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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: -1, Troll) by Alfred on Tuesday February 16 2016, @09:15PM
Can you make an air conditioner that runs on just solar power? Yes but not the kind you are thinking of so you will be disappointed.
Can you make the green tech you want without strip mining for rare earth elements. I don't think so.
Do you have the power to make a windmill generator without it ultimately coming from coal/gas/nuke? Very nope.
Is there an electric car in use that doesn't cause pollution outside of the city it operates in? Absolutely not.
In thermodynamics you have to determine your boundaries to analyze the system. Every analysis of green anything uses a boundary tighter than tunnel vision so everyone sees the cute electric car but no one sees the pollution or nasty chemical disposal required to produce the car. Until you take care of the green collateral damage you don't have a green solution, just a trendy green investor scam.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Gravis on Tuesday February 16 2016, @09:39PM
Can you make a solar panel with just energy that came from solar panels? Nope.
umm... yes you can.
Can you make an air conditioner that runs on just solar power? Yes but not the kind you are thinking of so you will be disappointed.
umm... i was thinking of it being electric. why can't i have that?
Can you make the green tech you want without strip mining for rare earth elements. I don't think so.
yes you can. solar panels are made of refined sand.
Do you have the power to make a windmill generator without it ultimately coming from coal/gas/nuke? Very nope.
umm... is there something special about electricity that comes from "coal/gas/nuke"?
Is there an electric car in use that doesn't cause pollution outside of the city it operates in? Absolutely not.
you know the tesla charge stations are solar powered, right?
Every analysis of green anything uses a boundary tighter than tunnel vision so everyone sees the cute electric car but no one sees the pollution or nasty chemical disposal required to produce the car.
chemical pollution is not a requirement for industries, it's a shortcut. everything can be recycled, it just costs money to do it properly.
Until you take care of the green collateral damage you don't have a green solution, just a trendy green investor scam.
the "green collateral damage" is purely voluntary. eventually China will get it's act together and stop their polluting but right now they want to be an economic superpower more than they want their health.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 16 2016, @10:10PM
Being located in the UAE, it is doubtful that "electric" anything will be powered from renewable energy - unless the project is a pure un-economic showpiece. Certainly, they could buy fewer fighter jets and put that money into solar panels just because they can, but with oil still flowing from the ground at lower cost than water, this city will be an example of how expensively people can live when ignoring local abundances.
Disappointing that they gave it up, just like the artificial islands and all the canceled mega-towers.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 16 2016, @10:55PM
oil still flowing from the ground at lower cost than water
Desal water is getting cheap. Like $4 per 1000 gallons. Maybe cheaper if the accountants are crooked enough. UAE gets all their drinking water from desal. I clicked around on wikipedia and was surprised to discover this city project is getting four solar powered desal plants. Thats about right if they ever get the 50K residents they're claiming... or if it stays at the 4K residents they actually have in the ghost town, its hard to economically run plants below 10% capacity, so they kinda have a little problem.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday February 17 2016, @03:21AM
$4 per 1000 gallons is pretty impressive, now, if that's burning Saudi oil at $4 a barrel production cost, maybe not as impressive, but still good to get 1000 gallons out of a single barrel of crude.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 17 2016, @12:49PM
The San Diego desal plant is charging $6 for the same amount of water, and they have impressive california cost of land, regulation, labor, insane california electric prices, and are baking a 12% profit into the cake. So $4 in the third world is realistic.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 16 2016, @10:40PM
You're mostly correct there for a change, Gravis, except the part about recycling. Recycling most things is not green, only greener.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Wednesday February 17 2016, @08:15AM
Recycling most things is not green, only greener.
