A Houston company has completed construction of a pair of power-generation barges that, when installed later this year in Venezuela, will become the world’s largest floating power-generation facility. Photo: Courtesy Walker Marine Inc. Floating powerplants will move from Signal International Shipyard in Orange, Texas, to Venezuela in September. Waller Marine Inc. completed work on the two $125-million vessels, Margarita I and Josefa Rufina I, earlier this month at the Signal International Shipyard in Orange, Texas. Each barge boasts a single GE 7FA turbine generator and is capable of producing 171-MW. When installed in a prepared basin at Tacoa, Venezuela, near

Boise, Idaho-based U.S. Geothermal Inc. announced on Aug. 30 that it has signed a contract with Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), McLean, Va., for engineering, procurement and construction for the first phase of a new geothermal powerplant at San Emidio in northwest Nevada. The design-build work will be done by a subsidiary of the Benham Cos. LLC, a unit of SAIC. The first phase of the project, set to cost $27 million and be completed by the end of 2011, will generate between 8 MW and 9 MW of power. A second phase, to cost $170 million, will add an

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ $14.6-billion drive to bring New Orleans’ hurricane defenses to 100-year levels of protection by June 2011 could fundamentally change the way U.S. civil-works projects are funded and delivered, project leaders say. + Image + Image The Greater New Orleans Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction System, or HSDRRS, is the largest civil-works construction program in Corps history. It was launched in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Already, on the fifth anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster and with a year’s construction yet to go, the works now in place provide

Civil engineers and other researchers working under a $90,000 National Science Foundation grant are studying the Great Inca Road of South America for clues to help modern society build roads, bridges and other infrastructure that last longer and have a less harmful impact on the environment.

Many pavilion designers at Expo 2010 Shanghai, the World’s Fair currently under way in China, interpret its “Better City, Better Life” theme as a call for sustainable buildings. The Peru Pavilion is covered in “green” bamboo and clay, while the Japan Pavilion collects light, air and water in its “eco tubes.” But the developers of the Finland Pavilion interpret “sustainable” not only in terms of the materials and systems used in its construction, but also as an integrated process that begins in building information modeling and continues through adaptive reuse. Image: Courtesy Tekla Software Kirnu, Finnish for “giant’s kettle,” evokes

Photo: Courtesy of SOM The $450-million China World Trade Tower in Beijing’s Central Business District, which opened on Aug. 30, has become the city’s tallest structure at 330 meters. The 81-story high-rise will have 36,421 sq meters of mixed-use space and is LEED Gold registered, says its designer, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM), Chicago. The project’s energy and conservation strategy includes crystalline walls layered with “fritted glass” and “metal fins” that serve as “vertical sunshades” and maximize daylighting for the building’s interior, says the firm. The tower’s structural engineer was Ove Arup & Partners, HK Ltd.; its mechanical-electrical engineers

One of the world’s most ambitious urban development initiatives is taking place in Doha, the capital of the Gulf kingdom of Qatar. Photo: Courtesy Of Hochtief Infrastructure master plan includes commercial and residential centers, along with an airport and seaport. Even in a region known for brash city-building, Qatar’s plans will radically enlarge its urban footprint in the next decade to accommodate hundreds of thousands of additional residents with new housing, commercial and tourism centers through about a half-dozen projects. These projects include a plan by the state-owned developer Dohaland to re-create Doha’s downtown using more traditional Gulf architecture; further,

An Aug. 28 fire that heavily damaged an articulated dump truck and three other pieces of construction equipment at a mosque under construction in Murfreesboro, Tenn., might be connected to the national debate surrounding Manhattan�s contentious Islamic center under development two blocks from the World Trade Center site. The equipment, owned by Ole South Excavating of Murfreesboro, was doused with accelerant and set ablaze in a suspected arson attempt. Ole South Excavating could not be reached for comment. The equipment was being used to break ground on the new Islamic Center of Murfreesboro. Joel Siskovic, an FBI spokesman in Memphis,

The amount of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act-financed projects under contract in highways and other infrastructure sectors is slowly rising closer to the 100% mark, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee's latest update on the economic-stimulus measure shows. With the ARRA programs now in the 18th month since the measure was signed, the month-to-month gains in funds under contract are modest. The committee's latest monthly stimulus scorecard, released Aug. 26, says that of the $38 billion that ARRA allocated for highway, transit and wastewater-treatment programs under the panel's jurisdiction, $34.1 billion, or 90%, was under contract as of July 31.

Divers installing new control gates 150 ft below the surface of Cheesman Dam continue to blast, chop and saw-cut through granite to bring water-control systems on the 105-year-old dam up to modern standards. The dam, in the foothills 25 miles southwest of Denver, stores 80,000 acre ft of water to help meet the needs of Denver Water’s 1.3 million customers. When it was built in 1905, the 221-ft-tall brick-and-granite dam was the tallest in the world, but its cast-iron valves are rusty and unworkable, giving engineers no reliable upstream controls to shut the water off if something happens at the