|
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/20740/?nlid=1058&a=f
A city being built in Abu Dhabi will serve
as a large-scale test for renewable energy.
Electronic chauffer: Driverless transports
will provide door-to-door service for occupants of a new city being built
in Abu Dhabi (top). A typical street will be sheltered from most direct
sunlight. Solar panels overhead and built into the walls of buildings will
provide power.
Last week, in the harsh desert climate of
Abu Dhabi, construction started on a city that will house 50,000 people
and 1,500 businesses but use extremely little energy, and what it does
use will come from renewable sources. The initial building is a new research
institute that the founders hope will be the seed for the equivalent of
a Silicon Valley of the Middle East, only one centered not on information
technology but on renewable energy.
The city, which is expected to cost $22 billion,
will implement an array of technologies, including thin-film solar panels
that serve as the facades and roofing materials for buildings, ubiquitous
sensors for monitoring energy use, and driverless vehicles powered by batteries
that make cars unnecessary. Indeed, the city's founders hope that it will
serve as a test bed for a myriad of new technologies being proposed to
reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
The new zero-emissions city, which is being
built near the city of Abu Dhabi in the center of the United Arab Emirates
(UAE), is part of the Masdar Initiative, a $15 billion government-funded
investment program designed in part to ensure that the UAE's prosperity
won't be linked exclusively to its oil. Its leaders say that the project
will give the country a leadership position in renewable energy. If it's
successful, says Sultan al Jaber, Masdar's CEO, "we'll be sitting on top
of the world."
Designing the city from the ground up will
bring a number of advantages. About half of the cost of solar energy comes
from installation materials and labor. In Masdar, thin-film solar cells
can be incorporated directly into the facades of buildings in place of
conventional construction materials, reducing the costs of the solar power.
Energy needed for cooling will be reduced by controlling the orientation
and design of the city's buildings, streets, and green spaces to find a
balance between shade and sun, and to promote natural-air circulation.
Air conditioners will use absorption chillers that run on heat from the
sun in place of conventional compressors.
Energy for transportation will also be reduced.
Efficient electric transports will provide door-to-door service: just type
in your destination, and the transport will come to your door and take
you automatically to your destination. The power will be generated by renewable
energy and stored onboard in batteries. On Monday, Masdar received the
first bids on the system, which will likely use battery-powered vehicles
running on tracks or powered by magnetic levitation. |
Water use will be kept to a minimum--which
will reduce energy needed for desalination. And sensors throughout the
city will also keep residents informed of their energy use--and when they're
going to have to pay extra for using too much. All told, the city's designers
predict that efficiency improvements will result in a 75 percent reduction
in energy consumption compared with a conventional city of the same size.
The energy that is used will come almost entirely from solar--with wind
and power from technology that converts garbage into fuel contributing
smaller amounts.
This, as least, is the theory. One of the
main purposes of the city is to find out what works and what doesn't. This
experiment will continue even after the city is completed in eight years;
"innovation hubs" throughout the city will test new technologies, including
some developed at the new Masdar Institute of Science and Technology. The
school is being developed in partnership with MIT, which is selecting faculty
and designing curricula.
Of the $22 billion in expected costs, the
Abu Dhabi government will provide about $4 billion for infrastructure.
The rest of the money will come from outside investors. Masdar's leaders
hope that the city's environmental credentials and low energy costs--along
with tax breaks--will lure buyers to the property. "We want it to be
profitable, not a sunk cost," says Khaled Awad, who is directing the
development of the city. "If it is not profitable as a real-estate development,
it's not sustainable. Then it will never be replicable anywhere else."
In some ways, however, it won't be replicable.
Al Jaber notes that the project could not have been done anywhere else--"It's
a huge risk." The enormous wealth in Abu Dhabi, which Fortune ranked
the world's richest city last year, makes a zero-emissions city a tenable
proposition.
What's more, the design is specific to Abu
Dhabi, accounting for, for example, the position of the sun throughout
the year (which is dependent on the city's latitude), the high temperatures
(which are bad for most solar cells), and the nature of the wind (the city
will use wind turbines much smaller than conventional ones because of low
wind speeds). As a result, future developments outside the region will
have to be redesigned. "Everywhere we go, we will have to custom-tailor
our model for the specific environment," al Jaber says.
Nevertheless, Paul Dickerson, the chief operating
officer for the United States' Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable
Energy, believes that Masdar will prove a valuable model. "We will no
longer have to guess what the city of the future looks like," he says.
"In Abu Dhabi, we will be able to see it with our own eyes."
|
