[Music] hello and welcome to fully charged my name is Robert lwell this is a series about the future of energy and transport electric cars all kinds of cool stuff like this and today I've just come along to see this normal town just another town in Dubai in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and uh I don't know it's very nice it's very quiet as you can tell not a lot of traffic in fact none in fact it's amazing this is the sustainable [Music] City first of all thank you for coming I mean this is a it's a delight to show you all of this so this is the sustainable City and we we regard it as our goal is to have a Net Zero Energy development so everything you see first of all the principal design elements is to reduce the energy intensity of the city and so if you notice as we drive through those streets uh the orientation of the Villas you know these Villas they benefit from the shade we decided to design and to orient all the Villas towards the north so all these Villas are North orienting which means they get a lot of shade and we avoid the Sun and that is so important in this part of the world because otherwise your air conditioning cost is going to go up through the roof and that's not good for carbon and carbon emissions we also have UV reflective paint which means you deflect a lot of sunlight and you reduce the uh the thermal heat gain right the windows also have tremendous uh thermal values and the roof as well just it's such it's such an attractive place to live I mean we're now going past these beautiful ponds yeah these are these are the water features uh this is actually gray water and this comes out of our wash basin this is water from the showers and the uh the washing machine and we actually treat we we separate the water which enters the city into two streams so we have black water and water so what you just saw is the gray water that is treated and we treat it here sight or on site in the community and you will see that in a bit and then we Pump It Up through that stream and we have these storage ponds and all along this Farm we're now driving through the farm which runs the length of the city uh we uh tap into the gray water system to irrigate the landscape and we also use the gray water to keep these pads if you can see those streaks those streak marks you know those pads we keep the moist with treated gray water and those are pads that we utilize to cool the biodomes right so they actually provide fresh air into the biodomes and we're going to enter one of those and see what's inside wow and then this is the thing that I first saw when I arrived is that all the car park space is shaded with solar panels which is so sensible yeah which well two points first of all all the cars are assembled so we wanted to keep the cars away from the Clusters which means when we drove through a cluster it is completely carfree that's amazing for for kids this is their space the entire cluster is their space so we have all the cars in one location and under a roof panel and uh so we have in the city we actually have 10 megawatt Peak installed let me put that into perspective that's 40,000 panels PV panels we so far we've installed 26,000 and of those 10 megawatt 3 megawatt come from the parking areas wow so that's a lot of electricity yes so we can produce 10 megawatt hour of of uh of electrical energy uh solar energy per day wow and this feeds into the grid this feeds into the grid because we are grid connected and then we tap from the grid you know we take it back to to supply energy in different sections of the city right all the services the cooling pads the farm the street lights the water features all of that is actually uh utilizing electricity from the car Parks right yeah so there is one community pool and this this has always been a contentious point about sustainability but you know we've designed in such a way first of all this is a system so the water is filtered and we just top it up replenish it because of evaporation during the summer and we have a very uh environmentally friendly treatment system as well installed but it's also clearly very popular it's always popular I mean uh you know living in Dubai without a pool at least one pool is a bit difficult it's it's become expected CU it's such beautiful weather here today when we're in January uh you know so I have been in this area before in the mid Midsummer and I know that it is extremely hot so it can get yeah exactly so now the weather is it's beautiful we're at 25° C if you come back in 4 months it's going to be 45 yes so then then the story is different so the water that you see here this water is streaming down this is this is gray water treated and we have a little bit of slope so we utilize the slope to have that movement of of and is it is it cleaned as it's so it's treated it is first of all it is treated and then we can we improve the treatment if you notice these these um uh these grass this is papyrus right that's what they had in Egypt right to make paper for example and those are called biofilters so we planted those and they're actually soak they're soaked down in the water and they biofilter the water as well because they there's a lot of nutrient uptake so they improve the water quality even more the trees that you see now the landscape here is only 2 years old so what you see is only 2 years old so we've tried to balance between the amenity and the utility value of a landscape we we don't just want beautiful trees and Landscapes and shrubs we also want to have trees that are going to bring something back to us so the date palms these we pollinate in the spring and then we're going to harvest we harvest the dates in August and then the trees scattered along the farm we have avocado papaya uh Palm granates uh Mulberry uh fig trees so those are spread and they will benefit from the shade of the palm trees and all of that is actually irrigated with treated sewage affluent so these pipes that you going to see everywhere this is actually treated sewage affluent right wow and so right here on on our left now while you're going to see other the buggies is the the gray water treatment plant so it's underground and you know it's just next to the Villa so people are not offended by it no odors whatsoever that's the water that we Tre lovely plants I can't smell anything else that's the water that we treat and then we store it in the lake and then we pump it up and then it it trickles down again and we tap from the lake for irrigation purposes we have recycling stations spread throughout the city so we have a ratio we actually have uh nine of these for every 90 Villas um so this is farming that we try to have uh for the um the cooler climate so for about 6 months of the year we can grow food outside and this is actually managed by the community by residents right and some of that furniture that you see scatter these benches the picnic tables and this giant table or chair this is made of uh of construction waste this is all construction waste from phase one uh wood pallets and uh the plant and exactly and the planters [Music] so this area is really at the entrance of the city and as part of the master plan this is the mixed juice area which is open to the public and so here we have 15,000 square meters of space of rental space and this is only for rent and the idea behind it is that this is going to