Dubai’s DEWA bags Guinness record for largest single-site natural gas power facility

The Jebel Ali Power Generation and Water Production Complex of the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) has been confirmed by Guinness World Records as the largest single-site natural gas power generation facility in the world.

The complex can generate 9,547 MW of electricity. The total assets of the power production and water desalination plants in the Jebel Ali complex are now valued at over Dhs45bn.

Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD and CEO of DEWA, said that Dubai recorded the world’s lowest Customer Minutes Lost (CML) of 1.66 minutes per year; the lowest electricity transmission- and distribution-network-line losses of 3.3 per cent, and one of the lowest water-network losses of 5.1 per cent.

Fuel Heat Utilisation in DEWA’s power plants reached 90 per cent. The UAE has maintained its first global ranking for the third consecutive year, with scores of 100 per cent in all Getting Electricity indicators in the World Bank’s Doing Business 2020 report. The report measures the ease of doing business in 190 economies around the world.

.@DEWAOfficial achieves Guinness World Records title of largest single-site natural gas power facility in the world, located at Jebel Ali Power Plant and Water Desalination Complex with an electricity generation capacity of 9,547 MW. #Dubai pic.twitter.com/hZgPZ06LP0

— Dubai Media Office (@DXBMediaOffice) March 1, 2021

“DEWA is implementing the latest Fourth Industrial Revolution disruptive technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and other innovations. This has resulted in DEWA improving its generation efficiency by 33.41 per cent, which also helped achieve considerable financial savings. This improvement has also reduced more than 64 million tonnes of carbon emissions, which are equivalent to planting 327 million trees. It has also reduced more than 46,000 tonnes of nitrogen oxide gases and over 3,000 tonnes of sulphur dioxide,” said Nasser Lootah, executive vice president of Generation at DEWA.

In 2019, DEWA completed the extension project for M-Station in Jebel Ali, which is the largest power generation and water desalination plant in the UAE. With the construction of the extension, the total cost of the M-Station reached over Dhs12bn, while its production capacity reached 2,885 megawatts (MW) and 140 million gallons of desalinated water per day.

McKinsey has categorised DEWA, represented by its Generation division, as one of the best five plants in the world, in an assessment of 60 other global utilities that use electricity and water co-generation systems.