Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) has announced that it has secured the Smart Water Project of the Year Award 2024 at the Global Water Awards, for its fully automated Hydro Insight system.
DEWA’s system, which it says is a “world first” for a water utility, was developed internally using the AI and data science technologies developed in-house for smart grid automation and management.
The systems enables the monitoring of over one million smart metres, and improves visibility on a range of areas, including water meter anomalies.
The company shared that the system has “dramatically decreased” metre anomaly detection time from 30 days to one hour, resulting in the conservation of 214 million gallons of water.
HE Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD and CEO of DEWA, commented: “We follow the directives of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, to achieve Dubai’s Integrated Water Resources Management Strategy 2030. We continue to utilise the smart grid to develop our state-of-the-art infrastructure for managing facilities and services using disruptive and Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies.”
Adding: “DEWA is committed to consolidating its position as one of the most prominent utilities in the world and improving the monitoring and management of its water grid, the automation and efficiency of operations, and the reliability of water supplies. This supports DEWA’s global excellence in water network losses. DEWA recorded 4.6% water network losses compared to around 15% in North America,” said Al Tayer.
Al Tayer called smart meters the backbone of the smart grid, noting that they play a “pivotal role” in driving digital transformation, further, DEWA has installed 1,066,558 smart water meters, said Al Tayer.
“DEWA’s staff has developed innovative and automated systems to monitor the grid around the clock. This contributed to about AED 201.1 million in savings since 2017, and resolving more than 40,600 cases of meter malfunctions and 13,397 cases of overloads. DEWA has also notified over 1.9 million customers of their internal water leakage, which prevented the waste of more than 11 billion gallons of water, amounting to about AED 610 million,” said Abdullah Obaidullah, Executive Vice President of Water & Civil at DEWA.