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DEWA's Sirb Initiative To Harness Drones For Ensuring Water Quality | |
| Staff Writer |
The Sirb initiative, which is aligned to DEWA's own directives to harness different technologies, will now also incorporate drone technology featuring upgradable technologies, such as high-definition cameras that are equipped with night-vision and laser technologies, GPS sensors that can measure pressure, height, and magnetic fields, and use ultrasound scanning. The company has several types of drones, such as multi-rotor hydro, fixed-wing, multi-rotor, and underwater Remote Operated Vehicles (ROVs).
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Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) launched the Sirb (Arabic for fleet) initiative at the DEWA 2021 strategy workshop and continues to develop its infrastructure supported by assets exceeding AED200 billion owned by DEWA and its subsidiaries, and an additional investment of AED40bn over five years in the energy and water sectors.
In 2021, the Generation Division completed over 90 flights using robots to support the delivery of water and electricity services.
DEWA ensures drinking water quality through round-the-clock monitoring. Samples of seawater entering the power and desalination plants are collected to ensure a sufficient level of free residual chlorine to maintain the disinfection process for protecting the equipment.
The company has also installed instruments for continuous monitoring of seawater parameters, such as pH, temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen. It maintains regular schedules to collect water samples at different stages of the desalination process to ensure drinking water quality and analyses the seawater inlet and brine discharge samples from the power generation and desalination process to study its physical, chemical and microbiological parameters to ensure compliance with UAE regulations.
DEWA currently has 43 Multi-Stage Flash (MSF) water desalination units, with a total production capacity of 427 million imperial gallons of desalinated water per day (MIGD) at the D-, E-, G-, K-, L, and M Stations. It also has 2 SWRO plants with a production capacity of 63 MIGD.
Its total production capacity of desalinated water is 490 MIGD at the Jebel Ali Power Plant and Desalination Complex and the company aims to increase its SWRO production capacity to 303 MIGD by 2030, reaching 42 percent, from its current share of 13 percent.