Background Story

The client is recognized as one of the leading district cooling providers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). With an extensive portfolio of District Cooling Plants (DCPs), they aim to capitalize on expansion opportunities in the Gulf region’s dynamic property development market. Seeking to enhance plant efficiency and reduce energy consumption costs, the client engaged Ark Energy. The project focused on one of their DCPs as a starting point.

Problems

The plant in question consumed significantly more energy than benchmarked peers. Due to limited instrumentation and sensors for critical equipment, the plant operated manually, lacking digital energy monitoring or automated fault detection systems. Additionally, several major equipment components were non-operational due to issues such as tube leakages and corrosion, hindering the plant’s ability to meet peak demand as designed. High harmonic distortion further compromised equipment and instrumentation. These inefficiencies led to steadily rising operational expenses.

Main Objective

To address these challenges, the client tasked Ark Energy with developing and executing a portfolio-wide energy optimization and operational modernization program across 11 plants. The primary goals were to:

The program began with an initial DCP, whose specifications are outlined below:

Table 1 The features of the initial District Cooling Plant that was tackled by Ark Energy

• Chilled water optimization system to improve overall plant efficiency, including condenser piping upgrade and other modifications
• Installation of a local DCP SCADA and instrumentation
• O&M Digitalization protocols and technology to enable a fully automated unmanned machinery space (UMS)