Highlights from inaugural World Future Energy Summit

The first World Future Energy Summit has concluded, but there’s still plenty of buzz.

With 230 companies and over 11,000 visitors attending the conference in Abu Dhabi, the event ran on full power over the course of three days.

Highlights from the event include:

On a light note, HRH The Prince of Wales being beamed in to speak to the Summit by hologram, the furore this caused represents the excitement surrounding the event.

On a more substantial level, US $15 billion have been pledged by Abu Dhabi for Masdars vision of a zero-carbon city. Masdar’s Initiative’s first project is to build a new six million square metre sustainable development that uses the traditional planning principals of a walled city, together with existing technologies, to achieve a carbon neutral and zero waste community.

Pooran Desai OBE, Technical Director of the One Planet Living Communities programme, said Masdar would be the largest and one of the most advanced sustainable communities in the world: ‘The vision of One Planet Living is a world where people everywhere can lead happy, healthy lives within their fair share of the Earth’s resources,’ he said. ‘Masdar gives us a breathtaking insight into this.’

Masdar will be employing creativity to make its vision a reality. The kind of creativity exhibited at the Summit by William McDonough.

McDonough was commissioned by Fortune magazine to come up with a ‘Tower of Tomorrow’ - a skyscraper office tower that would anticipate a 100 per cent positive impact on people and place.

‘What we came up with was ‘a building for the present’, something possible today that embodies the idea of a building like a tree - a building that receives its energy

from the sun, that grows food, that builds soil, that provides a habitat for hundreds of species, that changes colours with the seasons, that creates micro-climates, that would purify water. A building that would do just about everything a tree can do except self-replicate,’ explained McDonough.

He is adamant that: ‘Green buildings shouldn’t be seen as something that add cost, they should be seen as high-performance buildings - high-performance in terms of the productivity of the people that work there, in terms of energy, in terms of materials. Our buildings don’t cost much more than normal buildings but they out-perform them.’

Oil major, BP, isn’t one to admit to performance anxiety. Keen not be blown out by alternative clean energies, Steve Peacock, President of BP in the Middle East & South Asia region, said: ‘Alternative energies such as solar, wind and bio-fuels are unlikely to replace oil and gas entirely and governments will have to continue to invest in conventional forms of energy in order to meet rising demand. Nevertheless, alternative energy can help meet at least a part of the rising demand and we expect there will be an increasing focus on this field over the coming years.’

Forecasting the change in energy sources, BP, which now has a dedicated Alternative Energy division, is a founding partner of the Masdar Alternative Energy initiative has announced a $2 billion hydrogen plant for Abu Dhabi, generating hydrogen without carbon release from fossil fuels.

Solar power is likely to play a big part in Masdar’s visions and elsewhere, as UK representatives acknowledged.

Jeremy Leggett, chief executive of UK-based Solar Century, said: ‘The opportunity now is for solar power to take enormous bites out of traditional markets, much bigger and quicker bites than most people believe possible, I suspect.’

Sven Teske, of Greenpeace’s Climate and Energy Unit admitted that ‘the upfront investment costs [of solar energy] are relatively high’. However, he added: ‘Once we reach the economies of scale, solar will be a competitive or even cheaper energy source than many fossil fuels.’

Masdar’s zero-carbon city has the ability to demonstrate how economies of scale can make solar a more accessible technology.