it all depends on what you consider recycling. everything is name of molecules and you can break those down into their individual elements and use them for whatever you like. all that is required is electricity/energy, plenty of chemistry and most importantly, a destination for the resulting chemical elements. modern "recycling" is all about turning existing material into a material that can be reused cheaply for existing manufacturing industries. if money wasn't involved, we could have real recycling and eliminate pollution completely.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday February 17 2016, @11:37AM
And the chemistry is what makes it less than green. Many types of recycling you end up with toxic nastiness left over.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Wednesday February 17 2016, @09:54PM
And the chemistry is what makes it less than green. Many types of recycling you end up with toxic nastiness left over.
if you end up with anything unwanted that isn't a pure element, you aren't finished with the recycling process.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday February 18 2016, @11:21AM
Arsenic is a pure element and also quite toxic, just as an example.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Thursday February 18 2016, @12:10PM
sure, plenty of elements are toxic to humans but doesn't mean they aren't perfectly useful to make chemicals we want. Just add a Gallium atom to your Arsenic atom and suddenly you have Gallium arsenide which is a valuable semiconductor.
(Score: 2, Informative) by vux984 on Wednesday February 17 2016, @03:24AM
yes you can. solar panels are made of refined sand.
Not entirely. 1st gen panels are crystalline silicon; but even they use lead and cadmium in the electronics, and highly toxic materials are also used in the panel production processes (chemical purification, cleaning, etc)
2nd and 3rd gen panels are typically exotic compounds of silicon and thus even the cells are toxic.
umm... is there something special about electricity that comes from "coal/gas/nuke"?
In this context, electricity produced from it is widely available to industry. There are no solar powered solar panel factories, at least not today.
you know the tesla charge stations are solar powered, right?
In a very small part sure. But they don't collect remotely enough power that two actually charge even a small number of cars. The vast bulk of the electricity is coming from other sources.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Alfred on Wednesday February 17 2016, @02:32PM
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Friday February 19 2016, @11:39AM
even they use lead and cadmium in the electronics,
actually thanks to RoHS, very few electronic components use lead or cadmium.
and highly toxic materials are also used in the panel production processes (chemical purification, cleaning, etc)
toxic chemicals are not environmentally unfriendly. dumping chemicals into the environment, toxic or not is pollution and the only difference is toxic chemicals have worse side effects on the ecosystem. as long as you contain and recycle the waste generated by any chemical process, it's environmentally friendly. burning coal wouldn't be a problem if they weren't dumping the waste chemicals into the environment via a smokestack.
2nd and 3rd gen panels are typically exotic compounds of silicon and thus even the cells are toxic.
if you are talking about GaAs cells, sure they are toxic... but they are also sealed and laminated. however, cells like that are absurdly expensive and everyone generally sticks to making silicon panels still.
There are no solar powered solar panel factories, at least not today.
O RLY? [gizmag.com]
In a very small part sure. But they don't collect remotely enough power that two actually charge even a small number of cars. The vast bulk of the electricity is coming from other sources.
actually, they are pushing large amounts of power to nearby locations during the day when not directly charging a car. the effect is using the grid like a rechargeable battery.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Friday February 19 2016, @06:53PM
toxic chemicals are not environmentally unfriendly
Sure, as long as they are procured (mined) in an environmentally friendly mine; processed in an environmentally friendly factory, and then when they get around to actually being used they aren't dumped into the environment, but are actually collected and recycled... and... the recycler is itself environmentally friendly.
I mean suppose I send all my aluminum can's to be recycled and the recycling plant is using coal power. It's recycling, and its better than landfill, but its still not really all that environmentally friendly. (Don't get me wrong, you've got to start somewhere, but right now, recyling and renewable energies are resting on the back of some environmental disasters. Its a step in the right direction, not a fait accompli.)
O RLY
Yeah RLY. From your own article:
"A rooftop solar array accounts for a "significant proportion" of the electrical demand, according to Burckhardt+Partner."
They didn't mention a percentage that I saw, but I'm guessing its quite a bit less than even 1/3rd.
actually, they are pushing large amounts of power to nearby locations during the day when not directly charging a car. the effect is using the grid like a rechargeable battery.
