Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) continues its efforts to expand and develop its water networks to keep pace with the rapid growth and development of Dubai.
According to DEWA, the length of pipelines in the water network has quadrupled from 3,349.88 kilometres in 1992 to 15,948 kilometres. The storage capacity of water in Dubai also increased from 38 million gallons in 1992 to 815 million gallons today, which is an increase of 20.44 percent. DEWA will increase the storage capacity to 1,002 million gallons this year.
In 2014, DEWA launched the first phase of the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) centre for water transmission at DEWA’s Sustainable Building in Al Quoz. This enabled it to monitor the water network in Dubai remotely around the clock, including the water transmission pipelines, pumping stations and reservoirs sprawling over 2,300 kilometres. This is has been done by installing over 8,500 smart devices. DEWA is currently implementing the second phase of the system to include the water distribution pipelines and regularly expanding the transmission network.
Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD & CEO of DEWA, said that DEWA replaced all its mechanical water meters with smart ones in 2020. It also started operating the Smart Meters Analysis and Diagnosis Centre, where 879,000 smart meters are read and monitored remotely every 15 minutes. This helps DEWA improve the meter readings availability to 99.9 percent. Remote control of smart meters also identified and handled 457,233 water leakage reports, 16,103 defects, and 7,974 cases of increased load over the past three years.
DEWA’s Smart Response initiative, available in five languages, provides customers with information and tools to improve the availability of supply and enhance the quality of life.
The initiative has reduced the number of steps required to fix interruptions from 10 steps to only 1 step as well as reducing the number of field visits by DEWA’s technicians by 56 percent and reducing the duration of fixing interruptions by 43 percent. This has increased the service quality by 93 percent and customers’ trust by 94 percent. Stakeholders’ happiness with the initiative reached 96 percent whilst technical water complaints decreased by 42 percent between 2013 and 2020, from 1.63 percent to 0.94 percent.
The Smart Response service has saved more than 5.77 billion gallons of water and saved customers over AED317 million.
DEWA developed its Hydronet project to use AI and Deep Learning. Hydronet has saved AED5.3 million annually by remotely monitoring and controlling the water network in Dubai. It can also fix leaks in seconds without human intervention. DEWA’s water network losses have dropped from 42 percent in 1988 to 5.1 percent today, which is one of the lowest percentages worldwide.
DEWA won the Hamdan bin Mohammed Programme for Government Services Flag in 2020 for its Smart Living initiative and the Global business Excellence Award for Outstanding Innovation from Awards Intelligence in the UK for the Smart Living initiative. In 2019, DEWA received the Green Champion of Water Efficiency award at the International Green Apple Awards. The Authority became a member of the ‘Leading Utilities of the World’ (LUOW) network, which is the Gold Standard for utility performance. It also won the Smart Water Company Award of the Year at the Global Water Awards 2018.
Source: https://www.urdupoint.com/en/middle-east/dewas-smart-programmes-increase-conservati-1264531.html