RIYADH — National Energy Globe Award Saudi Arabia for the project "Innovative Hybrid Desalination Cycle for Future Sustainability" was awarded to Dr. Muhammad Wakil Shahzad, who was working as research scientist at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Recently, he joined Northumbria University, Newcastle UK. The awarded technology is considered as a game changer to achieve sustainable water supplies. Speaking to Saudi Gazette, Shahzad said: "This innovative research was done at KAUST. This original idea was started as my PhD project at national university of Singapore in 2011 and the first pilot was installed in 2013. The second and more advance pilot was installed at KAUST when I joined in 2014. The pilot experimentation showed excellent results, a big jump in the performance was observed as compared to conventional systems. "Since 1980s until today, all conventional processes are operating only at 10-13% of thermodynamic limit because there is no major change in technology. We developed out-of-box solution to achieve 18-20% of thermodynamic limit. This shows that to achieve high jump in the performance, need to adopt innovative solutions. Shahzad also said: "The KAUST pilot has been visited by many Saudi industries like SWCC, SEC and Aramco and they were impressed by the performance of our pilot. It is solely operating with solar energy and showed an excellent feasibility for Saudi application. We were awarded an industrial pilot contract that was installed at solar village with King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) and it was commissioned by Ministry of Energy, KACST and SWCC officials" Shahzad added: "We are trying to improve the performance of desalination processes to the next level and we are confident that our tri-hybrid system will achieve 25-27% of thermodynamic limit. With this performance, it will be the world best desalination system. Dr. Kurt Altmann, Austrian commercial counselor in Riyadh, said: "As Austrian Trade Commissioner, I am very grateful for this initiative because Austrian environmental technology has a long history. It started in the late seventies and early eighties when a new thinking started to develop in my country and other European countries." Altmann commented that such an initiative also helps to put Austrian technologies in the mind of the people in Saudi Arabia again and again and assists also our activities in the environmental technologies here. Altmann is very optimistic and mentioned two Austrian official Trade Missions to Saudi Arabia organized by his office in Riyadh this year. Furthermore there will be an official Austrian pavilion at Saudi Build 2019. On the energy transformation in Saudi Arabia, Wolfgang Kutschera, deputy head of mission Austrian Embassy. said: "I have been here for seven months now and I think it is very interesting to hear that there's so much ambition in the field of renewable energy although the Kingdom is blessed with a lot of fossil energy resources. At the same time, I was glad to learn about so many ongoing initiatives to save energy and to look further into the potential of renewable energy. I found that really quite impressive, so at the Austrian Embassy we are absolutely ready to make a contribution. We have a lot of world market leaders working also in important niche markets in a numerous fields of technology." The Energy Globe Award is the world's most renowned environmental prize and has been awarded worldwide since the year 2000. 187 countries all over the world are taking part and more than 2000 innovative projects related to the environment are submitted every year.
