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Until last year at least, when Dubai’s speculative property-based boom came to a spectacular and sudden halt, there was a saying in the United Arab Emirates (UAE): “Abu Dhabi plans and Dubai delivers”.
A visit to Masdar City, on the desert fringe of Abu Dhabi, shows how its planning is starting to bear fruit.
This is where the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company intends to raise a city out of nowhere, for a population of 90,000, roughly the size of Falkirk.
Masdar, which aims to be the world’s first full-scale fully carbon-neutral, zero-waste city, is a project of astonishing – and possibly excessive – ambition.
In January 2008, Abu Dhabi invested $15 billion, making Masdar the largest single Government investment of its kind.
Meanwhile, Abu Dhabi’s cousins in Dubai stopped “delivering” much of anything. The emirate’s property-related woes resurfaced again last week when Dubai International Capital, the Government-owned investment arm, requested a three-month extension to repay its debt.
By contrast, Masdar is forging ahead, according to the technocrats who gathered in the desert from all over the world.
One of these is Scott McGuigan, Masdar’s head of infrastructure finance and an expatriate Scot from Currie in Edinburgh. McGuigan, 42, who first went abroad to play rugby and has had a stellar career in infrastructure finance throughout Australasia and the Middle East, plays a leading role in the UAE’s revitalised Globalscot network of senior executives who open doors for Scottish companies.
The Herald’s visit accompanied Mackay Smith, the Paris-based regional director of Scottish Development International (SDI), the Scottish Government/Scottish Enterprise agency which seeks overseas opportunities for Scottish companies.
SDI’s Middle Eastern team is seeking ways to plug Scotland’s expertise in renewable technologies and its academic brain power into the Masdar project.
McGuigan was seconded to Masdar Institute from the energy infrastructure consultancy CH2M Hill, and is one of the hive of young technocrats that Masdar’s directors cherry-picked from around the world.
The money, brains and idealism behind the project make it a magnet for members of the global “cleantech” technology community. They either want to work there or have their technology tested and incorporated in the Masdar supply chain.
“Dubai knows about the price of everything, but Abu Dhabi understands about creating value,” said McGuigan, describing how the senior emirate will use Masdar to reposition itself as a knowledge-based economy, and turn it into a technology developer and exporter.
When its first phase is completed, by 2014 at the earliest, Masdar will be transformative for Abu Dhabi and the Gulf. The intention is to show how urban planning, smart construction, futuristic transport systems and 100% renewable energy generation and waste recycling systems can enable a carbon-free future.
In the process Abu Dhabi will have inspired the finest technical and financial minds to create a modern oasis on this six square kilometre site. Achieving this in a waterless land, where summer temperatures top 40C, will show, rather than tell those with lesser environmental challenges what “sustainable living” should mean.
Masdar (meaning “the source” in Arabic) is the general name for a complex portfolio of five inter linked initiatives. There is the almost-complete Masdar Institute, a graduate university specialising in alternative energy and environmental technology, aligned to MIT in Boston.
Masdar Power is a global portfolio of renewable energy operating assets, both on-site and abroad. These include the UK’s London Array, the world’s largest offshore wind farm project.
There is also Masdar Venture Capital, a group of “cleantech” investment funds, and Masdar Carbon, a group of experimental projects across the renewable energy spectrum in various stages of commercialisation.
All feed back into Masdar City itself – designed by Norman Foster & Partners – which will cluster round the Institute building, whose shade-creating Arabic architecture prefigures how the city’s streets might look. Powered largely by photovoltaic cells, it will be cooled by wind towers, and its waste products recycled and used to fertilise surrounding parkland.
As well as being a futuristic address for (presumably fairly wealthy) idealists, Masdar will house the new International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), whose aim is the rapid transition towards widespread and sustainable use of renewable energy worldwide.
Masdar is one way in which Abu Dhabi has played jewel-encrusted tortoise to Dubai’s entrepreneurial hare. The emirate broadcast the message through the annual World Future Energy Summit, a politically high-powered gathering which claims to be “the world’s foremost … annual meeting for the renewable energy and environment industry”.
Alex Salmond should certainly be there, but despite the claims it makes for itself as a global pioneer in the fostering of renewable technologies, the Scottish Government has so far failed to fly the Saltire at this event.
McGuigan, along with Mackay Smith and SDI’s point man in the Gulf Colin Crabbe, would like to see Scotland plugged into Masdar City, joining far-sighted, technology-exporting governments from Berne to Seoul.
Often in the Middle East, the most successful companies come with Government backing, though The Herald has learned of one innovative Scottish firm – still bound by commercial confidentiality – won a place in the supply chain for its modular building materials.
The next year or so will be crucial to the advance of the Masdar plan, and there is no transparency over whether the regional property slump has cut off an important source of investment capital.
But even if the current property hiatus slows the project down, that pace is only relative to the UAE’s do-it-now attitude. Masdar has too much invested in it to remain unrealised.
How Masdar can benefit Scotland
Scott McGuigan Q&A
Q: Why should Scotland pay attention to Masdar?
A: Scotland is blessed with a green, natural environment but we could study some of the emerging cleantech technology being incorporated there with a view to adopting variations of these technologies, where they would fit our environment. The technologies will evolve and Scotland may need them to stay competitive in the sustainable development field.
Q: How can our companies and policy-makers get involved?
A: By sharing the models for sustainable development at Masdar – a “lessons learned” resource to those delivering new developments in Scotland. This country has a thriving renewables industry across the supply chain, such as wind and hydropower, and the knowledge base that comes with these industries is extremely valuable to Masdar.
Q: Can Scottish expertise make an impact?
A: Scotland has many potential contributions to the cleantech market in products, management and finance. Scotland’s companies have a long history of building and financing complex projects. These areas of strength can be built upon, packaged, developed and exported globally.