German – SpecNews

GIB signs deal for £1.5bn offshore wind site

The Green Investment Bank (GIB) yesterday unveiled its backing for a £1.5 billion wind farm off the Suffolk coast, its eighth deal to date in the offshore wind sector.
The joint venture has also secured £1.37bn of debt facilities from a consortium of 12 commercial banks plus the European Investment Bank (EIB), making it the UK’s first construction-ready offshore wind project finance deal.
Although the partners haven’t detailed how much they have each committed to the project, it is thought GIB is investing around £100 million.
The Edinburgh and London-based bank has joined Siemens Financial Services, Macquarie Capital and German energy group RWE Innogy as 25 per cent joint equity partners in the Galloper wind farm.
Construction of the 336 megaWatt (mW) wind farm will start next month with around 700 jobs created during the construction phase and up to 90 in operations and maintenance once construction is complete.

High quality PE recompounds launched / Rising demand from construction sector / Newcycling project in development
German recycling specialist(APK, Merseburg; www.apk-ag.de ) has developed technology for producing high quality recycled regranulates from post-consumer film scrap.
APK, using its proprietary technologies, has built a large-scale pilot plant financed by German venture capital firmsand
They emerge from APKs elaborate cleaning, separation and recycling process as Mersalen LDPE recompounds and MDPE recompounds in pellet form., manager of APKs southwest sales office, said: Our Mersalen MDPE recompounds, which are designed for demanding processing technologies and applications, are meeting growing demand from the building industry and other sectors.
The scrap, called fraction 310, comprises pieces of PE and PP film.
As a result, said APK, the MDPE recompounds are particularly clean, contain little or no moisture and have undergone minimal thermal damage.A project to separate and recycle plastic waste from the packaging and automotive industries into raw materials with properties identical to virgin material (newcycling) is also underway.

For all the hype around 3D virtual and augmented realities, however, the technology still necessitates strapping a device to your head.
For anyone who has experienced virtual reality (VR) before, or been in any kind of simulator, the experience is all rather underwhelming, particularly after the warnings of motion sickness and expectations of an immersive bucking bronco ride.
Signing a health and safety waiver and confirming that I’m not overly sensitive to noise, I am strapped into a padded vest and virtual reality goggles and invited to straddle the turbine – and ominously told to hold on tightly.
Before you know it, you’re floating somewhere above an imaginary landscape and landing back in the room 90 seconds later.
Which is something that the spectacular downfall of Google Glass revealed the general public – if not hardcore gamers – are still very reluctant to do.