Masdar – The First Green City (Video)

Juan Cole posts about Masdar – The First Green City (Video).

Masdar City is a new city in Abu Dhabi.

The things I found interesting about the video were:

• The ambition is to have the entire city powered by renewable energy.
• The city is generating far more power now than it needs—so it is exporting to the rest of the country.
• This is a government project with central planning
• Design is a key feature of reducing energy requirements
• The designers are revisiting historical solutions to problems of cooling
• The government is clearly focused on a future beyond cheap oil
• The project is using research results from earlier stages to design better solutions

In Australia, we could have the same chance to do something similar in Port Augusta with Port Augusta’s solar thermal future:

No city has more to gain from this shift to renewable clean energy than Port Augusta.

It has first rate resources of solar power, dependable sea breezes and an existing high capacity grid connection … all of the ingredients to become an energy hub.

Solar thermal plants are baseload solar power, which use mirrors to concentrate the sun’s energy to create heat. In turn, that heat is stored to generate electricity 24 hours a day.

Solar thermal plants are a commercial off-the-shelf technology, so they are ready to go now. The materials required are concrete, glass and steel, of which this nation has an abundance.

Because they are thermal plants they have the same turbines and generators as coal-fired plants. But it would be best to commence with a greenfield site.

They can be air-cooled so will use about a tenth of the water of coal-fired plants.

In Australia, this drive towards renewable energy has to be community-led rather than by the Government is still beholden to the Coal Mining industry.

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