Masdar’s green dream is not for all

• Last Updated: April 25. 2008 2:48AM UAE / April 24. 2008 10:48PM GMT

This article originally stated that Mr Younes was the project director of Masdar, which is incorrect. We regret the error.

The $22 billion carbon-neutral Masdar development could very well be the city of the future, but the lifestyle will not be for people accustomed to driving around in 4x4s and enjoying the chill of air-conditioners running at full blast.

In Masdar, flats will be smaller, cooling will be ambient rather than frosty, and you will have to walk or take public transport to get around.

Even Masdar’s engineering co-ordinator for the master plan acknowledges the city will not appeal to everyone.

“The people who want to live there want to live a sustainable lifestyle,” Serge Younes said. “It’s people who work in the field, people who are environmentally friendly, people who understand the pressure of living in an environment like the UAE and the impact it causes to all of its surroundings.”

The 28-year-old engineer from the UK said in an interview in Dubai that the goal is to make Masdar an appealing example of how residents of the UAE and the world can live without using too much energy or materials. The UAE has one of the highest rates of per capita energy use, most of which goes into air conditioning, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

For most people here, voracious energy consumption has become a way of life, unlike in Europe, where countries are making steady progress towards greater efficiency.

“Your average housewife in Freiburg, [Germany,] knows more about sustainability than you or I or any of the sustainability gurus out there,” he said. “They actually live it, day in and day out.”

Masdar will give residents an option for a sustainable lifestyle that does not currently exist in the region, Mr Younes said.

Buildings here are often spaced too far apart, meaning that they do not provide any shade for each other and the energy used to cool them is dissipated into the atmosphere. Large swathes of unshaded pavement cause temperatures in the city to rise.

Even inside, older buildings are tremendously inefficient, leaking cool air and forcing occupants to crank down the thermostat to maintain a comfortable temperature, Mr Younes said. Public transport and waste recycling programmes are virtually non-existent.

Relatively cheap rates for petrol, electricity and water do nothing to change behaviour patterns, he said.

Mr Younes said that when he first came to the UAE, he rented a 4x4 to cruise around Dubai. When he went to the petrol station, he expected to pay £100 (Dh720) to fill up, not Dh100.

“You can easily understand why people here quite quickly forget the reality of what it is to live with a resource because the resources are extremely cheap,” he said. “I feel sorry for people who come here with all good intentions, and a year later they are barely recognisable, they lose all those environmental and sustainable values.”

The designers of Masdar have sought to give those people a better option. The city’s buildings are hyper-efficient and orientated to maximise shade and make use of prevailing winds to help keep the city cool, like Arab cities of old.

With “creative architecture” alone, Mr Younes said, the city of 50,000 will cut its energy usage by 50-70 per cent compared with a city of similar size.

“One of the main concepts is you really can walk outside and it just doesn’t feel as hot,” he said. “Therefore when you’re in your building you don’t need to set your air conditioning as high, you can actually walk quite comfortably to the shops, you don’t need to run and dash as we all do into the closest car.”

The compact, walled city will be surrounded by acres of photovoltaic solar panels and wind turbines that will provide the electricity that is needed.

In designing the Masdar project, Mr Younes has set out ambitious goals. He said he does not believe in so-called carbon offsetting, where alternative energy projects elsewhere make up for carbon dioxide emissions.

“You can achieve zero carbon on balance sheets, but in my view it’s a little bit of cheating,” he said.

He wants Masdar to truly be a “zero-carbon” city that uses every bit of its available resources.

Smiling enthusiastically, he describes as an example how non-recyclable rubbish will be run through a gasification machine, producing synthetic natural gas. Residual heat from the process will be run through an absorption chiller, which will help power the city’s air conditioning systems.

He notes that the process will be similar for water and the rest of the energy process: interconnected systems that exploit every available angle to achieve greater efficiency.

As oil and gas get more expensive and global climate change becomes a bigger issue, cities like Masdar will become the norm, not the exception, he said confidently. And if it does not work?

“Yes, if it fails here we’re in serious trouble, the whole world is in trouble,” he said. “If the only place that has liquidity to build such a thing can’t do it [then who can]. [We] have brought the best in the world: the best architects, the best engineers, the best programme managers to make it happen. If it doesn’t work, does that show that humanity is not ready for it? That becomes the more philosophical question.”

cstanton@thenational.ae