Empower, the world's largest district cooling services provider, has announced that its state-of-the-art, world-class Command Control Centre (CCC) has started monitoring the activities of 26 of its 62 plants, through an advanced, high-performance smart network.

The new centre has capacity to serve 74 additional plants in the future. This was announced at the official inauguration of the SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) by Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD & CEO of the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (Dewa), and chairman of Empower. He was accompanied by Ahmad bin Shafar, Empower's CEO, as well as other officials from Dewa and Empower.

"This is a major step in Dubai's march towards conservation by providing environmental friendly and more efficient district cooling services, as part of the implementation of the ‘Green Economy for Sustainable Development' initiative launched by His Highness Shaikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai,” said Al Tayer, after the opening ceremony.

Al Tayer added that Empower has become the world's largest district cooling services provider. He explained that through the services of this centre a large segment of consumers of district cooling in Dubai will receive more efficient and sustainable services. The centre also ensures high-performance control as it adopts precise and highly advanced measurement systems. This first of its kind investment will provide multi-level measurement tools to track and manage different aspects of district cooling.

Empower said the smart connectivity of its plants through this centre was being powered by the communications infrastructure of Dubai. It is currently monitoring 350 buildings, reflecting 10,000 individual single unit meters, and could add around 650 more buildings, and around 90,000 more individual unit meters.

"Empower's Command Control Centre is providing a holistic smart monitoring of all the operations of Empower plants in Dubai to ensure smooth, reliable and sustainable district cooling services across the emirate,” said Ahmad bin Shafar. "The technologies used by the centre enable Empower to monitor all the operations of its plants that have a total production capacity of over 1 million Refrigeration Tons (RT).”

He added that the advanced technologies and systems used by the centre provide real time access to information, define supply and consumption patterns in each building unit through a click of a button, in line with Dubai Government's vision of making Dubai a unique smart city in the world.