UAE uses enormous 1.8bn MW hours to power its economy each year

Nearly 1.8 billion megawatt hours of energy was consumed by the UAE to achieve a total annual GDP of $377 billion (Dh1,383.6 billion) in 2013, according to Heliocentris, a German market leader in energy saving solutions.

This amount of energy could be sufficient to power all of the nation's households for more than 15 years and around 70 million households for a whole year.

The figures were released ahead of Critical Communication Middle East 2014, a trade specific show dedicated to critical communications technologies in the Middle East, which opened at the Jumeirah Beach Hotel in Dubai.

Heliocentris offers clean energy solutions, training and research in the field of Information & Communication Technologies (ICT), to help businesses to control, monitor and reduce their energy usage, providing technology to improve both operational and financial performance so as to meet the next generation's energy demands today.

A research report by World Resources Institute revealed that in 2013, the UAE used 481 tonnes of oil equivalent (toe) for every $1 million of its GDP. By comparison, a predominantly urban population such as Japan uses 154 toes for every $1 million of GDP, more than two thirds less than the UAE. On the basis of a total annual GDP of $377 billion in 2013, the energy used to achieve the total GDP equates to 1.8 billion Megawatt hours.

Michael Kutschenreuter, General Manager of Heliocentris' Dubai-based Middle East operations, said: "Everyone knows that with natural resources being cheap and freely available in the UAE, it is the obvious fuel of choice both domestically and industrially. However, it's only when you drill into these figures that you realise what a staggering amount of energy is involved and, more importantly, by how much it could be reduced. It is therefore important to implement energy saving solutions, based primarily on sustainable energy, such as solar and photovoltaic systems. Gradually we are seeing more and more customers switching to our technology, with the know-how that it can save them more than 50% of their diesel consumption, especially in the telecoms sector."

In its current roll-out-phase, the Company targets primarily base stations of mobile telecom operators in world regions with poor and unreliable grid-coverage such as the Middle East, Africa and South-East-Asia, successfully installing several hundred systems in the field already. The German firm recently acquired FutureE Fuel Cell Solutions GmbH, a leading integrator of fuel cell systems for applications in the telecoms sector, and plans to imminently bring the international technology to the Middle East region.

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