It takes about 90kWh to charge a tesla. And takes 75 minutes to charge an empty Tesla to full. So you need, very roughly, panels that produce 100kw of power PER stall. And each stall change charge 10-12 cars per day. (Right out of the gate that's abysmal compared to fuel cars, where a station might might move 10-12 cars through a stall per *hour* but lets set that aside.)
You need 5.5m^2 to generate 1000W on a clear cloudless day at sea level, assuming 18% efficient panels. So... 495m^2 is the absolute minumum solar panel area you need to charge a single Tesla under optimal conditions. 4 stalls... quadruple it. 2000m^2. This is not small. And in a future electric world? Charging 4 cars per hour is not going to cut it... we'll either need a LOT more electric stations than we currently have gas stations... a LOT MORE. (And yes, sure, we can count charging at home, as part of the solution... but those aren't all solar powered.)
And again... they built a few in california, a veritable desert. Are the tesla charging stations in Vancouver solar? Nope.
Look, I'm not really disagreeing with you; the tesla solar charging stations do exist, clean technologies for a lot of things do exist. But we are still a long way away from most things we say are "green" really being green through the whole cycle in practice. An honest assessment of this stuff is at best "greener than otherwise but still got a long way to go"; and there's a more than a few "green" technologies where they've externalized more pollution than the "non-green" technology actually created... but they've hidden back in a factory in china where we don't see it. That's not "green".
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Friday February 19 2016, @11:28PM
I mean suppose I send all my aluminum can's to be recycled and the recycling plant is using coal power. It's recycling,
the plant itself is powered by the grid. the grid is an abstraction of energy generation, so they are burning puppies to generate power for all i know. you cannot choose how the power is generated if you are not generating the power yourself.
right now, recyling and renewable energies are resting on the back of some environmental disasters
right now they are because no company is going to voluntarily turn off their money maker even if it's burning puppies for fuel. that's a separate issue that people have been working hard to address. [sierraclub.org]
Yeah RLY.
touche! i should have looked closer, shame on me. however, just because the power comes from the grid doesn't mean it's destroying the environment because it's an abstraction.
we are still a long way away from most things we say are "green" really being green through the whole cycle in practice
true the entire cycle isn't "green" but the point is that the side you can actually change is "green". the grid is an abstraction of power generation meaning that you cannot choose what methods are used for power generation. the electric car is a "green" technology but not all power generation for that car is "green". by your logic, an electric can can get more and less "green" dependant on where you live. i think that's a preposterous analysis because the car is not exuding any pollution at all.
there's a more than a few "green" technologies where they've externalized more pollution than the "non-green" technology actually created... but they've hidden back in a factory in china where we don't see it. That's not "green".
this is another case of abstraction where what it is and how it's made have been separated. what a particular manufacturing plant does to make something does not change the attributes of the thing itself. if the manufacturer magically reversed the damage it did making solar panels, do the solar panels themselves change from being "non-green" to "green"? not even a molecule of the solar panels has changed, so why should it's attributes change? a solar panel can come from a environmentally friendly factory or a polluting factory but the solar panel itself does not determine how it was made just like electricity doesn't determine how it's generated. in both cases, you don't have a choice in the matter. what i'm saying is you need to be putting the blame (labeling as "non-green") on polluting factories, not the things they make. the sins of the father are not the sins of the son.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Saturday February 20 2016, @12:25AM
the electric car is a "green" technology but not all power generation for that car is "green". by your logic, an electric can can get more and less "green" dependent on where you live. i think that's a preposterous analysis because the car is not exuding any pollution at all.
I don't think its preposterous. I think it MUST be considered.
A fleet of electric cars solar charged in california superstations is a greener transportation system than the same fleet of cars charged by a coal plant in the midwest. The coal plant is not part of the "Car", its the same car. But it is part of the complete "transportation system".
