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Solar Energy Zero Waste City

These may be early signs but they are certainly there. Almost like a line of chalk on a grained playing filed, a wall in white expands through the desert area. A bus featuring a darkened window causes ripple in a low cloud. It dutifully takes the workers on the other sides of steel cranes. Then there are a couple of portable drilling rugs and then a stand of concrete pillars emanating rust colored rebars. There is also a high wire fence that shelters neat lines of solar panels lying over concrete pads.

This construction, grand in design, heralds a huge experiment. It is an endeavor meant to establish world’s first car-less, carbon dioxide-less, Zero-waste city. To be completed by 2016, the city holds center stage for the Masdar Initiative. Masdar Initiative happens to be a 15 billion USD venture by the Abu Dhabi government. The city to be built on solar energy will utilize one fifth of energy resources in comparison to the equi-sized traditional cities. Garbage will be sifted away and then recycled or utilized as compost. All the sewage will be used as fuel after due processing.

The city will be a cauldron of renewable energy in a country which has a population of 5 million. It’s the city which exploits the maximum amount of natural resources in the world. The country has been entirely defined by similar projects; we mean the big, high-scale ones. UAE has by now become home to few of the biggest skyscrapers. Also worthwhile to talk about is a colossal ski drome that houses a 200 meter long black diamond slope. Realtors have brought out coral and sand right from the sea floor and piled it on the Persian Gulf to establish islands which resemble palm trees and the world map.

The idea of development is not only techno-centric but also moolah-centric.” We want Masdar City to be profitable, not just a sunk cost,” suggested Khaled Awad, the project’s head of property development, at a giant realty exhibition in Dubai last autumn. “If it is not profitable as a real-estate development, it is not sustainable.” Yet if it is, it may be replicable.”

Yes, it is a different story altogether that enough of what’s already been learnt will not apply to any place outside the Persian Gulf. It is because the gulf is extremely hot and thus a vast resource of solar energy. Let’s say, a place in Germany might not be able to convert as much solar radiations which are required for the sustenance of a solar city. If the experiment succeeds and we do get to reach beyond the environmental distress which might come out of the experiment, then it will be a great pioneer.