Fit for purpose

The Nad Al Sheba district cooling plant at the Meydan complex under construction.

Designed to provide air conditioning to large scale developments, district cooling has had to reinvent itself to adapt to challenging times.

District cooling is a fairly young concept, and its rise to prominence coincided with the construction boom that ended only as the financial markets soured in 2008. Built in an era defined by largesse to service developments of ever increasing proportions, many of the district cooling plants were designed without careful deliberation on actual requirements.

“In the past we built plants with a capacity of 50,000 tonnes, when all that was needed was 20,000 tonnes,” says Mohamed Yousseff, managing director at SNC-Lavalin, an EPC contractor active in district cooling.

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Things changed as the world economy took a turn for the worse, and the pace of property development slowed considerably. As developers struggled to find occupants for their new buildings, dead assets in district cooling plants became a common phenomenon. Some plants, already built, would simply be fitted with less capacity, says Yousseff.

Inspired by the new spirit of austerity, and more familiar with district cooling, the utilities companies and developers are now looking to take a more considered approach. “The market has matured a lot, people are more conscious of the capacity of a district cooling plant,” says Tawfiq Abu Soud, executive director at Drake & Scull Water and Power. “Three years ago, they would go and install the district cooling for the whole master plan with some additional capacity just to be safe. They didn’t dig deep inside to the load profile of each building to see what the actual need was.”

Abu Soud sees a trend towards more customised plants arising, partially because of the financial constraints experienced by the utilities companies providing district cooling. With the credit markets in turmoil, securing funding has been a difficult in the last couple of years. Even if crowned with success, the process can take up to a year.

This has left district cooling companies unable to bid for as many projects as in the past, a problem for developers who cannot open their residential or commercial buildings without air conditioning.

To solve this dilemma, property developers are moving towards building their own cooling plant. “We had a call from a property developer from Abu Dhabi recently, who said that he had a problem. His utility provider couldn’t provide him with chilled water until 2012, but his property will be ready next march, and without cooling it cannot open,” recalls Abu Soud.
ECP contractors like Drake & Scull will increasingly be dealing with the property developers, supplying them with purpose built plants for individual complexes.

“We think we can provide a better solution,” states Abu Soud. “We can build a plant fit for purpose. District cooling providers built a plant providing cooling for the whole area – so maybe the requirements are not fit for purpose for everyone.”

A more gradualist approach in the construction industry, coupled with reduced demand for new residential and office space in the region, will further accelerate the move towards more custom built district cooling applications, believes Abu Soud, who speaks of a trend towards ‘distributed energy’.

In order to avoid dead assets in a plant already completed while the rest of the complex is still under construction, district cooling providers are now looking at building a range of smaller plants in a staged process.

“The construction of a development can be phased out, but if you are building a central plant, you can only phase parts of it out,” explains Abu Soud. “So there are a lot of dead assets, especially underground, as the infrastructure for the chilled water has to be built in the beginning. There no return on investment for the capital investment. That’s why we are moving to distributed energy or localised chilled water plants.”

To improve the reliability of the system, the plant will be interconnected, meaning that a malfunctioning plant can be compensated for by the remaining capacity.