Its conceivable that a fleet of modern gasoline-sippers might very well be a cleaner transportation system than a fleet of electrics powered by an old coal plant; as an extreme example.
this is another case of abstraction where what it is and how it's made have been separated. what a particular manufacturing plant does to make something does not change the attributes of the thing itself.
The production process is an inescapable part of the environmental footprint of the system. Even if a local-view of a particular output looks "green" we must look at the big picture. Maybe your puppy-burning factory can be eventually replaced with a solar powered one. In which case, the "larger system" has potential to improve and while its not really green right now, it can become greener. Or maybe the puppy-burning factory needs the burnt flesh of puppies as an integral component in the production and there is clear way around it.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Saturday February 20 2016, @05:07AM
I don't think its preposterous. I think it MUST be considered.
A fleet of electric cars solar charged in california superstations is a greener transportation system than the same fleet of cars charged by a coal plant in the midwest.
if you are going to attribute the actions of others to objects why not take it a step further and assign the same qualities to people? that way we can squarely place blame on customers who get power for coal for all the damage they are doing to the environment. we should also start jailing parents of criminals because they are guilty of what their children did too. now all the wins and loses of local sports teams are thanks to me too! oh and now we can say it's the people of Flint, Michigan's fault that they put lead into their own water and we can just ignore them now since they did it to themselves! do you see how preposterous that is?
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Saturday February 20 2016, @07:06AM
if you are going to attribute the actions of others to objects
That's not what I did. All I did was count the total pollution in a complete system rather than just slicing off a corner and just looking at that corner in isolation.
I'm not really even sure how to address the rest of your arguments except to say that none of them apply.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Saturday February 20 2016, @10:23AM
That's not what I did. All I did was count the total pollution in a complete system rather than just slicing off a corner and just looking at that corner in isolation.
i understand that but the problem with that is that you addressed "that corner" (the cars) as if they are responsible for the entire system. electric cars are "green" but what you are saying is that now electric cars have to take to blame for how a company generates electricity thusly reducing it to only being "greener" or in cases of extreme pollution, "less green". why is the car to blame for what someone else does to generate electricity?
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Saturday February 20 2016, @07:31PM
why is the car to blame for what someone else does to generate electricity
The car is not "to blame". I didn't say the car was less green, i said the "transportation system" was less green. When I expanded my lens to look at the big picture I blamed the complete "system".
If making "locally green" choices doesn't net benefit the environment then I'm not really accomplishing anything. We need solutions that result in net benefits, not local ones. An electric car might be part of a net green solution or it might not be, depending on what's happening in the rest of the system it is part of. It's not the car's "fault" what the rest of the system is composed of but neither assigning nor absolving the car of blame doesn't help the environment.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Saturday February 20 2016, @09:32PM
I didn't say the car was less green, i said the "transportation system" was less green.
touche.
If making "locally green" choices doesn't net benefit the environment then I'm not really accomplishing anything. We need solutions that result in net benefits, not local ones.
Sure it does. It's baby steps toward a real solution. Just like a single gene mutation may have little to no effect but when the last gene of the puzzle is in place it will cause an evolutionary leap. [wikipedia.org] One person can only change what they do, not what other people do (without governmental interference) but when we all work together it will have a huge impact. voting systems have the same issue where one vote for a candidate doesn't matter but if enough people vote together, that candidate will win. my vote is for electromagnetic energy processes instead of chemical energy processes and when enough people vote the same way, we elect (see what i did there) to save the planet. :)
An electric car might be part of a net green solution or it might not be, depending on what's happening in the rest of the system it is part of.
it is part of a realistic sustainable solution which seems like the definition of "green". if you are consumed by what other parts of the system are doing, you will be paralyzed into inaction. all we can do is fix the parts of the system that we can and trust that the other parts of the system will eventually be fixed by other people fixing the part of the system that they can fix. trying to fix the entire system by yourself is an unrealistic task.
(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]
(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: