Dewa’s 250MW hydroelectric power plant in Hatta at 29% completion

Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD and CEO of the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (Dewa), recently visited the pumped storage hydroelectric power station being built by Dewa in Hatta, which is 29 per cent complete.

The station will have a production capacity of 250 megawatts (MW), a storage capacity of 1,500 megawatt-hours, and a life span of up to 80 years. This is the first station of its kind in the GCC with investments up to Dh1.421 billion. Nasser Lootah, EVP of Generation at Dewa; Khalifa Albedwawi, the project manager, and the project’s team accompanied Al Tayer.

Al Tayer inspected the construction site of the hydroelectric power station and was briefed on the project’s progress. The first 37-metre-high Roller Compacted Concrete (RCC) wall is now complete at the project’s upper dam. The station will use water in the Hatta Dam and an upper dam that is being built in the mountain.

The Hydroelectric power plant is an energy storage with turnaround efficiency of 78.9 per cent that utilises potential energy of the water stored in the upper dam which is converted to kinetic energy during the flow of water through the 1.2 kilometer subterranean tunnel, and this kinetic energy rotates the turbines and converts mechanical energy to electrical energy which is sent to Dewa grid within 90 seconds in response to demand.

Then to store energy again, clean energy generated at the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park is used to pump the water through this tunnel back to the upper dam by converting the electrical energy to kinetic energy and then finally storing it as a potential energy in the upper dam. This makes the whole project 100 per cent renewable.

business@khaleejtimes.com