The National Central Cooling Company (Tabreed) of the United Arab Emirates, which has operations throughout the Gulf Cooperation Council, is known for supplying high quality, efficient and environmentally friendly district cooling (DC). Tabreed is one of the largest DC providers in the UAE and many iconic buildings, including residential and commercial towers as well as the Dubai metro, are cooled by Tabreed.
Taking action on energy efficiency targets
As part of ABB’s forward thinking, environmentally-aware strategy, in early 2019 Tabreed and ABB began talking about ways to use energy efficiency technology in the DC operations to help squeeze important, though sometimes overlooked, incremental energy savings out of its cooling systems.
ABB has already delivered drives for efficient control of the main chillers throughout the DC industry. To go a step further, ABB and Tabreed partnered to explore energy efficiency improvements in the smaller but numerous pumping systems which distribute cooling water throughout its network. Both companies saw this as a good opportunity to make considerable gains in energy savings and progress towards national energy efficiency goals.
ABB drives balance cooling supply and demand
One of the various ways to achieve better energy efficiency in district cooling systems is to replace soft starters on the systems’ pump motors with versatile ABB variable frequency drives, VFDs. In this way, ABB’s intelligent drives could perfectly adjust the pump speeds to match the flow rates necessary to keep buildings and consumers comfortably cool. Previously, soft starters would start the motors smoothly but then always run them at full speed, even if the cooling demand from the network did not require it.
Great cooperative results
Somit Laddha, Service Sales Engineer at ABB, explains how the collaboration worked. “Tabreed is a very progressive customer and was immediately positive to the idea of big potential energy savings, without doing major rebuilding. Together, we partnered to save large amounts of energy and help meet national energy targets.”
This fruitful cooperation with Tabreed is a great example of how ABB’s technologies and problem-solving attitudes are perfectly suited to support forward-thinking customers in meeting their increasing energy savings requirements. In this case, the energy efficiency goals in the UAE have been the key catalyst, and ABB and Tabreed took charge with creative ideas to make progress towards achieving them.
