Buildings

Hyundai Motor Company, South Korea’s largest automaker, is to install the nation’s largest rooftop PV power plant at its manufacturing factory in the city of Asan, on the northern outskirts of Seoul.

The Jakarta city government says it will audit existing high-rise buildings in the Indonesian capital to ensure compliance with a green building code, which comes into effect this month.

Builders of Tokyo Skytree, the 65 billion yen (USD656 million) broadcast tower which is almost double the height of the Empire State Building, say they aim to make their mark on more than just the Japanese metropolis’s skyline.

Hong Kong should be a walker’s paradise. It is compact and dense, with a large number of amenities concentrated in a very small space. Few errands require the use of a car, and in fact over 90 percent of daily journeys occur on public transportation. Walk Score, a US-based website which calculates walkability based on the proximity and concentration of amenities in a neighborhood, gives much of urban Hong Kong scores of 70/100 or above. Moreover, Hong Kong has a vibrant street food and market culture, boasting areas with enough complexity and variety to keep people entertained for hours. Yet Hong Kongers do not seem to enjoy walking.

According to the NPD Solarbuzz Q1’13 Asia Pacific Major PV Markets Quarterly report, PV demand in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region is forecast to grow to by 50 percent year-on-year 13.5-GW in 2013. China, Japan, India, and Australia will remain dominant for PV demand in the region, accounting for 90 percent of demand in 2013, however, discrete end-market demand environments are now evolving in each of these countries.

A new report from Pike Research says that over the next 40 years the global urban landscape will be dominated by smart cities and mega-cities.

Hong Kong’s new Chief Executive C Y Leung made a range of sweeping promises in his maiden policy address today aimed at tackling the city’s pressing environmental issues, including the city’s stifling air quality and absence of any real efforts towards nature conservation. "For the well-being of future generations, the government and the community must commit to improving the environment. To tackle key issues such as waste management and air quality requires us to make choices," Leung said

The Vietnamese Government and the United Nations have signed a Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) on building an eco-friendly regional facility for the international organization in the country.

Japanese telecoms giant, turned green-energy provider, Softbank Corp has announced that it will use the rooftops of peoples’ homes to generate solar energy and tap into the generous feed-in-tarrifs offered by the Japanese government for renewable power.