Oil won't last forever, so Dubai is betting big on science and tech

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 Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid ­Al Maktoum, rendered in a mosaic of solar panels.




His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, rendered in a mosaic of solar panels.
Andrew Blum

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.

READ MORE AT: https://www.popsci.com/dubai-science-tech-innovation

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

4 hidden Mac tweaks to speed up your computer

Image
It happens to the best of machines—after a few years of use, it just doesn't run as smoothly or quickly as it used to. Luckily, a few tweaks under the hood can rev up the performance of your MacBook, iMac, or Mac Mini. (Not an Apple aficionado? Check out the Popular Science guide to improving the performance of Windows machines.) These adjustments won't be immediately obvious, but they can give macOS a new spring in its step. Follow these steps to speed up your Mac machine like the experts do. 1. Tone down the visual effects There's no doubt macOS is a gorgeous-looking operating system. But all those fancy animations and transparency effects take up resources that could be going towards actual applications. If you want to make sure your machine runs as lean and as mean as possible, you can turn these extra visual flourishes off. This trick is especially useful for those who tend to leave a lot of applications and windows open at one time. To cut down on the e...
Read more

The Best Pictures Of Mars

Image
  With SpaceX declaring that they will land a Dragon capsule on Mars in 2018, and NASA pledging to send astronauts there in the 2030s, Martian colonies are seeming more and more like a reality with every passing day. Sure, there is still a mountain of hurdles for researchers to overcome before we're sipping our morning coffee on the red planet, but nowadays the idea of Mars coffee isn't all that foreign--it's the future. To celebrate that, here are some of our favorite pictures of Mars from over the years, which will hopefully provide us with a preview of what our backyards will look like one day (fingers crossed). READ MORE AT: https://www.popsci.com/best-images-mars-so-far#page-4
Read more