Radiant Cooling on a Dubai Beach

tim smith

not gripe too much. I would think with such a hot sunny place they might be able to do it with all renewable resource. Use solar thermal along with photo voltaic and absorbtion chillers. The thermal could power the absorbtion side maybe with steam and the voltaic could supplement and run all mechanical. Would be astronomically expensive but that's what they get. Just a thought and what a test ground.

Tony_42

Some people have too much money

Chill out, you beautiful people, the Versace beach is refrigerated

Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor Versace, the renowned fashion house, is to create the world’s first refrigerated beach so that hotel guests can walk comfortably across the sand on scorching days.

The beach will be next to the the new Palazzo Versace hotel which is being built in Dubai where summer temperatures average 40C and can reach 50C.

The beach will have a network of pipes beneath the sand containing a coolant that will absorb heat from the surface.

The swimming pool will be refrigerated and there are also proposals to install giant blowers to waft a gentle breeze over the beach.

The scheme is likely to infuriate environmentalists. The revelation comes as more than 11,000 politicians, green campaigners and others are gathered in Poznan, Poland, for the latest talks on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Last week the Met Office released a report warning that if greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise, the world could warm by an average of 5.5C by 2100. Inefficient buildings are one of the world’s greatest sources of greenhouse gases.

However, Soheil Abedian, founder and president of Palazzo Versace, said he believed it is possible to design a refrigerated beach and make it sustainable. “We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool enough to lie on,” he said. “This is the kind of luxury that top people want.”

Hyder Consulting, a British construction consultancy, is overseeing the engineering on the project. The hotel will be marketed strongly in the UK where Dubai is a popular tourist destination, attracting about 800,000 Britons a year.

Abedian’s firm began its association with Versace a decade ago with the idea of creating the first chain of luxury fashion-branded lifestyle resorts.

The first Palazzo Versace is already operating on Australia’s Gold Coast – where Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey, the actors, have stayed – and the Dubai hotel will be the second when it opens late next year or early 2010. The 10-storey hotel will have 213 rooms, several with their own internal swimming pools, plus 169 apartments. Fifteen more such hotels are planned.

Competition to serve the world’s rich is getting intense, especially in Dubai. The city already boasts the world’s first seven-star hotel, the Burj Al Arab, while Armani, a competitor with Versace, is building a similarly branded Dubai hotel.

The refrigerated beach is designed to give Versace the edge in this battle of luxury lifestyles. The system will be controlled by thermostats linked to computers.

Versace's plans have shocked environmentalists. Rachel Noble, the campaigns officer at Tourism Concern, which promotes sustainable tourism, said that the carbon generated by such projects would contribute to climate change, whose worst effects would be felt by the poor.

“Dubai is like a bubble world where the things that are worrying the rest of the world, like climate change, are simply ignored so that people can continue their destructive lifestyles,” she said.

Aided by cheap oil and gas, Middle Eastern nations have poured enormous resources into controlling temperature. About 60% of Dubai’s huge power bill is for air-conditioning; each person living there has a carbon footprint of more than 44 tons of CO2 a year.

Mark Eatherton

Sounds like the key to global warming to me.......

he said with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

Check out Ski Dubai...

http://www.skidubai.com/dubai/mountain-ski-dome/

And the enviros are worried about the beach....

Like you said, chill out. It's (weather changes) just a trend, and there is NOTHING we can do to stop it. Enjoy it whilst you can before the world comes to an end from a hail storm of passing meteorites :-)

singh

Or how about

the Radiant Cooled race track , that was featured in last month trade magazine.

A double wammy, cars driving in circles and cooled track?

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Rich L.

Obviously

they're not afraid of "astronomically expensive"!

Plumdog_2

Straight Line

Those cars race in a straight line. I took my grandaughter to a sportscar club race when she was about 4 years old (they race around a twisty road course). When asked how she liked it, she replied "It's too loud. And where are they going, anyway?"

Charlie from wmass

I would say the hotel will need lots of hot water so perhaps the could go geothermal for domestic water production and even use the heat to produce steam for electrical generation? Solar cells could also be used to shade areas for the electrical needs. It would be ironic how few green house gasses they could end up producing if they thought things through all the way.

Rich L.

They'll have

trouble generating steam with their Geo system Charlie. No matter how hot it is over there!

Baltimore/Maine Doug_4

I wonder if the

energy consumed is near the amount we use for huge lights to make daylight on all the car lots in the US. At least with many of them closing we are doing our part to reduce consumption.

In India there are 11 cars per 1000 persons. In the US there are 765 per thousand. What's a little beach cooling here and there.

Neat engineering feat though given that it is much more difficult to do than snow melt systems.

Charlie from wmass

not sure of the wonders of compressors actually but I figured they could do wonders with that kind of funding. They do have solar collectors that can produce steam for powering turbines. Why could a heat pump not be designed to boost the heat to make steam? Seriously why not? Maybe the future of steam systems, geothermal steam boilers. May save that one for Iceland though.

tim smith

Dubai would be a great place for solar parabolic trough

collectors. There is a great article on a Trough collector array in Arizona, producing steam and using steam turbine generators for power. I can't remember the site that has a good description about it but way cool. I will see if I can find it. Tim ahah, found it. check it out.
http://www.nrel.gov/csp/troughnet/power_plant_systems.html