Green light: Solar power parks in Dubai

posted on 08/01/2012: 121 views

As twilight sets in, a community park behind the Mall of the Emirates flickers to life with solar-powered pole lights.

Residents can be seen bringing in their youngsters to enjoy the evening breeze, walking or stretching around a patch of greenery with park benches not far from the villas and residential buildings of Al Barsha.

There are six parks already fitted with solar lights, as Dubai turns to the sun for power. Two more will follow early this year, a senior official at Dubai Municipality's Landscaping Section told XPRESS.

At least four more community parks may switch to solar lights by the end of 2012. "All neighbourhood parks will eventually have solar lights," the official said.

More projects

With a spike in the cost of electricity, the municipality looks for ways to turn green by switching to energy-saving LED and metal halide lights, which use less than half the power of regular tungsten-halogen lights. Hussain Nasser Lootah, Director General of Dubai Municipality, said earlier that all parks will eventually use solar-powered lighting.

Bigger community parks like Safa and Zabeel where the lighting infrastructure is already in place will, however, take some time to switch to solar, the official said. "Our focus is on new community parks with no lighting facilities installed yet. The big parks have the infrastructure already in place," he added.

The municipality has already completed work on the 1.55-hectare Dh7 million Al Sufouh Park using solar lighting systems, the first to use this technology with 25 pole lights. The Dubai Electricity and Water Authority also uses solar parking lights in a number of its offices. Dubai hopes to source at least five per cent of its power from renewable energy.

Its foray into solar energy, however, pales in comparison to Abu Dhabi's Masdar initiative, which is already producing 10MW from a massive array of solar panels. – Gulf News

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