The UK government has announced a £6.5 million investment in engineering skills for the renewable energy industry.

Business secretary Vince Cable said the scheme would provide training for up to 50 of the best engineering students as part of a new Industrial Doctorate Centre in Offshore Renewable Energy, delivered through leading universities and industry.

The students will be trained in technologies such as designing cost-efficient new windmill blades and testing the latest wave energy technology.

The concentrated solar power industry (CSP) is gearing up for its second annual conference in San Francisco, California next week.

The 2nd CSP Plant Optimization Summit USA will take place on the 7-8th September at the Parc 55 Hotel in San Francisco. The event will bring together leading technical experts throughout the CSP industry and will tackle the immediate roadblocks faced in the design, engineering and operation of large-scale CSP plants.

Subjects on the agenda include:

The UK’s Haulfryn Group has returned to 100 per cent family ownership after 43 years, it has been announced.

The group, which is the UK's largest combined holiday and residential park operator, has stated that the return to 100 per cent family ownership is key to its long-term growth and branding.

The group operates 35 luxury holiday and residential lodge parks across north Wales, the south-east and the south west; and last year reported a substantial rise in profits as well as a £60 million refinancing deal with Barclays Corporate.

FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company (FENOC), a subsidiary of FirstEnergy Corp, broke ground today on a new emergency operations facility in Lindsey, Ohio, for the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station.

The new 12,000 square-foot facility will allow for improved coordination between the plant and state and local emergency management agencies during the unlikely event of an emergency at the plant.

For years, science fiction has proposed driverless transportation—but now it’s possible to see what such a system might look like, as Alan Swaby discovers.

How do you solve the impasse that is urban public transport? Most people recognise that pollution and congestion in city centres could be lessened by switching to public transport; and yet a crowbar couldn’t prise most of us out of our cars.

Andrew Kinder of Infor explains everything you ever wanted to know about ERP but were too afraid to ask.

Just what is ERP?

ERP is an abbreviation for ‘enterprise resource planning’. It is simply an integrated IT system which translates business management practices and the core business processes of an organisation ‘into’ modern technology and vice versa.

With more people going online using mobile devices, the PC is no longer the default mode of web access. As Boris Kraft of Magnolia CMS explains, this demands a significant attitude shift for any business running a website. If you don’t have a mobile internet strategy, then it’s important to give serious consideration to whether you should.

Paul Docherty, CEO and founder of i-nexus, outlines the multiple benefits of introducing business execution software.

New financial years come and go, and organisations face the same execution-related issues every time. Conference Board Surveys of CEOs highlight ‘execution’ as one of their major challenges. Coupled with the fact that only 10 per cent of global organisations consistently deliver on their objectives, it’s no wonder that CEOs are viewing execution with such trepidation.

La’ala Al-Kuwait Real Estate is proving that urban development and ecological protection can go hand in hand. Ian Williams talks to Gay Sutton about the symbiotic relationship between engineering and the environment at the new Sabah Al-Ahmed Sea City.

Pan African Shopfitters set up its own shop a long time ago and today, the retailers of Africa and beyond depend on it to turn their brand identity into reality on the street.

Now under the management of the third generation of the Blumenthal family, Pan African Shopfitters is nothing if not a dynastic enterprise, with all the advantages that entails. It is close knit, with shared values and policies; and it is agile—decisions about strategy, policy and investment can be made very quickly.