Kenya's president has launched a US$ 14.5 billion project to build a new city intended to be an IT business hub and dubbed "Africa's Silicon Savannah". It will take 20 years to build Konza Technology City. The IT hub will be built over four phases starting with the technology centres. The new city is situated about 60 kilometers from the capital, Nairobi. It also will be just 50 kilometers from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and 500 kilometers from Mombasa and its ports, will provide a range of facilities suitable for IT companies and businesses to flourish. Konza is part of the government's ambitious Vision 2030 initiative to improve much-neglected infrastructure over the next 18 years. It is hoped that more than 20,000 IT jobs will be created in Konza by 2015, and more than 200,000 jobs by 2030. The 2011-hectare site will have a residential area comprising around 37 thousand homes to accommodate 185 thousand people. Over 600 hectares of Konza will be marked off as green corridors, and Kenya Wildlife Conservancy has pledged to safeguard the ecology of the surrounding savannah. It will also include a Modern Business Processing Outsourcing Park, Science Park, Convention Center, Mega Mall, Data Centres, Financial District, World-class Hotels, local and international schools and a championship golf course.

Belgium is set to construct an artificial island in the North Sea that will be used solely as storage for wind energy. Announcing the plans earlier this week, Belgium's North Sea minister Johan Lanotte explained that although Belgium has the capacity to produce a great deal of wind energy, much of the power produced during high winds exceeds the needs of the grid, and is wasted. By creating a dependable storage system for the wind energy, Belgium hopes that this innovative solution will help the nation to transition away from nuclear power and towards greater use of renewables. Only around 4 percent of Belgium's energy presently comes from wind power-the rest of the grid is supplied largely by nuclear power. However Belgium, as with Germany and Switzerland, has decided to shut down its nuclear power program by 2025 in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in 2011. The project for the artificial island is part of the state's larger initiative to reorient its power supply towards renewable energy sources. The European Wind Energy Association predicts that, by managing to store energy produced by using wind power, Belgium could expand its wind power capacity to over 4.000 megawatts by 2020. As an alternative to nuclear power and fossil fuel, wind power has so far faced major problems, largely due to insufficient ways to store the generated power. When the wind dies down, energy production must be backed up by a power source, which makes it expensive to operate. "We have a lot of energy from the wind mills and sometimes it just gets lost because there isn't enough demand for the electricity," said a spokeswoman for Belgium's North Sea minister Johan Vande Lanotte. The doughnut-shaped island will store energy by pumping water out of a hollow space in the middle and allowing it to flow back into the reservoir by turning a turbine to generate electricity. The electricity can then be sent back to the mainland.

Google has completed a US$ 1.6 billion deal to build a new UK headquarters on 10 thousand square meters of disused land behind King's Cross Station, underlining the global technology industry's commitment to London, reported The Financial Times. The internet search group confirmed that it would start building a new 11 storey office block on the site, which it would use to consolidate operations from its existing offices in London. The land was acquired from the Kings Cross Central Partnership. As reported Reuters Google was investing US$ 1 million to buy and develop the site. The office building will be worth up to US$ 1.6 when it is finished in 2016. The deal, one of the most valuable property transactions in the UK since the start of the financial crisis, follows a string of high-profile moves by technology groups, including Skype, Oracle and Amazon, to take up office space in the UK capital. Matt Brittin, vice-president for northern and central Europe at Google, said: "This is a big investment by Google, we're committing further to the UK - where computing and the web were invented. It's good news for Google, for London and for the UK." Google's London staff are currently split between two offices in Victoria and one in Holborn. The move will allow the company to house all London staff under one roof. The company plans to keep its office in Manchester. Google also operates Campus, a seven-storey centre in Shoreditch that offers work spaces to technology and media start-ups as part of London's Tech City project. Google has traditionally leased its overseas offices but in the past two years has purchased premises in Paris, Dublin, and now London, its filings show.

