In 2006, the UAE government established Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company PJSC (Masdar) to diversify the entire resources and boost the local economy.[3][4]
Sultan Al Jaber is the founder and served as the CEO of Masdar when it was founded in 2006.[5][6] In 2009, he oversaw Masdar’s efforts to secure the presence of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) headquarters at Masdar City, delivering the successful bid in South Korea.[7] In early 2016, Mohamed Jameel Al Ramahi was appointed as the chief executive officer of Masdar.[8]
During the COP28, Masdar was reported to have hired lobbyists and a public relations firm, First International Resources, to defend its work during the COP28 after criticism from politicians and environmentalists. Masdar chairman and founder Sultan Al Jaber, was the president of COP28. According to the contract, the consultancy was to respond to and deflect negative press reports about Al Jaber.[12][13] According to The Guardian, edits on Wikipedia have been made by a user, who disclosed being paid by Masdar, to make Al Jaber’s role at Masdar more prominent on his page the day after The Guardian revealed his appointment as president of COP28.[14]
On 1 December 2023, it was agreed that Masdar would part of an £11 billion investment in the UK's Dogger Bank wind farm project.[15] The agreement was made at the COP28 summit that was held in the UAE.[15]
Masdar City is a sustainable urban development project located in Abu Dhabi that was launched by Masdar in 2008 and was designed to be a zero-carbon city by 2016.[16][17][18] The city is powered in part by the Masdar City 10MW Solar Power Plant, the first grid-connected renewable energy project in the UAE and the largest of its kind in the Middle East when it was inaugurated in 2009. An additional 1MW of rooftop PV is located on the buildings developed as phase 1 of Masdar City.[18][19][20][21] Masdar City has a university for artificial intelligence (AI), which was launched 2019. The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) is a graduate-level research institution, named after Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed.[22][23][24]
Shams 1 is a 100 MW concentrating solar power station which uses parabolic trough technology. It displaces 175,000 tons of CO2 per year and its power output is enough to power 20,000 homes. The station consists of 258,048 parabolic trough mirrors, 192 solar collector assembly loops with 8 solar collector assemblies per loop, 768 solar collector assembly units, and 27,648 absorber pipes. It covers an area of approximately 2.5 square kilometres (0.97 sq mi).[25][26]
