Page 29 - RSB Annual Report 2019 English Final

Towards the end of the year the Supreme Council of Energy completed a refresh of the DSM strategy. This included expanding the «District Cooling» (DC) programme to an «Efficient Cooling» programme. This will require a focus on cooling technologies other than just DC and other factors contributing to the overall efficiency with which cooling is delivered, such as the operation and maintenance of cooling systems within buildings, whether served by DC or not. In addition to the anticipated regulatory framework for DC the programme looks to: 1. Develop and support an association of DC operators in Dubai which will seek to deliver further energy savings through improving the awareness of DC, sharing its benefits with consumers and increasing the scope for retrofitting buildings with DC. In addition, the association will look into alternative renewable power sources to support DC. 2. Improve the efficient delivery of cooling of any technology in buildings, by incentivizing facility management companies to deliver energy savings for their clients. At the end of the year the RSB commenced a series of stakeholder meetings with developers, FM companies, ESCOs and others to discuss options for creating an incentive scheme. We will report on the progress of these initiatives in future annual reports and report savings under the expanded programme. Whilst June 2019 was the hottest June in the last 20 years and the shoulder months of September and October were relatively warm, overall the year was slightly cooler than 2018 (yet still significantly warmer than 2000). We monitor the performance of the DC sector through data provided to us on a yearly basis. We have collected data from co-operating DC Providers for seven years and over that time we have been able to evaluate trends in performance and the growth of the sector. This year we received data from six DC providers. Unfortunately, one company declined to provide data on 2019, so we have rolled forward its reported data from last year without adjustment to aid comparability between 2019 and earlier years. Data returns sit at the heart of our analysis and performance assessments but it should be noted that the data we receive is not audited by us. For the most part, the quality of data returns continued to improve and the few queries that we raised were resolved faster than in previous years. This year, however, only one DC operator provided a complete and accurate annual return on time and, whilst most companies provided returns shortly after the due date, the last data returns were not finalized until March, over a month behind the original deadline. We have committed to review the design of the data return to ensure it is no more complex than necessary to complete our analysis. To improve comparisons with other cooling technologies and wider energy usewe have opted to report SI units, in addition to the combination of metric and imperial measures we have used in previous years. Annual Report 2019 RSB 29