FLAMANVILLE, France: It looks like an ordinary building site, but for the two massive, rounded concrete shells looming above the ocean, like dusty mushrooms.

Here on the Normandy coast, France is building its newest nuclear reactor, alongside two older ones. It is the first reactor to be built in the country in 10 years and will cost $5.1 billion. And President Nicolas Sarkozy has announced that France will build yet another.

Two solar power plants to be built in California together will put out more than 12 times as much electricity as the largest such plant today, a fresh indication that solar energy is starting to achieve significant scale.

The plants will cover 12.5 square miles, or 32 square kilometers, of central California with solar panels, and in the middle of a sunny day will generate about 800 megawatts of power, roughly equal to the size of a large coal-burning power plant or a small nuclear plant. A megawatt is enough power to run a large Wal-Mart store.

PG&E, a California power company, has placed an order for what are believed to be the world's two biggest photovoltaic solar farms, giving a strong endorsement to a technology that few power generators have yet considered to be ready for utility-scale use.

Between them the two farms, due to come on-stream in 2010 and 2011, are planned to generate 800 megawatts at peak capacity, or more than the 750 MW of the entire photovoltaic grid capacity in the US at the end of last year.

Eight kinds of beer and freshly shucked oysters make the Innamincka Hotel an oasis for travelers on Australia's remote Strzelecki Track. But keeping food and drink cold in the Outback isn't cheap. Every three weeks a diesel tanker must make a 1,600-km round trip from Port Augusta, South Australia, to keep the generators running.

A pilot project costing 5 million dollar to produce 486 meters cubic feet of bio-gas and 25 kilowatts of electricity per day from cow-dung has been commissioned in Landhi Cattle Colony. British company HiRAD Technology Plc, UK has installed this plant as a pilot project to utilise cow-dung and convert it into bio-gas and electricity.

A vast area of the city remained without electricity on Wednesday as over 30,000 complaints of power breakdowns remain unattended by the Karachi Electric Supply Company, while no one within the utility seems to be prepared to own responsibility for the crisis.

The utility was still facing an approximately 500 megawatt shortfall as its flagship Bin Qasim Power Plant was only operating at half its optimum output, generating much below par

Rains in Karachi on Tuesday left seven people dead and several injured, while the entire power generation and distribution system of the Karachi Electric Supply Corporation (KESC) collapsed, plunging almost 85 percent of the city into darkness.

The heavy downpour led to tripping of major feeders supplying electricity to the city.