Market Trends of United Arab Emirates Smart Grid Industry
Advanced Metering Infrastructure to Witness a Significant Growth
- Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) or intelligent metering is a fundamental component of grid development, which is expected to witness considerable growth in the future and drive the smart grid market further. With the rise of electricity generation capacity, which stood at 139.4 TWh in 2021, an increase of 8% in the last five years, the steady growth will require smart grid solutions in UAE.
- As per DEWA Smart Grid Report 2022, the existing advanced metering infrastructure provides interval meter reading data. The data is transported over the communications network and exchanged, processed, and stored across DEWA's Enterprise Integration Architecture (EIA) and IT Infrastructure.
- DEWA installed advanced metering infrastructure through the latest technologies in Dubai. It includes end-to-end security, a head-end system, a meter data management system, and integration with DEWA's billing system. As of 2021, 1,058,895 intelligent electricity meters and 960,364 smart water meters were installed across Dubai.
- DEWA enables its customers to get access to their energy usage via automated metering reading. It helps customers to manage their electricity and water usage and preserve natural resources. DEWA also facilitated the opening and closing of customer accounts by utilizing on-demand meter readings.
- With increasing efforts to modernize the electricity grid and adopt advanced metering infrastructure, the AMI segment is expected to hold sigificant share in the United Arab Emirates smart grid market during the forecast period.
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Supportive Government Initiatives and Renewable Energy to Drive the Market
- In 2022, Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) announced to invest of USD 1.9 billion toward implementing its updated smart grid strategy for 2021-2035. The innovative grid program also envisages Dubai Clean Energy Strategy 2050 and the Dubai Net Zero Emissions Strategy 2050 to give 100 percent of the energy production capacity from renewable energy sources by 2050.
- As a part of the smart grid strategy, DEWA replaced existing electricity and water meters with smart meters between 2015 and 2020 and automated its entire transmission network connected to the 400 kV and 132 kV substations.
- DEWA strengthened the integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) in its smart grid through its virtual power plant (VPP). DEWA's VPP platform integrated a few DERs, such as a smart grid station with a solar inverter of 200kW, residential photovoltaic (PV) inverters of 9kW, and electric vehicle (EV) charging stations with 44kW.
- Dubai's Clean Energy Strategy 2050 aims to provide total power output from renewable energy in a phased manner. It envisages providing 100% clean power by 205,0, 25% by 2030, and 7% by 2020. The installed renewable energy capacity reached 2579MW in 2021, a 25% increase from the previous year. The generation capacity would increase due to ambitious clean energy targets.
- Therefore, with the clean targets and existing deployments of smart solutions, the United Arab Emirates is expected to witness considerable growth in the market studied.
