There is a new city. One that, 10 years ago, would have only been imagined in dreams or fuzzy futuristic films filled with flying cars. But Masdar City outside of the Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates is a brand new completely green city where buildings will be covered in solar panels.

“It’s a really futuristic city,” said SunPower managing director in Europe Jorn Jurgens. “It’s designed to be completely renewable. There are no cars in the city, and everything is done very intelligently.”

SunPower, a United States solar company, has the first major solar installation completed in the new city. The 1-megawatt solar photovoltaic array is featured on the Masdar Institute, a new university in the EAU. The university is a joint venture of the EAU and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the US’s most elite technical universities.

The Masdar Institute will specialize in training students in renewable energy and the emerging green economy, Jurgens said in a phone interview from Germany. It is the first major building completed in the futuristic city.

“It’s important for us that our technology was chosen for the first major building,” Jurgens said. “Also, the education at this institute is going to be top-edge, and when the students see SunPower technology featured on the roof of their school, they will know it’s because Masdar wanted to establish the best performing modules.”

The school is a showcase building in Masdar City, Jurgens said. And SunPower has been dedicated to building a presence in the Middle East. They also installed a major solar array at a university in Saudi Arabia earlier this year, he said.

SunPower is especially excited to be invited into such a prominent position in the EAU, Jurgens said. The world will look to Masdar City as an example of how sustainable communities can work.

“The City of Abu Dhabi had the cash from the oil industry,” Jurgens said. “They decided to do this to encourage the new technology and also because they wanted to learn from it themselves.”

Construction continues in Masdar City. Most of the community was planned and designed by Fosters & Partners, according to a SunPower press release.

“This is a perfect city,” Jurgens said. “It’s an example to show the world how it could possibly work out to where people could live together without hurting the environment or using extreme amounts of fossil fuels.”

Pictured: Masdar Institute campus, courtesy of SunPower.