Masdar set to hold two architectural competitions

Original Article

Sustainable city planned for Abu Dhabi on the look out for green practices to produce designs for zero carbon hotel

The developers of the Masdar zero carbon city planned for Abu Dhabi are set to launch to architectural competitions for super green buildings.

Speaking at the Cityscape event last week Khaled Awad, director of property development, said the team was looking for designs for a zero carbon hotel for the project, which will occupy 6km2 of land in the Middle East.

Khaled also revealed that the final designs for the first scheme to be built in the city, a university called the Masdar Institute, were due for completion by the end of November. The project is being designed by Foster and Partners, who are also masterplanning the city. “We gave Fosters the task of designing to demonstrate to us that the masterplan is do-able,” Khaled said.

Khaled said the Masdar buildings would outperform the highest LEED standard, LEED platinum, in order to meet their objective of creating a zero carbon city. The team is targeting to reduce energy consumption of buildings by 60% and to supply the remaining energy with renewable sources.

“For this to be a success we have to be able to continue to stick to the orginal vision of it being zero carbon. We are on target for this right now.”

Khaled also revealed details of the renewable energy planned for the city:

* Masdar will include a 10MW PV plant, the first phase of which will be completed in 2011. “This will be a breakthrough for PV costs,” Khaled said
* Only 1% of the renewable energy for the city will come from wind. “We have done a study on wind and there was no cost benefit in using it,” Khaled said.