The outlines of a massive solar thermal power plant-the largest ever-are starting to appear in the wilderness outside of Las Vegas. The US$ 2.2 billion project, which is being built by NRG Energy, Google, Oakland, California-based BrightSource and Bechtel, the engineering and construction contractor for the project, stretches over 14.5 million square meters near Ivanpah in Mojave Desert, California. When it's finished, it will generate 377 megawatts of electricity on sunny days and it will nearly double the amount of solar thermal electricity produced in the US. The project has been a long time coming. BrightSource first filed an application for the project in the summer of 2007. Approval took three years and official construction started in October 2011. Crews began installing the hundreds of thousands of mirrors in February of this year. Construction was temporarily slowed to accommodate the care and relocation of desert tortoises-a threatened species-found in larger numbers than expected. The project, which will generate electricity by using mirrors to concentrate sunlight to heat up water and drive steam turbines, is now expected to be finished next year in 2013. The Ivanpah solar thermal power plant will generate power the same way as traditional power plants - by creating high temperature steam to turn a turbine. However, instead of using fossil fuels or nuclear power to create the steam, this plant uses the sun's energy. By this way, the plant will reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by more than 400 thousand tons annually, which is equivalent of taking more than 70 thousand cars off the road. Besides this, in order to conserve scarce water resources, the plant employs an air-cooling system to convert the steam back into water in a closed-loop cycle. By using air-cooling, the new technology uses more than 90 percent less water than older technology parabolic through plants with wet cooling. Even as the project nears completion, the future of solar thermal power plants is in doubt. That's in large part because prices for solar panels-which convert sunlight to electricity directly-have dropped quickly in the last few years, causing at least one company to abandon plans to build solar thermal plants in favor of making ones that use solar panels. At least, solar thermal has one great strength compared to many other types of solar power: the heat it produces is easy to store, so electricity can be generated even after the sun goes down, and power can be dispatched to the grid whenever it's most needed. But the picture may change, as according to The CNNMoney, the US Department of Commerce last month announced it would impose punitive tariffs as high as 250 percent on panels imported from China after finding that Chinese companies have been "dumping" them at prices below production costs. As we reported earlier, on May 2011 took place ground breaking ceremony of the world's largest Blythe Solar power plant. Once construction is completed, the site will feature four solar thermal power plants with a total generating capacity of thousand megawatts of electricity. Latest development for Blythe Solar is very much unfavorable. As reported the Forbes, developer companies of the project Solar Trust of America and the Solar Millennium Group filed for bankruptcy, the former in USA and the latter in Germany.

Engineers in California have unleashed high-intensity artificial earthquakes on a five-storey building packed with medical equipment. The mock hospital has been built on a giant "shake table" which can subject the building to movements similar to real earthquakes. The tests are designed to determine if hospitals built on rubber bearings could function after a quake. The use of these rubber bearings is common in earthquake-prone Japan. The $5m project also tested whether the bearings could protect other strategically important buildings, such as computer data centers, so they could operate without interruption after a large earthquake. It is the first time that the bearing system has been tested under a full-scale building on a shake table in the United States. "What the bearings do is uncouple the building from the motion of the ground during an earthquake, like putting the building on roller skates," said Tara Hutchinson, an engineering professor at the University of California, San Diego. She said that while most research concentrated on the structural integrity of buildings after an earthquake, very little examined how vital contents such as stairs, lifts and other parts of a building that allowed it to fulfill its function fared after a major seismic event. The building was equipped with a surgery and an intensive-care unit, computer servers and other electrical equipment, as well as stairs and a working lift. The 80ft (24m) structure was also clad in precast concrete and synthetic stucco, two materials which are commonly used in commercial construction projects, and a large water tower and a heating and air-conditioning system was installed on the roof. On the first day of testing in early April, the shake table subjected the building to identical motions to those recorded during the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles, which measured 6.7 on the Richter scale, and the 8.8-magnitude Chile earthquake in 2010. The engineers found that the rubber bearings (or "base isolators") successfully protected the building from most of the damaging lateral motion that it would experience during a real earthquake. It also left lifts, stairs, medical equipment and other machinery intact, although there was some minor cosmetic damage. "What we found is that the contents of the building carried on working after our 'earthquakes'," said Professor Hutchinson. "If the equipment had been life-support systems keeping real people alive, then the bearings would have saved their lives." Engineers have now removed the base isolators from beneath the building, and over the next three weeks Professor Hutchinson will repeat the simulated earthquakes so that a direct comparison can be made between the damage to the building's contents with and without them in place. Rubber base isolators have already been retrofitted under the Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco city halls.

