Dubai:
US IT firm Honeywell is to supply 150,000 additional smart meters to Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (Dewa).
Honeywell has already supplied Dewa with 250,000 smart meters. The authority said the new batch will help it manage electricity more efficiently across residential areas. By 2020, Dewa intends to have a million smart meters installed, replacing all mechanical and electromechanical meters in the emirate.
Dewa did not reveal the value of the new deal, but described the whole project as a ‘multi-million dollar initiative.’
Smart meters allow not just a simple reading of current electricity and water consumption, but give customers access to detailed and automatic readings of both current and historical usage.
Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, Managing Director and CEO of Dewa, said the meters formed part of Dewa’s smart grid initiative, itself one of three strategies aimed turning Dubai into a smart sustainable city, as outlined in the Dubai Plan 2021.
Smart meters will support Dewa’s demand-side management strategy, which aims to reduce water and energy consumption by 30 per cent by 2030 by encouraging people to use less energy and high-load times.
Kurt Oswald, a partner at management consultancy AT Kearney, and leader of its Middle East utilities practice, said such demand-management projects were an effective strategy when incorporating renewable energy into grids, as they could use flexible pricing plans to encourage people to use power at off-peak times — a particular issue for solar generation, which does not produce power at night.
“Demand management is the first step. You optimise the meter reading when smart meters are introduced and … you can integrate price signals into consumer billing and make the consumer feel the price levels, ideally using the washing machine at night and not during the day, and then you can further optimise with other technologies.”
Such demand management is a contrast to traditional utility provision, in which the power generator attempts to predict peak demand, then make sure there is sufficient supply to cover it. “This is a new way of managing a whole grid set-up,” Oswald said. “Basically, it’s more the utility directing customer desires.”
Oswald added that at a later stage — perhaps 10 years away in the Middle East — smart grids could help detect price signals that “optimise deficient use of centralised power stations. Then smart grids functionalities are required because you can steer and connect power plants via the smart grid, and this will optimise the portfolio of decentralised power plants. Then it’s getting from an economic and commercial perspective as well more interesting, not just the technical aspect.”
