After months of struggle to restore power in Puerto Rico, the territory’s Gov. Ricardo Rosselló on Jan. 22 announced that the state-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority will be privatized.
Society saves $6 for every dollar spent through federal grants funded to the private sector for damage reduction in the event of river flooding, storm surge, fire at the wildland-urban interface, and strong winds and earthquakes, says NIBS.
To expand offshore wind in Europe and reduce the cost of connecting turbines farther out to sea by cable as coastal locations fill up, TenneT, a major European transmission grid operator, is studying the feasibility of building a $1.8-billion man-made wind-farm island in the North Sea between the U.K. and Denmark—and maybe others.
Steel interests have misgivings about the fairness of a California law, enacted last month, intended to minimize carbon footprints of certain construction materials used in state-funded building projects by requiring all products to have a global warming potential less than the industry average.
Insurance companies, governments and some businesses are looking to engineers to build more-resilient structures to accommodate changing climate and weather extremes.