$50M solar plant comes online to power Masdar City construction

The largest utility-scale solar project in the Middle East and North Africa has been connected to the electric grid to provide power for the construction of the world's first zero-carbon, zero-waste, car-free city.

The 10-megawatt photovoltaic system was built on 55 acres in Abu Dhabi, the largest of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates. The $50 million system was designed by Abu Dhabi-based integrator Enviromena to supply power to build Masdar City in the desert outside Abu Dhabi.

When completed in 2016, Masdar City is expected to have 1,500 businesses and 50,000 residents consuming sustainable energy, water, and food. Madsar City is being built by the property development arm of the Masdar Initiative, which the Abu Dhabi government created to be its cleantech investment group (see Abu Dhabi, the next cleantech hub?).

The city's electricity is expected to be generated by photovoltaic panels, with plans to get cooling from concentrated solar power. Water would come from a planned solar-powered desalination plant, and landscaping within the city and crops grown outside the city would be irrigated with gray water and treated waste water produced by an expected water treatment plant.

Check out a rendering of Masdar City >> 

Demand for power in the United Arab Emirates is expected to double by 2020, according to the International Energy Agency, with an additional 100 gigawatts of power necessary at a cost of $10 billion (see UAE: The future of cleantech?).

The UAE, which is the world's fifth-largest oil exporter, already has the world's largest per-capita ecological footprint, according to a 2008 report from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). A contributor factor is the region's use of water, which is in limited supply but used to generate 20 percent of electricity.

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