Search Results for: Austria

BY MARK ROWE

BETWEEN t-shirts that incorporate technology allowing people to chat up someone from across the dance floor to vests that can monitor the wearer’s health, the past decade has seen some extraordinary developments in high-tech smart fabrics. Scientists have been keen to explore their potential and while more eye-catching garments may have been at the forefront of these technologies in the past, according to experts, the industry for intelligent fabrics is now moving in the direction of less flash, and more functionality.…

BY DEIRDRE MASON

RECYCLING products as large as motor vehicles; or encouraging public authorities to buy environment-friendly autos seem such good ideas, laws insisting this happens is surely just commonsense? Not so in Europe, it would appear, where a string of countries are in trouble for not implementing the European Union’s recent (EU) green procurement directive; and one – Italy – is facing potential legal action for flouting the EU’s end-of-life vehicles (ELV) directive, even though these was approved in the year 2000.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Commission is drafting legislation seeking to break regulatory and financial logjams preventing the European Union (EU) achieving ambitious planned gas infrastructure investments. A Commission working paper predicts the proposal will come in October and warned red-tape and financial shortages are potentially delaying cross-border interconnection and pipeline projects worth billions of Euros.…

BY MONIKA HANLEY, LEE ADENDORFF, MARK ROWE, ALAN OSBORN, MINDY RAN, GERARD O’DWYER and MARTINA MARECKOVA

FOR an industry that generates energy, heat and maybe cooling, the European cogeneration sector has been operating on a decidedly low output in recent years.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

EUROPEAN Union (EU) consumer protection information network RAPEX has reported a string of market withdrawals of potentially harmful skin whitening products in the Netherlands and Austria. The actions were taken largely because of excess hydroquinone content, breaching the EU’s cosmetics directive.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL, DAVE YIN and WANG FANGQING

A GOOD deal of excitement has been created by the announcement this week in the UK academic journal Nature Geoscience that significant deposits of rare earths have been found in the Pacific Ocean floor.…

BY MARK ROWE

CO-GENERATION (or combined-heat and power – CHP) plants operate using a variety of technologies: gas turbines, fuel cells, Stirling engines, gas or diesel engines and combined cycle gas turbines. According to the Joint Research Centre (JRC) – the European Union’s (EU) scientific and technical research body – natural gas is currently the preferred fuel across Europe for co-gen, with combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) and gas turbine plants expected to become the predominant future technology for large-scale units.…

BY LEE ADENDORFF, MARK ROWE, ALAN OSBORN, KATHERINE DUNN, MARTINA MARECKOVA, GERARD O’DWYER and MINDY RAN

Austria’s newest combined-cycle power plant (CCPP) – the 412-MWe/100 MWt Timelkam power plant in Vöcklabruck district, Upper Austria, which was handed over to its owners Energie AG Oberösterreich and the Swiss Groupe E at the end of 2008 – has introduced a number of technical refinements which are bringing about major advances in fuel efficiency, environmental control and cost savings to Austria.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

A CONSULTANTS report for the European Commission on the impact of biofuel expansion has warned that a reliance on bioethanol could damage the European Union’s (EU) fossil fuels security of supply.

Written by experts from Wood Mackenzie, Ricardo and Celeres, the paper – just released by Brussels – says that with bioethanol sources focused on Brazil and a few other countries, "there is a risk of a high degree of reliance on few sources of ethanol supply."…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) Council of Ministers has let lapse anti-dumping duties against Chinese exports to the EU of magnesia bricks widely used in steelmaking. The move comes after Austria’s RHI AG, the EU’s biggest producer of the bricks said it no longer wanted the duties – which ranged as high as 39.9% and which were originally imposed in 2005.…