Recently, the tech giant Facebook announced its decision to relocate its company headquarters from Palo Alto to Menlo Park, California - a move which could spur over US$ 366 million in construction spending for the region, reported constructiondigital. According to a report by research firm Brion & Associates, the US$ 250 million budgeted building project could result in an additional US$ 116 million in additional construction activity over a period of 3-4 years, and may bring up to 2,5 thousand jobs to the area. The move comes as Facebook prepares for an IPO (Initial public offering) aimed at raising up to US$ 10 billion in revenue for the social networking leader, which would bring its overall company value to over US$ 100 billion. The new headquarters would house up to 9,5 thousand employees in anticipation of coming expansions, and some predict the firm would bring almost US$ 30 million in annual spending to the region's lodging and retail markets. Facebook is planning similar expansions of its satellite facilities in New York and elsewhere as part of the lead up to the public offering - yet another way social networking is helping prop up the struggling construction industry.

Last week California's Governor Jerry Brown was joined by U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar for the ground breaking ceremony of the world's largest solar thermal facility near Blythe, California, reported constructiondigital.com. Once construction is completed, the site will feature four solar thermal power plants with a total generating capacity of 1,000 megawatts of electricity. This would be enough energy to power 800,000 (corrected by construction.am according to the US Energy Department data) American homes using a clean, domestic source of fuel. Blythe Solar will cover about 7,025 acres of land. Governor Brown praised the solar power plant as a key step toward his goal of building a green economy of the future in California."We're going to be the world leader in solar energy," Brown said during the groundbreaking ceremony. Preparations for the facility have been underway since 2010, with early work already being done on the first two solar power plants that will be able to generate 242 megawatts of electricity. The first two plants are expected to be operational and connected to California's power grid by 2014. In April the Blythe solar project received a loan guarantee of $2.1 billion from the US Federal Financing Bank. The total projected cost of the project is expected to reach about $2.8 billion. The facility is being built by the Solar Trust of America and the Solar Millennium Group, two of the world's top producers of solar thermal technology. The Solar Millennium Group built the first operational parabolic trough power plants in Europe. Parabolic trough is the only type of solar technology that has been proven since the 1980s to be able to produce enough electricity for commercial use in large power plants.

After thirteen years as the world's premier Internet Search Engine, Google has finally decided to get its own address. The company has hired a German architecture firm to undertake construction of its own office. With plans to add over 6,000 new employees just in 2011 alone, Google is in massive need of some new space. For over a decade, Google has leased its offices in Northern California, spread out between 65 different buildings in the Mountain View area. That number is more than double what it was in 2005, and the company expects to grow even more in the coming years as it makes dramatic staff increases. According to Mercury News, Google announced this week it plans to build its brand new headquarters on a property in Mountain View, California south of Palo Alto near the Moffett Federal Airfield. The Mountain View City Council approved the deal in late March, and Google is expected to make the $30 million upfront payment in June for a lease that will run for 53 years on half of the 18.6-acre city-owned site. Mountain View and Google had reached an agreement in 2007 to lease the other 9.2 acres, with Google paying an initial rent of $1.1 million a year. The two deals collectively allow Google to develop up to 595,000 square feet of office and research and development space. German firm Ingenhoven Architects, renowned for their large-scale environmentally-friendly projects and unique aesthetics, will reportedly design Google's new structure. Ingenhoven has designed buildings in Europe, Asia and Australia, including a tubular glass and steel structure for the new European Investment Bank headquarters in Luxembourg and a new zero-emission railway station in Stuttgart, Germany, that will require no heating, cooling or mechanical ventilation. "We've asked them to build the most green, sustainable building possible," a spokesman for Google told Mercury News. Google is not sharing any details, but city officials said preliminary plans could be filed later this month, with construction starting as early as 2012.