Weekend Australian
Saturday 29/3/2008 Page: 5
GROUND was broken last month in one of the world's most harsh environments - the initial step in spending $US22 billion on the first zero carbon, zero waste and car free city. But Masdar City --- the name means "the source" in Arabic - is more than a bid to turn 7 sq km of featureless desert into a sustainable urban area. It is also the core of an audacious attempt by oil-rich Abu Dhabi to become the silicon Valley of global renewable energy research.
Abu Dhabi, capital of the seven-state United Arab Emirates, is today the world's richest city. Its 4.2 million inhabitants are the collective owners of an estimated 100 billion barrels of oil - and, after 50 years of feeding the world's oil thirst, they are wealthy enough to also have the globe's largest per capita ecological footprint, the product of ubiquitous air conditioning, chilled water swimming pools and a transport system largely consisting of SUVs and Hummers.
Masdar, however, will be different. Ahmed al Jaber, the Californian-educated chief executive of the project, says Abu Dhabi is setting out to create a standard for re-engineering world urban planning. Using the services of renowned architect Lord (Norman) Foster and his London-based Foster and Partners design business, Al Jaber will supervise the construction from the ground up between 2009 and 2016 of a walled city to house 50,000 people and 1500 businesses.
Energy for Masdar will come from solar and wind power. The construction work will be fuelled by a 100MW solar power station and its output will be supplemented later by rooftop solar panels on city buildings and by a wind farm. Water will be supplied from a solar powered desalination plant. Energy will be efficiently used. "A city of this size would need 820 megawatts of electricity," says Al Jaber,"but Masdar is being, designed so that its load will be only 220MW."
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