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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: 3, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday February 16 2016, @10:20PM
Can you make the green tech you want without strip mining for rare earth elements.
In this you are correct that you do take a darn near 50% performance hit going from rare earth filled CIGS-process cells to rare earth free amorphous-process cells.
Rare earths and heavy metals are not rare enough and are cheap enough that you only see a-Si cells in things like solar calculators for kids, but there's no technological reason you couldn't spin up production if we lost tellurium or gallium dried up or WTF-ium were no longer available. Its just that today the costs (economic or environmental) of thin film CIGS-process is so dang cheap it doesn't make sense to toss out half your power output. But if we had to, no problemo, a-Si process all the way and Chinese gallium miners can go pound sand. We'll just need about twice as many panels. This is a problem in that the cost of the panels has dropped to not much over glass, aluminum, and installation labor, cells are practically free. Well, not quite, but they're not the price driver anyway.
You might be confusing green solar cells with green-type ultra high power ultra low weight electric car motors, like the electric motor in my wife's prius which is something ridiculous like 1 pound per horsepower, good as an aircraft engine. Fifty years ago, a 1 Hp motor weighed about 40 pounds, I have my grandpa's electric half horsepower drill in the basement somewhere and you had to be a pretty strong carpenter to wield that thing. Motors like that are all weird as heck rare earth magnets, very true. Of course they recycle pretty well, just like NiMH batteries or cat converters.
The rest of your post was all wrong, however, as someone will likely point out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 17 2016, @02:36AM
Gallium isn't one of the rare earth elements. It is about as abundant in the Earth's crust as lanthanum, the second most common rare earth element.* Unlike the rare earth elements, it's recovered when aluminium and zinc are produced from ores. This is done in various countries. The USGS publishes a report [usgs.gov] about it, which says: