Masdar City has selected PE INTERNATIONAL’s SoFi system to monitor carbon embodied in buildings for its ambitious project to construct one of the world’s most sustainable cities, the two companies announced today.

Masdar City, one of the integrated units of Abu Dhabi’s multi-faceted renewable energy company Masdar, has captured enormous worldwide interest by demonstrating how sustainable cities can be developed. SoFi is PE INTERNATIONAL’s high performance tool that provides a central platform for benchmarking and forecasting sustainability performance and developing sustainability strategies. The system is playing a key role in helping Masdar’s supply chain team and contractors track and monitor the carbon embodiment of building materials thereby calculating the amount of carbon associated with construction activities.

Commenting on the use of SoFi, Alan Frost, Director of Masdar City, said: “Through SoFi we can monitor carbon performance during construction and quantify how well we are meeting our goals. This is vital for Masdar and our stakeholders in terms of validating our ambition of building one of the most sustainable cities in the world.”

”It is an honor to be supporting Masdar in this illustrious project, which sets a high standard for the region as a whole, helping Abu Dhabi to become a centre of excellence in the next generation of renewable and green technologies,” said Neil D’Souza, SoFi Product Manager at PE INTERNATIONAL. “We believe SoFi can play a major role in helping city construction projects around the world to construct sustainable buildings.”

PE INTERNATIONAL has been supporting Masdar in achieving its impressive goals for over two years, initially working with the city’s supply chain team to produce Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for capturing and communicating the environmental performance of products used in the city. Life Cycle Assessment or energy efficiency studies carried out for some of the suppliers have helped identify improvement measures in products and processes, in line with Masdar’s strategy of engaging with their supply chain to achieve better performance.

Having now implemented SoFi, Masdar has the capability for target setting and monitoring the evolving project. It can also use SoFi for benchmarking against targets and comparing how much CO2 would be involved in producing a building in the city compared to a standard building in, for example, London, Paris or New York.

PE INTERNATIONAL has linked carbon footprints from Masdar’s TheFutureBuild.com – the first Middle East database on sustainable materials, – into SoFi together with PE INTERNATIONAL’s proprietary databases to create the sustainability platform.

A key ability of SoFi is its distributed data acquisition, which gives Masdar City great flexibility in how it collects information from different sources, while the system’s analytics will support decision making. For example, being able to see that a building is 50 per cent complete, yet already 70 per cent on the way to meeting its emission target, will help affect decision making on possible corrective measures.

 

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