The crown prince of Abu Dhabi wants to build a desert city that houses 50,000 people and 1,500 businesses yet emits no carbon dioxide and produces no waste. And he’s turned to MIT for help. At the heart of Masdar City will be a new research institute devoted to alternative energy and created in collaboration with MIT. The technology it helps produce, including new solar cells and novel ways to convert trash into electricity, is meant to help the prince meet his zero-emissions goal. At the same time, if all goes according to plan, it will help drive the city’s economy, much as technology out of MIT has helped fuel businesses around Boston.
Ultimately, the city will serve as a test bed for green technology developed at the institute and elsewhere. “We’re following the whole technology curve, right from the beginning in the lab to manufacturing and producing the product and deploying it at large scale,” says Sultan al Jaber, the CEO of the government-owned Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, which is responsible for the city’s development. The new institute, called the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology (MIST), is the “intellectual centerpiece” of the city, he says. “It is the nucleus that will feed into all the other components of the Masdar initiative.”
MIT professors helped develop MIST’s curriculum and research projects and weighed in on prospective faculty. Last year, MIST’s first 14 faculty members, many of whom graduated from MIT, spent a year at MIT taking courses they’ll be teaching in the desert city next September, when the first buildings–the labs, residences, offices, and classrooms–will be complete. They also worked on research projects that they’ll take with them to Abu Dhabi. Ten more future MIST professors will spend the current school year at MIT, with a new “class” arriving every year until the total reaches 60.
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