fairly compete," the company alleged.

GE has petitioned the court for "immediate injunctive relief" from ongoing harm and damages to compensate the company for "misappropriation of its trade secrets."

In December 2020, Dominion Energy scrapped plans to build the 500-MW Pittsylvania Electric Generation Project, a peaking gas plant that would have been sited at an industrial park owned by the City of Danville and Pittsylvania County, Va.

Siemens is a subsidiary of Germany's Siemens Energy AG.