An computer-generated image Masdar City, a futuristic city in the United Arab Emirates, where the 3rd World Future Energy Summit is being hosted.
Credit: Masdar
This is the surprising question I found myself asking as the cool winter sun set over the hazy skies of Abu Dhabi, the oil-rich emirate that played host this week to the 3rd World Future Energy Summit.
The meeting has attracted an impressive line-up of movers and shakers in the world of climate change and the booming renewable energy industry, as well as a sizeable gathering of political and business leaders from 120 nations.
There were 23,000 visitors over four days, 600 exhibits from 50 countries spread over 40,000 m2 of floorspace at the city's high-tech new exhibition centre, itself part of a US$2.2 billion micro-city of skyscrapers still partly under construction.
Everywhere you go in this city of 900,000 people, there is a frenetic pace of construction - with several building sites operating 24 hours a day.
With 9% of the world's proven oil reserves and almost 5% of the planet's known natural gas deposits, the emirate of Abu Dhabi has the highest GDP per capita in the world. And it's not planning to squander it.
The emirate is staking its future on renewable energy technologies, spending a portion of its vast wealth in a concerted effort to capture the high ground in this nascent but rapidly growing industry.
In 2006 it launched the Masdar Initiative, a network of large-scale investments in solar, wind and biofuel projects around the world.
This week, Masdar announced a joint venture with Spanish engineering group Sener to design, build and operate concentrating solar power plants around the world, starting with a US$1.2 billion 150 megawatt solar thermal plant in southern Spain.
Masdar has also established a US$600 million facility in Germany to manufacture amorphous thin film photovoltaic modules for the world market, with another plant expected to be built in the emirate.
It has bought 20% of the London Array, a US$2.8 billion project to build the world’s largest offshore wind farm 20km from the Kent and Essex coasts in Britain, generating a total of 1,000 megawatts when completed in 2015.
And Masdar is building a national carbon capture and storage network to cut into Abu Dhabi's carbon footprint, one of the world's largest, and plans to sequester 6.5 million tonnes of CO2 from power plants and industrial facilities by 2013. Interestingly, the captured CO2 will then be injected into oil reservoirs to enhance oil recovery.
On the outskirts of the capital, Masdar City is under rapid construction, with more than 3,000 workers working 24 hours a day to complete - by September 2010 - the first stage of a planned US$22 billion model city for 50,000 people that will be solar-powered, carbon-neutral, produce zero waste and act as a living laboratory for sustainable cities research.
Clear planet
It´s good to see that there are "clear minds" concerned on our small planet and its carbon-dirtyness!
This article just made me
This article just made me smile, I think it's great that a nation decided to take the initiative and start transforming from our more primetive means of energy, to more sensible ones. Who says that in order to use energy you have to also be wasteful & destructive? I just can't wait til it's finished, it's about time!
hmmm
Well, regardless of whether Carbon is the menace here, I do believe that it is going to reshape our world and become a catalyst for the new economies of the world. Forget oil, let's work on alternative sources of energy now. Might be a good idea to start investing now in and/or becoming a part of this revolution soon. Might be good for the wallet later on.