generate rental revenue and a portion of the rental revenue is going to pay all the service fees and the maintenance fees in the city so we have promised all the residents in the community that they will pay zero service fees and zero maintenance fees wow hang on let me get my head around that so so you move into the city yeah whether you're a tenant or a homeowner Villa owner so you can you can buy one of the V you can buy yeah this is called free hold in R so you can you can buy property or you can rent right in both both options in both cases you will not incur service fees or maintenance fees it's zero so when you look at con service or sweeping the streets or sweeping uh the panels or we actually dry clean the panels the solar panels all the Landscaping the water features the gray waterer treatment um the security outside uh the mosque Etc all of that is provided for free I mean for free meaning it is offset by revenues that come from this Plaza and this this you know uh this is related to ensuring that there is also economic sustainability and social sustainability it is not only about the energy features and the water features the economic Dimension also has to make sense and I mean has the general sort of public response to what you've done here been it's been tremendous I mean it's been tremendous some people were there was a lot of skepticism right if we go back four or five years when the planning started most people kind of just brushed us aside right even even you know bankers and uh I mean there was little interest we did we did draw attention but I don't think many people believed in this concept and the design that was post financial crisis Global financial crisis things have really picked up and now when you demonstrate what we've what we've done so far in phase one I think it's becoming more and more obvious that this is doable and it is not more expensive you know Apples to Apples so this is a myth and uh you know when you design sustain from the start from the start it's not an afterthought an afterthought is expensive but when you plan it right from the beginning and you also capture the latest technology or the latest you know features from the market uh then it's not more expensive right and we've demonstrated that right all the way down to social sustainability and economic sustainability we've we've brought down just to talk about carbon uh on average in the world each one of us from UK to Dubai to Lebanon to Australia we emit on average 7 metric tons of carbon dioxide per person per year here we've we did our estimates because we're doing a greenhouse gas inventory of the city and we are at approximately 3 3.1 metric tons per person per year right that applies for residents living in the city wow including commuted outside the city wow so and that's and you're talking people who've got you know a lot of people have quite substantially large vehicles in Dubai unfortunately they're not all in super little Eco so this is this is something we have we have our own targets as well to transform the mobility not only inside the city because that's you know we've achieved that already with electric vehicles and Buggies and and bicycle trucks and and jogging trucks Etc so we've we've provided that but more importantly we want people to begin to switch to electric vehicles and so we've done two things so far we've provided charging stations second and that's really unique as a developer we are actually providing an incentive a cash a subsidy to Villa owners who wish to uh purchase an electric vehicle right and who live in the city so if you live in the city and you are a villa owner you will receive up to €10,000 or 40,000 dham towards your first Eevee purchase that's so that's the incentive so that's that's part of your sales contract you know so whether you you make use of it or or not that's that's your choice [Music] [Music] this is amazing yeah so we have 11 of those right and this is uh our you know attempt to um to grow food we started with herbs we now have we we spent most of last year 2016 experimenting with different herbs and different temperatures and so we've now selected 40 herbs what you see here in this Bome we have um we have leak we have parsley we have mints we have basil chory uh spinach coriander cherry tomatoes lettuce cuz it's much cooler in here than outside but then the F so the fans are blowing air this is the beauty of of of having a lowex solution this is a desert technology right this has existed for more than 40 years in farms all across the Arabian Desert and the system is very simple we actually have we call it fans and pads fan and pads so we have four fans blowing air out then you have a negative pressure inside so passively air is going to flow in it's going to flow in because you're blowing air out these are called pads it's like cardboard corrugated cardboard and then we wet them we moist them all the time with treated gray water so if you see them you have these streaks of water you can just see some drips coming down exactly and if you stand in front of it it's like an air conditioning system wow wow so the temperature is going to drop from 45 to about 30 well the other thing is if you were doing this 10 years ago you would be you know burning some form of fossil fuels in order to run the motors that drive the fans but all this electricity is all coming from solar so this is coming from the the car pars that we saw yeah that's what we call the solar farm and these are just Motors doesn't take a lot of power very simple it's very technology just Motors Motors Motors so there's no air conditioning system right [Music] I think that's my argument really for the British property development sector that I want to watch this is pull your finger out guys because you because there's a huge amount of this technology could be used in in the UK it's not it's not all everywhere I mean every country has its has it opportunities I mean there are things you can do in the UK that we cannot do in Dubai and and vice versa so uh but it is about you know being Future Ready that's what we say we want to be Future Ready meaning the climate is changing things are getting more difficult uh and we all have this responsibility to bring down our Footprints and uh and so we try to personalize the um the problems and the solutions here you know by getting everybody involved and then presumably like in the even in summer at night actually well it gets quite it gets colder at night than you expect doesn't it but I mean you could eat you could have a meal up here in the early evening when it wasn't wasn't quite so we can use this space you can use this for about 8 months but then you have 4 months you don't want to be outdoors uh that would be mid June through mid September right it's it's uh you know upper mid 40s lower to mid 40s and then it's humid as well towards the end of the summer but otherwise you know 8 months and so if you notice a feature we have here is that you know we tend to associate panels solar panels with ah you know put it over the garage I don't want to see it it's not it's it's unsightly but we've actually Incorporated it it's part of the architecture because when you look over there you wouldn't think oh all those roofs are solar panels because you you're expecting to see something like that [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] s