Energy efficiency makeover for Dubai government buildings

Seven Dubai government buildings will undergo energy efficiency retrofits as part of a plan that aims to improve the efficiency of 30,000 existing buildings by 2030.

DUBAI // Seven Dubai government buildings are to have energy efficiency makeovers as part of a plan to improve the environmental footprint of 30,000 buildings by 2030.

The Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (Dewa) has created a company called Etihad Energy Services (EES) to carry out a pilot project and retrofit seven of its buildings before expanding the scheme.

Work on the pilot project is expected to start early next year and its target is to save a million tonnes of carbon emissions by 2030.

“We are just setting out, initially we will be focusing on some projects with Dewa as this will be easier for us to start with,” said Stephane Gentil, the chief executive of EES at a conference organised by the The Green Economy Partnership (GEP) – a public-private programme launched in May 2012 by Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed, Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of Dubai Executive Council.

“Our steps right now are to investigate those buildings and build what we call the baseline, which is defining the energy consumption and what can be done in terms of savings and then we will prepare a tender that we will put on the market for companies to apply.”

Mr Gentil said he hoped the pilot project would be completed by the end of 2014 before the focus goes on the much larger task ahead.

“To get to 30,000 buildings that means roughly 2,000 buildings every year. That is going to be a lot but we need to start somewhere with a first, small project just to validate everything,” Mr Gentil said.

He said the company hoped to follow up the Dewa project with a larger deal with an owner of 120 Dubai buildings.

Buildings eligible for makeovers are those that consume large amounts of energy but are otherwise in a good condition. Buildings that consume 600 kilowatt hours per square metre per year are what Mr Gentil called very high-consumption buildings.

“We are still in the process of investigating this but studies show there could be a lot of those buildings [here],” he said.

“The model we are looking at is to finance the projects through the savings that are being generated.”

EES would evaluate and organise the financing of projects and then subcontract the work to private companies.

Mr Gentil said similar schemes had proved successful in North America, Germany and Scandinavia, and were popular with building owners as they did not have to invest resources into the makeovers.

The pilot scheme would coincide with new regulations issued by the Regulation and Supervision Bureau in Abu Dhabi that set up standard contracts and an accreditation scheme for energy services companies.

“These new regulations will facilitate work both for us and also for the companies that will want to work in this market, because they will define clear contracts that have been validated in many ways,” said Mr Gentil.

The new regulations are expected to come into force early next year.

“The new rules will also, I think, reassure building owners that the companies that are going to work on this are reputable companies.”