Dubai Electricity & Water Authority (DEWA) - World's Best Electricity Service

The UAE, represented by Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA), ranked first in the world in getting electricity, as per the World Bank’s Doing Business 2018 report. The extensive report uses multiple criteria to measure the ease of doing business in 190 countries around the world.

“We work to achieve the vision of our wise leadership, represented by HH Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE; and HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, to shape the future and adopt innovation to enhance the sustainability of development in all sectors of global competitiveness. This support the objectives of the UAE Centennial 2071 to secure a happy future and a better life for future generations, and raise UAE’s status as the best country in the world,” said HE Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD & CEO of DEWA.

“We have achieved this unprecedented achievement, locally and globally, due to our adoption of an integrated strategy that makes the future a central focus of government work, to develop our services and initiatives as a basis for the development of strategies and action plans. We have adopted innovation as a cornerstone for continuous improvement to enhance DEWA’s competitiveness in all areas. We follow the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and take advantage of new technologies in various fields, by supporting the Dubai 10X initiative, to propel Dubai towards the future, making it 10 years ahead of other global cities, through government innovation, and to enhance Dubai’s leadership in shaping the future. It also contributes to the establishment of the world's largest government accelerator based on innovation, and R&D, through incubators that create models, solutions and energy technologies. DEWA adopts the best global research and development practices for the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity and water at the highest world class levels of efficiency, reliability, and availability, in order to achieve its vision of becoming a sustainable innovative world-class utility,” added Al Tayer.

“We strive to consolidate the concept of integration, partnerships and cooperation between public and private organisations, in line with the efforts being exerted at all levels to achieve the objectives of the UAE to take the lead in the region and the world. The contractors and consultants who actively participated in our innovation labs and seminars have played a key role in our development initiatives and for making recommendations for continuous improvements that facilitate and accelerate the mechanism of access to electricity services, in accordance with the highest international standards and practices. All this has contributed to the World Bank's assessment process. DEWA’s Al Namoos service is tailor-made to provide consultants and contractors with electricity connections of up to 150 kilowatts (kW) in just two steps from the earlier three within 10 days. The first step now only takes 8 days, and includes the application for electricity connections through low-voltage cables, with the first monthly bill postponed till after the electricity is connected. The second step only takes two days which includes technical inspection and operation of the final service,” noted Al Tayer.

“DEWA has achieved very competitive results in its global benchmarking, surpassing the private sector and major European and American utilities in efficiency and reliability. It has been able to raise the efficiency of energy production, using the latest technologies and adopting technological innovations, and also surpassed these utilities by reducing losses from electricity transmission and distribution networks to 3.3% compared to 6-7% in the US and Europe; and water network losses were reduced to 8% compared to 15% in North America. DEWA also achieved 3.28 customer minutes lost per year compared to 15 minutes in Europe. From 2006 to 2016, DEWA’s cumulative energy production efficiency increased by 25.47%,” concluded Al Tayer.