Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) works to enrich sustainable urban development in Dubai, through the Solar Decathlon Middle East (SDME) 2021 for university students to design solar-powered homes.
DEWA is also planning to build a new Emirati housing typology that combines state-of-the-art technologies with traditional Emirati design.
The authority organizes the SDME at the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park under the patronage of H.H. Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of Dubai Executive Council, as part of a partnership between DEWA, the Dubai Supreme Council of Energy, and the US Department of Energy.
Mr. Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD & CEO of DEWA, said that the SDME contributes to achieving the Dubai 2040 Urban Master Plan that maps out a comprehensive people-centric plan which is focused on enhancing people’s happiness and quality of life, and reinforcing Dubai’s competitiveness. The SDME was organized for the first time in 2018 and the second will be organized this year in conjunction with Expo 2020 Dubai.
Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer MD & CEO DEWA
“The SDME aligns with the directives of His Highness to unleash youth potential in creativity to become effective partners in achieving sustainable development. This is by encouraging them to design, build, and operate sustainable and smart solar-powered homes. These houses are efficient in terms of cost and energy consumption. They also focus on protecting the environment as well as the climate conditions of the region. Moreover, they support global efforts to limit global warming and climate change.”
The SDME’s innovative projects leverage the most cutting-edge disruptive technology to create smart and sustainable homes. Team KU from Khalifa University in the UAE is presenting a solar house model with a passive solar building design that collects, stores, reflects, and distributes solar energy in the form of heat in the winter and rejects solar heat in the summer.
The house also provides a smart bicycle to produce energy during exercise. It features predictive smart self-cooling and cleaning systems for photovoltaic panels and technologies that combine artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) to monitor the home environment in real-time and deal with any change through sensors in sound, movement, physiological signals and image processing.
The sensors will also help control lighting systems, thermostats, curtains, smart maintenance systems, etc. The house extracts water from the air, purifies water from the kitchen, cleans, cools and reuses it to irrigate the garden.
