Before Aliyu Ali attended the World Future Energy Summit this week in Abu Dhabi, he was not sure if the attention being given to renewable energy was real or just hype. But yesterday the undergraduate student at the American University of Dubai (AUD) said he was impressed by the amount of practical, ground-level solutions being offered by the world's leading technology and energy firms as well as Masdar, the clean technology company.
"It feels real now," said Ali, who hails from Nigeria. "They gave real life examples of how renewable energy can be implemented in the Northern Emirates. Then I started thinking how this can be implemented in my country." Ali was one of several members of Young Future Energy Leaders, a programme of the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, who attended a seminar yesterday at the summit on cultivating the next generation of clean-technology leaders. Executives from the non-profit, energy, academic and venture capital professions encouraged the young people of today to get involved in what they called the most exciting and dynamic emerging industries today - the production of power from renewable sources such as wind, solar, algae and other plants. "It is a fascinating, fascinating sector to work in," Katrina Landis, the chief executive of BP Alternative Energy, told audience members. "In my entire career I have never been more excited than in the two years I have spent in alternative energies." Ms Landis said there were limitless possibilities for entering the field of clean energy, depending on one's appetite for risk and skills, from engineering to finance . Alexander O'Cinneide, the head of venture investments at Masdar, called alternative energy, "without a doubt the most exciting sector to work in". He said the most important factor in deciding whether to back a particular business plan was the quality of the company's management. Mr O'Cinneide pointed out that one of Masdar's recent investment choices, the Abu Dhabi solar development company Enviromena Power Systems, was a recent start-up. It attracted Masdar's venture fund because its management had delivered the company's projects on time and within budget. Bianca Jagger, the founder and chairwoman of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation, was optimistic about the work being done in Germany by the public and private sectors. "While there are threats and opportunities, they are focusing on opportunity because the finality of fossil fuels forces us to find an alternative, and renewable energy is that alternative," said Ms Jagger, who is also a former model and an ex-wife of the Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger. For Marwa Attiya, a junior in electrical engineering at AUD, found the answer to a question she had been pondering. "I had been asking, what is my role in this as a student - what can I do? Well, I found a lot of things." igale@thenational.ae