UAE's most sustainable building Irena headquarters inaugurated at Masdar City

The 32,000sqm Irena headquarters at Masdar, with 1,000sqm of solar panels on its roof, is a sustainable building.

Abu Dhabi — The most sustainable building in the UAE, one of the least wasteful in the world, and the first ever to receive a four Pearl rating from the Abu Dhabi Urban Planning is the new headquarters of the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena).

Located in Masdar City, the new 32,000 square meters Irena complex was inaugurated on Wednesday night in the presence of Shaikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Minister of Foreign Affairs, members of the Royal Family, ministers and dignitaries.

“The inauguration of the building in Masdar City marks an important milestone in the UAE’s journey, which began with our first proposal to host the organisation seven years ago,” stated Shaikh Abdullah bin Zayed.

One of the very few buildings in UAE to be have a solar rooftop, Irena’s new home sports 1,000 square metres of solar panels on its roof, which produce 305,000 kilowatt-hour of electricity annually.

Up to 95 per cent of energy generated from lowering elevators is harnessed and reused throughout the building.

Altogether, the seven-floor complex uses 64 per cent less energy than any typical building in Abu Dhabi and 50 per cent less water. It also uses 42 per cent less energy than global energy-efficiency standards.

In an interview with Khaleej Times Adnan Amin, general manager of Irena, explains more about the Agency’s new home.

How sustainable is Irena’s new headquarters?

This is the only building in Abu Dhabi that has four Pearl Estedama rating, which is the equivalent to lead platinum rating, the highest level of rating.

The solar panels on the building are enough to cover about 10 to 15 per cent of our energy needs, but we also have solar thermal heating for hot water, so all our hot water comes from solar.

In addition, 75 per cent of the heat from the air conditioning system that is captured is converted into energy, so it’s a remarkable building.

Are there any new technologies created particularly for this building?

All of these are technologies that exist, but it is the first time in the region that they have all come together.

One of the biggest factors for efficiency for any building is the skin of the building that would allow heat or cold to escape from the building. If you can make a building airtight and you have materials that are insulated, you reduce your power needs dramatically, and we have that in this building.

This is the most airtight building in the region. We don’t have escape of cold air and we don’t have infiltration of hot air. We have special glass and this glass reduces the radiation level into the building and reduces the heat entering the building.

If you take this together with all the other sustainability elements of the building, this is a fairly unique building in this region.

What message does a building like this send to renewable players worldwide?

It sends two messages. One to the general public that sustainability elements in buildings can actually save you money. If you can spend a little more to make your buildings and your houses more efficient, conserve more energy in the long run, you will save a lot of money, and this is very important at a time when energy prices are going up. We are seeing subsidies being reduced and prices going up. This is the time to really push for efficiency buildings and households.

The second message is that if you have a new type of agency looking at a clean energy future for the world, a future that is build on innovation and new type of technology, to house that global agency in a building that brings together all of those elements in a way that works, is a very powerful message.

In this regard, we have to be very grateful to the UAE and its leaders for supporting the sustainability cause and for providing us with the headquarters that are suitable to our mission.

In the past few years renewable energy prices, especially solar and wind, have gone down dramatically. Has the use of renewables increased in equal measures?

Absolutely! If you take last year, we had global capacity, in addition to power generation worldwide higher for renewables than fossil fuels and nuclear combined, so we are seeing very high level of penetration for renewables.

The increase in investment was up to $270 billion last year, which is a 14 per cent increase on the year before.

Now we are seeing a new trend. With the cost decline that we’ve seen, there are big emerging countries like China and India, coming to the table with massive new targets.

India has just declared that they will install 100 Gigawatts of solar and 40 Gigawatts of onshore wind by 2022. This is a huge number. The needs in India are immense and their signal is a very powerful one for renewables.

China has pledged 200 Gigawatts of solar and 100 Gigawatts of onshore wind by 2020. Now, these are remarkable numbers, and they will trigger very dramatic increases in investment in the power generation coming from renewables in the future.

What does this means for countries like UAE that has an economy based on oil and gas?

I think that all oil and gas economies are beginning to see that the future energy mix is going to be very different. They also know that using their natural resources for power generation is probably the least economic way of using them. There are other much higher value added applications like petrochemicals, where they can divert their resources and they have the natural resources for solar and wind, where they can generate electricity from cheaper than anywhere else.

We looked at Saudi Arabia. For us it makes absolute business sense for Saudi Arabia to generate electricity from renewables because the heavily subsidised power generation from oil in Saudi Arabia is far less economic than any renewable source that is available to them right now.

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