The pace is fast here at Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week — panels, press conferences, announcements, round tables, interviews, and more presentations. For an inexperienced rookie journalist like me, it feels like a rollercoaster. Thank God the rollercoaster stops from time to time, and today it stopped for me with a roundtable interview with Bader Al Lamki, Executive Director of Clean Energy at Masdar.
A consortium consisting of French-based renewable energy company EDF Renewables and Abu Dhabi’s renewable energy company Masdar has been awarded the contract to build the 400 megawatt (MW) Dumat Al Jandal wind farm, the first wind farm to be built in Saudi Arabia and the largest in the Middle East.
I toured Masdar City for the first time this week. It is difficult to not be overwhelmed with the vision and execution taking place there. If you are new to cleantech news, make sure you go to the Masdar City website and check out its amazing architecture, admire its focus on residents instead of cars, and share with others its ambitious energy efficiency targets (which, by the way, Masdar* often exceeds).
Attending the 9th session of IRENA’s General Assembly on Friday, we were all looking forward to one item on the agenda – launch of a new report, The Geopolitics of Energy Transformation.
Ben Pullen, the managing director of Global EVRT, led a rousing day of informative e-mobility talks for the first ever e-mobility session at Intersolar Middle East last year. It culminated in questions from the audience. This question & answer session followed presentations on the accelerating transition to electric vehicles, the power of inflection points, sustainable cities, and more.
Zachary Shahan, Director & Chief Editor at CleanTechnica, earlier this year interviewed all of the 2018 Zayed Future Energy Prize (ZFEP) winners, including the youngest of the winners, the high school winners:
Zachary Shahan, Director & Chief Editor here at CleanTechnica, recently congratulated and interviewed Joseph Kava of Google after they won the Large Corporation Award of the Zayed Future Energy Prize. Google won for its leadership in the green, sustainable, “circular economy,” as Joseph Kava put it. Kava is President of Data Centers at Google.
Zachary Shahan, Director & Chief Editor at CleanTechnica, recently interviewed Thomas Samuel, founder of Sunna Design, a 2018 Zayed Future Energy Prize (ZFEP) winner. Every prize is a sweet acknowledgment of leadership in sustainable development and deep humanitarian efforts. Sunna is a kind business that brings light to undeveloped countries. It brings not only streetlights but also “nano grids” where energy is nonexistent or scarce.
The interview is a fresh exchange between two young, inspired fathers who are successfully supporting sustainability goals in different ways.
Norwegian energy company Equinor announced this week that it has completed the installation of the world’s first battery for an offshore wind farm at its 30 megawatt (MW) Hywind Scotland floating offshore wind farm, which is the world’s first floating wind farm.
BYD’s core competency is batteries, which blossomed as a result of founder, CEO, and Chairman Wang Chuanfu’s technical mastery and eye towards the future. He led BYD into cell phone batteries when cell phones made their entrance into the market (in the ’90s!) and then into laptop battery supply as businesses shifted from desktop computing to portable computing solutions.
