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"The world's largest tidal power station will be constructed off the coast of Incheon. GS Engineering and Construction signed a memorandum of understanding with state-run Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power (KHNP) on Wednesday and will begin Construction later next year with a view to completion around 2017. The power station will have a capacity of 1.32 million kw/h, surpassing the 1 million kw/h of a nuclear reactor being constructed in Ulsan and 3.4 times greater than the capacity of the Rance Tidal Power Station in France, currently the world's largest. It will generate 2.41 billion kw per year, the equivalent of 60 percent of Incheon's household electricity consumption."

Straw bale construction uses straw to build residential and commercial structures that are energy efficient and eco-friendly. It continues to gain adherents because of its use of natural building materials,

Officially grid-connected and set to work this week in Germany is a new wind tower from ATS. The novel tower construction allows very high hub heights that may increase a turbine's yield by 20% or more. With its hub height of 133 meters (436 feet), the system has an overall height of 180 meters (590 feet). "This is a great day for wind energy." said Frans Brughuis, Managing Director of the tower construction specialist Advanced Tower Systems (ATS). "Now the pilot project can demonstrate the high cost-effectiveness and efficiency of the ATS concept," The system, one of the largest wind energy systems with hybrid tower in the world, is installed at Germany's Windtest test field at Grevenbroich, near Cologne.

Green interior design is a post-construction step that is most likely similar to other ecological construction tasks. The materials used are eco-friendly.

MT 6024 is a multi-purpose subsea diving support and construction vessel (DSCV) being built for Thailand-based Mermaid Offshore Services, a subsidiary of the Mermaid Maritime Public Company. The vessel is being built by China Merchants Industry Holdings (CMHI) in China, with construction of the DSCV commencing in January; delivery of the vessel is scheduled for the third quarter of 2016.

Ecoinvent v2.1 is a life cycle inventory database that contains more than 4000 LCI datasets in the areas of agriculture, energy supply, transport, biofuels and biomaterials, bulk and speciality chemicals, construction materials, packaging materials, basic and precious metals, metals processing, ICT and electronics as well as waste treatment. The high-quality generic LCI datasets are based on industrial data and have been compiled by internationally renowned research institutes and LCA consultants. The data is available in the EcoSpold data format, and is compatible with all major LCA and eco-design software tools. Ecoinvent is used by more than 1500 users in more than 40 countries worldwide and is included in the leading LCA software tools as well as in various eco-design tools for building and construction, waste management or product design. It can be used for Integrated Product Policy (IPP), Environmental Product Declaration (EPD), Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Management (LCM) and Design for Environment (DfE)."

Ferreira Construction/Live Data Systems Cut the Electrical Cord

EDF Energy has secured planning approval from the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to construct a £14bn nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point C in Somerset, UK.

Tower climbers will play an instrumental role in the construction and the switch to a clean energy infrastructure.

The Guardian has an article on plans to expand micro-hydro generation in Britain - Canals and rivers to lead micro-hydropower revolution Britain's canals and rivers have already been heralded as a low-carbon way to tranport Tesco groceries, a test-bed for hydrogen boats and a opportunity to build more wind turbines. Now they're being billed as a chance for micro hydropower to flourish under new plans unveiled today by British Waterways, which maintains 2,200 miles of the country's canals and rivers. In partnership with The Small Hydro Company, British Waterways said it intended to build 25 small-scale hydro-electric schemes with a capacity of 40MW, enough to power 40,000 homes. While far smaller in capacity than offshore wind farms switched on in 2008, the hydro initiative hopes to raise £120m in private capital over the next three years, create 150 construction jobs and reduce CO2 emissions by 110,000 tonnes annually. Underwater turbines will be installed next to existing weirs and will not affect the navigation of canals and rivers. Larger waterways such as the Trent and Severn rivers will be used for the first hydro power projects, with many of the installations likely to be located in the East Midlands and Yorkshire. It is hoped the first of the 25 hydro installations will be generating renewable electricity by 2010.

Concentrating solar power (CSP) is an emerging technology that offers the potential to supply utility-scale peaking power competitively. In December 2008, a 1.5 MWe solar thermal central receiver system was declared operational by plant construction company Kraftanlagen Munchen. Although solar tower technology had been built as early as the 1970s and a second commercial tower is now close to completion (see REW magazine July/August 2008) the so-called Test and Demonstration Power Plant Julich, in Germany, is the world's first solar thermal power plant erected which uses air as the medium for heat transport. In all previous plants liquid media such as molten salt or oil have been used for the obvious reason of their high specific heat capacity, which in turn results in low volume flow rates and low pumping losses.

By office office office office office building green-and retrofitting existent buildings-the countries of North America could cut hothouse gas emissions by some-more than twenty-five percent North American homes, offices as good as alternative buildings minister an estimated 2. 2 billion tons of CO dioxide to a ambience each year-more than a single third of a continent's hothouse gas wickedness outlay. Simply constructing some-more energy-efficient buildings-and upgrading a insulation as good as windows in a existent ones-could save a whopping 1. 7 billion tons annually, says a brand brand new inform from a Montreal-based Commission for Environmental Cooperation( CEC), an general classification determined by Canada, Mexico as good as a U. S. underneath a North American Free Trade Agreement to residence continent-wide environmental issues.

