Dubai completes pilot for map of energy use in city’s buildings

Dubai’s Supreme Council of Energy has completed a pilot project that will eventually map the energy use of buildings in the city.

The pilot project has taken in 110 buildings of different types – from residential blocks to hotels, and factories to worker camps – in communities across the city.

Faisal Rashid, the director of demand-side management at the Dubai Supreme Council of Energy, told the Smart Skyscrapers conference in Dubai yesterday that the initiative is aimed at working out how many kilowatt-hours of energy a building produces per square metre to gauge how efficient they are.

This will not only allow it to compare how efficient buildings are within different areas but also to compare building types in different districts – how efficient one shopping centre is compared with another, for example.

“We have already completed a pilot of 110 buildings and this tool is expandable to reach 150,000 buildings,” said Mr Rashid. He said that its roll-out is likely to be completed in three phases, encompassing 5,000 buildings first, then 50,000 before taking in the whole city.

“This 110 buildings does not represent the emirate – it’s too small. We need at least 6,000-7,000 in order to use it as a fair representation of the city. Then we can compare kilowatt-hours per square metre with different parts of the world [to] see how we are performing – whether we are above or below the world aver­age.”

He said: “We can use this tool to raise awareness by looking at deviations in terms of efficiencies of certain buildings and also we can do policymaking where we can to see where are the most inefficient buildings.”

At the same event, Salim Zid, a senior civil engineer at Dubai Municipality, said that standards for the new building ratings being developed for the emirate should be released by the end of the year.

The system, known as Ai Sa’fat, which is Arabic for palm leaves, will have four levels of classification – bronze, silver, gold and platinum. These will fulfil a similar role for the local market as the Pearl ratings provide in Abu Dhabi.

“We are preparing a new publication for that by the end of this year,” said Mr Zid. “Maybe before that we can announce what we want to put in practice.”

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