Abu Dhabi staked its claim as the cultural capital of the Middle East on January 8 with the final go-ahead for its most eagerly anticipated landmark project. The main contract for the Louvre Abu Dhabi was awarded to the Dubai builder Arabtec. Construction of the US$ 653 million development will begin immediately and the new museum is expected to open in 2015. The Louvre Abu Dhabi, which arose out of a 2007 cultural partnership between France and the United Arab Emirates, won't look anything like the lavish 12th century building where Louis XIV once lived. The mushroom-shaped building designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, the Pritzker Prize winner, is slated to be part of a cultural district planned for Saadiyat Island. The architecturally stunning complex will consist of 64,000 square meters of pavilions, plazas and canals, two-thirds of it shaded by a 180-meter wide cupola that appears to float in mid air. The new museum will form the heart of the Saadiyat Island cultural district alongside the Zayed National Museum planned to open in 2016 and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi the following year. The construction challenges are considerable. A 180-metre wide cupola supported at just four points around its perimeter will shade two-thirds of the museum campus. Perforated to cast an intricate "rain of light" below, the dome will be made of more than 100,000 individual elements in 10 layers that will overlap to form a pattern inspired by Islamic geometry and the palm fronds of traditional Arish dwellings. The Louvre Abu Dhabi will be housed in 9,200 square meters of gallery space spread across almost 30 separate buildings. Planned like a town, these range from one to three storey in height and are linked by a network of gardens, plazas and watercourses inspired by traditional Arabian falaj. The scope of the architecture and public areas may sound prodigious, but these pale in comparison to the design, engineering and infrastructure challenges that have been overcome to get the project to this stage. The museum requires a 10-metre deep waterproof basement for emergency access and plant rooms that measure 31,500 square meters. In 2009, walls were buried in the sand 40 meters deep to ensure the construction site stays watertight. Once works are complete, these will be removed to allow seawater to flow between the museum precincts in a series of canals. In 2010 alone, contractors drove 4,536 piles into the ground - 2,958 steel and 1,578 concrete - the length of which, if put end to end, is the distance from Abu Dhabi to Dubai. Most of this work has gone unnoticed. The only visible sign of progress thus far has been a curious, wedge-shaped chamber on Saadiyat in which a 1:33 scaled model of the museum's canopy, made of 15,000 aluminum and steel parts, has been light-tested to ensure its performance. But behind the scenes an international team of architects and engineers has been working for almost five years, testing the dome for factors including its ability to cast the right type of shade, and its resistance to wind, explosions and fire. Most of the preparatory work associated with the Louvre Abu Dhabi is already complete. All that remains is the small matter of delivering the more tangible parts of what will be one of the early 21st century's most anticipated architectural projects.

In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, countries around the world questioned the value of nuclear power - and Japan, reeling from the impact, vowed to become nuclear-free by 2040. Japan became completely nuclear free for the first time since 1970 as it shut down the Tomari nuclear reactor on the island of Hokkaido in May of last year. But now, with the tragedy seemingly fading from memory, the newly elected Japanese government has decided to reverse this decision and once again invest in that same energy that is still damaging the Japanese environment. Prior to the Fukushima disaster, which occurred in March 2011, the Japanese government had pledged to increase nuclear energy in Japan from 30-percent to 50-percent. The disaster sent dangerously high levels of radioactive material into the surrounding air, water and soil and the effects of the radioactivity will be felt for decades. Last month the elected conservative Liberal Democratic Party took control of the government and with it, killed any hope of a nuclear free Japan for the foreseeable future. The government has pledged to re-open dormant reactors if they pass safety tests and has not ruled out the possibility of building new reactors. Toshimitsu Motegi, Japan's trade minister says that he will not risk reviving Japan's economy at the cost of nuclear freedom. Since all but two of Japan's reactors have been shut down, it will likely take months or years to get things up and running again. Only time will tell if the people of Japan will support or reject nuclear energy.