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Very few carbon-based lifeforms are inhabiting the United Arab Emirates' revolutionary yet unrealized zero-carbon city:
Years from now passing travellers may marvel at the grandeur and the folly of the futuristic landscape on the edges of Abu Dhabi: the barely occupied office block, the deserted streets, the vast tracts of undeveloped land and – most of all – the abandoned dream of a zero-carbon city. Masdar City, when it was first conceived a decade ago, was intended to revolutionise thinking about cities and the built environment.
Now the world's first planned sustainable city – the marquee project of the United Arab Emirates' (UAE) plan to diversify the economy from fossil fuels - could well be the world's first green ghost town. As of this year - when Masdar was originally scheduled for completion - managers have given up on the original goal of building the world's first planned zero-carbon city.
Masdar City is nowhere close to zeroing out its greenhouse gas emissions now, even at a fraction of its planned footprint. And it will not reach that goal even if the development ever gets fully built, the authorities admitted. "We are not going to try to shoehorn renewable energy into the city just to justify a definition created within a boundary," said Chris Wan, the design manager for Masdar City. "As of today, it's not a net zero future," he said. "It's about 50%."
When Masdar City began, in 2006, the project was touted as a model for a green mixed-use urban landscape: a global hub for the cleantech industry, with 50,000 residents and 40,000 commuters. Foster + Partners designed a car-free city scape, with Jetson-style driverless electric cars shuttling passengers between buildings incorporating built-in shades and kitted out with smart technologies to resist the scorching desert heat, and keep cooling costs down. Mubadala, Abu Dhabi's state-owned investment company, pledged financial support to the estimated $22bn experiment in urban design.
Ten years on, however, only a fraction of the town has been built - less than 5% of the original six square km "greenprint", as Wan called it. The completion date has been pushed back to 2030. [...] The pioneering autonomous transport system - which was originally supposed to stretch to 100 stations - was scrapped after the first two stops. There is a bike-sharing station – though it's a good 10 miles away from Abu Dhabi, and there are no bike paths. [...] [Chris Wan] maintained it was important to look at Masdar City within the context of the other renewable energy holdings of the parent company. Among Mubadala's other holdings, Masdar Clean Energy is developing the Shams solar farm.
Some more background on Masdar City (مدينة مصدر).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 16 2016, @10:16PM
Right, so-called green energy really isn't.
A solar air conditioner would have to somehow run off solar heat, perhaps in the way that gas-fired air conditioners run off the heat from burning natural gas. Very contradictory, very disappointing.
The only reason to have electric cars is to avoid pollution, yet they cause pollution! Another contradiction. The same is true of bicycles. When you look carefully at the material goes into a bicycle, it turns out to be steel, rubber, aluminium, and plastic (which lasts forever)--just the same things an automobile is made from. And the energy to propel a bicycle? Well, it doesn't really come from the person riding it. The rider has to burn extra calories, as compared to motoring. Those calories appear to come from food, but wait. The way we produce and handle food typically uses more energy in fossil fuels than the energy that ends up in the food! Better to just motor.
When rare earth elements are mined, the tailings cannot be safely disposed of. That's why such mines exist only in China. Without neodymium, the motors in electric cars and the generators in wind turbines would be huge and heavy.
With a stupendously huge PV farm, a semiconductor plant could be powered. But the concrete for building the plant must be made from coal. The supplies must be brought to it by trucks or trains, which must be powered by oil (there's no such thing as an electric train). The panels, once fabricated, must be shipped across the ocean, and ships run by burning oil. If it were possible to propel a ship with solar or wind energy, someone would have done so already.
When we look into the energy returned over energy invested for so-called renewable energy, it becomes apparent that energy must first be invested before any energy--at all!--can be returned. Since our present industrial apparatus runs mostly on non-renewable energy, most of the energy invested will be non-renewable. Constructing solar panels, wind turbines and the like will initially cause us to burn even more fossil fuels. It can take years before these things pay back the energy that was used to make them...better to just stay with fossil fuel instead of deluding ourselves.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 16 2016, @10:32PM
I modded you funny because it was pretty funny but the bike vs car thing really is true under highly restricted circumstances, like five people in a prius on a flat country highway and the biker has to live off organic food imported from far away by diesel burning delivery trucks. Then you really do burn less fuel in a car than on a bike.
Takes a lot of all kinds of petrochemicals to grow, harvest, and deliver an ear of corn to your house.
(Score: 3, Informative) by legont on Wednesday February 17 2016, @12:44AM
I've read somewhere that it takes about 10 calories of oil to get 1 calorie of food in the US, while in Soviet Russia it was 1:1. Times changed, but still most Russians have dacha's - little summer houses where they often grow food. If we want green we'd better grow local food by hand.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 17 2016, @09:14PM
> ...solar heat
Oddly enough solar panels do not generate electricity from heat at all. One can be excused because our skin feels the 'heat of the sun' and associates it with energy. But really solar power is a reaction from the light. Remember, even in the colds of space the ISS runs off solar power.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2016, @02:08AM
What you say is true, of course. I didn't have the misconception that photovoltaic panels turn heat into electricity. An air conditioner, as someone else mentioned, could run off electricity from photovoltaics. Instead of that, what I was writing about was something called an "absorption chiller":
http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/solar-powered-air-conditioning-just-makes-sense.html [treehugger.com]
http://www.gasairconditioning.org/robur_how_it_works.htm [gasairconditioning.org]