AP reports that Californian voters passed a measure to build a high speed rail network in the state - Calif. voters approve $10B bond for bullet trains. Hopefully they can find the money for it California voters are green-lighting the nation's most ambitious high-speed rail system, approving a nearly $10 billion bond to put speeding bullet trains capable of topping 200 mph between the state's major metropolitan areas. The measure, which passed with 52 percent support Tuesday, will fund the first phase of what is projected to be a $45 billion, 800-mile project built with state, federal, local and private money. Backers sold the proposal as an innovative alternative to soaring airfares and gas prices. In the closing weeks of the campaign, they touted estimates that it would create nearly 160,000 construction-related jobs and 450,000 permanent jobs.

It was a day when the shift from the past to the future was almost palpable. It started Thursday morning in Berkeley where Green Wombat was moderating a panel of tech luminaries gathered at the University of California's Global Technology Leaders Conference. As Shai Agassi, founder of electric car infrastructure company Better Place, makes the case for harnessing Silicon Valley's technological innovation to Detroit's manufacturing might to create a sustainable car industry, dispatches from the automotive apocalypse roll down my BlackBerry: Ford (F) shares sink to $1.01…GM's (GM) stock falls to its lowest level since World War II…U.S. automakers beg for a bailout…California Congressman Henry Waxman ousts Michigan's John Dingell - the Duke of Detroit - from his 28-year chairmanship of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee. Agassi slips out of the conference and an hour later I catch up with him across the Bay at San Francisco City Hall where he and representatives of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the mayors of San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland announce a $1 billion project to build a regional network of electric car charging stations. Better Place has signed similar deals with governments in Israel, Denmark and Australia, but California is the company's first foray into the U.S. market. Planning for the Bay Area network begins in 2009 with construction scheduled to start in 2010 and commercial rollout set for 2012.

Since 1995, West Palm Beach-based Florida Crystals Corp. has been operating the largest biomass-to-electricity facility in North America, the Okeelanta Co-Generation Plant next to its sugar mill and refinery plant south of South Bay. The plant uses 850,000 tons of sugar cane residue known as bagasse and 900,000 tons of clean wood material from construction and yard wastes to produce 140 net megawatts of electricity each year. The power is sold to Florida Power & Light Co. to provide electricity to 58,000 homes, said Florida Crystals spokesman Gaston Cantens.

The Peruvian alternative energy company Iberoperuana Inversiones SAC has commenced construction on a 240 megawatt wind energy farm. It is Peru's first major alternative energy project. Iberoperuana Inversiones plans to invest $240 million in the farm, which is projected to provide clean electricity for an estimated 80,000 families in Peru's southern desert region of Paracas. The wind energy park will be located near the city of Ica (near Paracas National Park and the Nazca Lines) and will be known as the "Parque Eólico San Andrés" (San Andrés Wind Park).

While still a small percentage of overall electric generation, there's no denying that wind power has been growing consistently in the United States. In 2007, an additional 5,329 megawatts of capacity was added, an amount which was slightly more than a quarter of all new global wind capacity that year. Currently an additional 8 gigawatts of wind capacity is under construction and scheduled to be operational by the end of 2008. The result: This will be the third straight year that the United States leads the world in annual wind power installations, according to a new study by Emerging Energy Research.

A while back we reported (with some skepticism) a report coming out of China that said they would be producing over 100 gigawatts of wind by 2020, a 1,500% increase. Little did I know that the United States was, at the same time, on track to actually beat that! A report from Emerging Energy Research, a cleantech consulting firm, points out that the U.S. is now the world's fastest growing market for wind power. Last year 5 gigawatts of wind power were installed, and 2008 will break the record again with 8 new gigawatts under construction. The U.S. will shortly be the world's largest producer of wind energy, surpassing Germany's 22 gigawatts.

Construction on the nation's first solar demonstration project in a highway right of way has begun. At the Interstate 5 and Interstate 205 interchange in Tualatin, Oregon, 594 solar panels are being installed on a strip of land beside the highway roughly the length of two football fields. Governor Ted Kulongoski, with transportation and utilities officials, broke ground on Thursday on the all-Oregon project.

As soon as I have finished this column I will jump on the train to Kent. Last year Al Gore remarked: "I can't understand why there aren't rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants." Like hundreds of honorary young people, I am casting my Zimmer frame aside to answer the call. Everything now hinges on stopping coal. Whether we prevent runaway climate change largely depends on whether we keep using the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel. Unless we either leave it - or the carbon dioxide it produces - in the ground, human development will start spiralling backwards. The more coal is burnt, the smaller are our chances of future comfort and prosperity. The industrial revolution has gone into reverse.