I. After Oil
Dubai drops away behind us, its comic-book skyline replaced by khaki sand dunes and the occasional wild camel. The first sign of the technological ambition we are about to see is a billboard: a 20-foot-tall portrait of Dubai’s ruler, His Highness
At a cluster of buildings about a half-hour south of the city, a guard slides open a high steel gate for our white SUV, with Alhaz Rashid Khokhar at the wheel. A project manager for the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority, Khokhar has, for the past several months, been working toward the opening here of a 200-megawatt expansion of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park. The dark panels stretch across the desert for more than 2 miles, a distance so far beyond the vanishing point that standing at one corner is like looking through a double mirror. The largest operating solar plant in the United States is just over 550 megawatts, but Dubai grows by exponents. This 200-megawatt section will soon be a smudge on the map beside an additional 5,000 megawatts planned to come online over the next 13 years—a $14 billion investment targeted to meet 25 percent of Dubai’s electricity needs. It is only one piece of a technological jigsaw puzzle that, once assembled, is intended to reinvent Dubai’s role in the world.
For more than a decade, this city-state’s story has been all about superlatives: the world’s tallest building, the biggest fireworks display, the busiest international airport. But a new ethos has taken hold, a broad and purposeful strategy to swap profligacy for ingenuity. Unlike some countries, Dubai believes the planet is warming—and is determined to use science and technology not only to adapt to a new era of extremes, but also to make that adaptation the basis of its economy. Dubai wants to be known more as a laboratory for world-saving technology than for the man-made beaches, indoor ski slopes, and vast air-conditioned malls that defined its recent past. Its plan would seem hard to believe if the contemporary reality of Dubai itself weren’t already so improbable. Dubai’s transformation from a blip on the map to a global hub was a neat trick. But can it pull it off again?
Khokhar moved here with his family nearly five years ago, after turning down a job at home in India working for an international consulting company. In doing so, he became a leading indicator of Dubai’s aspirations. Khokhar’s not a laborer from the subcontinent, living in an un-air-conditioned work camp and toiling manually in the heat—the notorious scenario that blemished Dubai’s recent rise. He ranks among the region’s best minds, and was attracted by the pay and lifestyle, as if Dubai were New York or London. “Here we have plans,” Khokhar says about the solar park, but he just as easily could be talking about his family and Dubai itself.
He and his peers believe they are building a better future, the outlines of which are all around us. Inside the park’s R&D facility—a small concrete slab building with big solar wings on the roof—researchers are working to improve the performance of photovoltaic modules in the parched, dusty environment. “You can easily lose 30 to 70 percent of the power from dust,” explains Jim Joseph John, an Indian engineer who recently relocated here from Phoenix, Arizona, where he’d finished up some research for his Ph.D. On an adjacent patch of sand, three visiting technicians fiddle with a sophisticated weather station, their tools spilling out of their rental car’s trunk. Behind another fence is a photovoltaic reverse-osmosis system, which transforms brackish groundwater into drinking water. Across a construction laneway, two steel towers a couple of stories tall poke at the sky like half-erected cranes. Technicians are preparing to install 3-D printers on them, which will extrude—in a matter of weeks—a whole building intended to house (naturally) a drone lab. The laneway itself will then be ripped up, its brick pavers replaced with solar panels and a system to wirelessly recharge electric cars as they drive along. For the moment, a run-of-the-mill plug energizes a white subcompact with a Dubai Electricity decal.
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http://www.popsci.com/dubai-science-tech-innovation#page-2It's long and the writer has a very inflated sense of their own ability to put words to screen, but still interesting.
