Development Concepts and Implementation Strategies for New Settlements RENEWABLE ENERGY AND SUSTAINABLE URBAN DEVELOPMENT IN HOT ARID REGIONS

Arid regions are an important part of the world as they cover more than 40% of the land surface and they can provide sufficient opportunities for extensive development. However, urban development of these regions is facing a set of problems. This is besides the development barriers due to the arid regions climate associated with a set of economical, social, administrative, and physical problems. The Egyptian arid regions are also suffering from these problems, which affected its urban development. Nowadays, it became so important to adopt new development approaches for these regions, as it became the main target and only solution for the overloaded population in the Egyptian old valley. On the other hand, the role of renewable energy resources to achieve sustainability in arid regions became so clear. This is especially after the recent researches, which have approved that depending on large-scale solar energy developments in arid regions will be one of the most promising sources of energy in the near future, not only for these regions’ energy demands, but also for providing energy for the neighbor-regions such as Europe. This is besides the global direction to transform cities and settlements into new power stations, through integrating renewable energy applications intensively in urban-scale schemes. This is also as a tool to achieve a general sustainable development, not only at the level of urban development. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to make a connection between the hot arid regions urban development and renewable energy e.g. photovoltaics (PV), to delineate urban integrated renewable energy e.g. Urban Integrated Photovoltaics (UIPV) as a new approach for building new sustainable settlements in hot arid regions. The study assumes that applying this approach can play a major role in developing communities of the hot arid regions. Furthermore, the study claimed that developing arid regions' communities within the concept “urban development integrated renewable energy” will offer suitable solutions for their current major urban problems, and this can be a new urban development approach for the Egyptian arid regions communities. In this realm, the research introduces a model for the Urban Integrated Photovoltaics (UIPV) and it has been used as a tool to analyze the Egyptian case study of New Toshka city, as an Egyptian trial for developing an UIPV community, with reference to another two UIPV cases; case of the OECD countries, and MASDAR city – the UAE. This is in order to set up the main guidelines for establishing an UIPV development in the Egyptian arid regions.