London Array just placed its last wind turbine and switched online as the world's largest wind farm. Located in the Thames Estuary, UK, the farm consists of 175 turbines that will power the area from Essex to Margate. Owned by Dong Energy, Masdar and EON, the 141 turbine (630 MW) phase one of the London Array is now fully functional. London is already known for being home to the world's largest solar bridge at Blackfriars , and now Kent joins the renewable energy elite with London Array, which is only around 50 miles from the capital. Under construction since March of 2011, the London Array's first Siemens 3.6MW turbine kicked into power just six months ago. Since then, the remainder of the first phase has quickly come into fruition, and since last Thursday has been pumping wind power into the grid. The next phase will be to get the remaining 34 turbines online, as well as to bury remaining cables. Phase one itself is anticipated to provide power for half a million homes a year, which will save 925 thousand tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year. Aside from becoming the world's largest wind farm, the developers behind the London Array are also using the project as a case study, in order to lower costs for large scale wind farms in the future. The ultimate goal for DONG Energy is to create offshore wind farm projects that yield usable wind power at around US$ 152 per megawatt hour by 2020.

The government of Vietnam has constructed the world's largest dragon-shaped bridge over the Han River. Not only it is the steel bridge the largest of its type in the world, but it is covered in over 2,500 LED lights - and it breathes fire! Construction began on the bridge in 2009 and cost a reported US$ 85 million. Connecting the city's international airport and beaches, the structure simulates the shape of the dragon in the Ly Dynasty, a symbolic creature that is part of Vietnam folklore. The 166-meter-long steel arch is the longest such structure in Vietnam, with the dragon's body measuring a total of 568 meters and more than 9,000 tons in weight. The Dragon Bridge has a total length of 666 meters and 37.5 meters in width, with six lanes. The Louis Berger Group designed the six-lane bridge to emulate the shape of the dragon in the Ly Dynasty. It is also currently the only the bridge with a single steel arch in Southeast Asia.

Construction of the massive Bakhtiari Dam is now officially under way thanks to an inauguration of the project by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Khatam al-Anbiya (KAA), which is controlled by Iran's military, will build the double-arch concrete dam on the Bakhtiari River in the Zagros Mountains of Iran's southwestern Lorestan Province. The dam can hold 4.8 billion cubic meters of water, the largest reservoir in the country, and will produce 1,500 megawatts of electricity. The Chinese firm Sinohydro Corp. was contracted in 2011 to build the dam for US$ 2 billion, but the Iranian central bank cancelled the contract in May and turned over the project to the IRGC and KAA. No reason and notice of cancellation was given to Sinohydro. When completed, the Bakhtiari dam will be the second-tallest in the world after Tajikistan's 335 meters tall Rogun Dam now under construction. The new dam will have a height of 315 meters and a length of 434 meters when completed. Currently, the tallest dam is the Jinping-I Dam, an arch dam in China standing 305 meters high. The second-tallest is the 300 meter Nurek Dam also in Tajikistan.

It might seem ironic that the oil-rich Middle East also holds nearly half of the world's renewable energy potential -but last month the President of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, officially inaugurated Shams 1, the largest concentrated solar power plant (CSP) in the world. The plant was designed and developed by Shams Power Company, and it cost US$ 600 million and took three years to build. It's owned by Masdar, Abengoa Solar and Total. This gargantuan power plant covers almost 2.5 million square meters - the equivalent of about 285 football fields. According to Masdar, it will generate enough electricity to power 20 thousand homes in the United Arab Emirates. It will also displace 175 thousand tons of CO2 per year - the equivalent of planting 1.5 million trees or taking 15 thousand cars off the road. Though Abu Dhabi has made a considerable investment in CSP, key members of Shams Power Company foresee most of the country's renewable energy coming from solar photovoltaic systems to meet its 2020 energy target of producing 7% of its total energy from renewable. This is because photovoltaic systems are cheaper, faster to build and are able to be installed in more locations than CSP systems. It is good to see a region so rich in oil look to grow its renewable energy potential. Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, CEO of Masdar states, "the inauguration of Shams 1 is a breakthrough for renewable energy development in the Middle East. With the demand for energy rising exponentially, the region is undergoing a major transformation in how it generates electricity. In fact, the Middle East is poised for major investments in renewables, and Shams 1 proves the economic and environmental advantage of deploying large-scale solar projects."

Demolishing tall buildings is typically a loud and messy process that produces a lot of dust and not a lot of building materials that can be salvaged. But Japan's Taisei Corporation is pioneering a new technique that preserves building materials and actually generates energy from the demolition process. The process, known as Ecological Reproduction System (Tecorep), uses huge jacks and an energy-generating crane to dismantle high-rises from the inside. Some of the most common demolition techniques used around the world include the use of wrecking balls, explosives and jackhammers-all of which are very noisy and disruptive, not to mention wasteful. But this new technique employed in Tokyo is much more environmentally-friendly. First, everything in the building that can be removed is taken out. Then, beams and concrete in the floors are dismantled, and they're taken down to the ground by a crane that harvests energy from descending. Giant jacks are used to keep the floors in place as structural elements are dismantled, which are then lowered. The building looks roughly the same from the outside throughout the process-even as the jacks are lowered and the building begins to shrink, it still keeps its roof. The novel demolition technique is believed to reduce dust by 90 percent, while also reducing the noise pollution caused by standard demolition techniques. But best of all, because Tecorep uses renewable energy to power its operations it reduces carbon emissions by about 85 percent.