The commercial renewable power-generation market has received a huge injection of faith with the Australian Greens’ rise to power in the recent federal election. This emergence of ‘green’ policy muscle, combined with the growing pressure on a carbon price, offers the greatest opportunities yet to the commercial power-generation industry to succeed by going green.

An electrical safety investigation prompted by the fatalities in the federal insulation scheme has found 15 people are killed and 300 hospitalised each year as a result of preventable electrical accidents in Australian homes.

Australian Industry Group has lodged three Fair Work appeals recently in an endeavour to preserve workplace flexibility.

Recent market research indicates that the optical networking market is growing, projected to reach US$20 billion globally by 2015.

Blade Network Technologies, a data centre ethernet switching company, has implemented Fanfare’s test automation product, iTest, to meet its increasing product development and time-to-market goals. Blade has saved approximately $500,000 in resource and equipment costs, sanity build times and time to market since implementing iTest.

A recent survey of 2700 Australian households has identified that consumers need help from the electrical industry to better understand the benefits of energy efficiency.

The ANZ Bank’s new head office in Melbourne’s Docklands precinct is Australia’s largest single-tenant office building, providing 87,000 m² of floor space that accommodates some 6500 staff.

The Italian Bilingual School (IBS), located in Sydney’s inner western suburb of Leichhardt, upgraded its teaching facilities earlier this year, with its top priorities being to improve the learning environment and comfort of students, as well as reducing energy consumption. Robert Ruggeri, principal of the school, turned to HPM Legrand, and added BTicino sound diffusion and lighting automation systems to effect these objectives.

Electrical industry association Master Electricians Australia is calling for state and federal governments to create a uniform solar feed-in tariff scheme around the country.

In production and work places, potentially explosive atmospheres can develop wherever flammable gases, vapours or dusts are mixed with the oxygen contained in the air.

Industry giant Siemens has publicly stated its support for the Prime Minister’s Task Group on Energy Efficiency report.

At a recent conference, an electrical and energy industry association has called for training and skills shortages to be properly addressed.

Chunghwa Telecom Telecommunication Laboratories (CHTTL), the research and development arm of Chungwa Telecom, has selected Spirent to validate the performance, availability, security and scalability (PASS) of cloud computing environments. CHTTL will use Spirent’s expertise in cloud computing testing to enable Chunghwa Telecom to become Taiwan’s largest cloud computing and data centre provider.

Safety is a key focus for the industrial compressed-air solution manufacturer Champion Compressors, a subsidiary of the global Sullair Corporation. Its management considers keeping its workplace safe just as important as meeting its financial objectives.

According to Wikipedia, polyvinyl chloride - commonly abbreviated as PVC - is the third-most widely produced plastic in the world, after polyethylene and polypropylene. It is widely used in construction because it’s cheap, durable and easy to assemble. The annual global production of PVC is expected to exceed 40 million tonnes by 2016. In spite of its ubiquity, there is mounting pressure to ban it.