DOHA: Qatar Energy and Water Efficiency Conference will be held from December 8 to 10 here with the country’s long-term initiative toward developing a sustainable energy and water strategy in mind.
At the conference, high-level government authorities will share their initiatives and plans towards achieving Qatar’s power and water sustainability objectives.
While its power situation is comfortable, Qatar has some of the smallest water reserves in the world. In an effort to ensure water security, Qatar General Electricity and Water Corporation (Kahramaa) is undertaking a $3bn Water Security Mega Reservoirs project. The scheme has been designed to provide seven days of strategic water storage within its network.
Though Qatar’s power demand growth has regularly exceeded 10 percent over the past five years, the installed capacity of 8,761MW was comfortably able to deal with the peak usage of 6,255MW recorded in 2012. Qatar’s power reserves have enabled it to sell electricity to neighbouring countries in the GCC.
“Current indications in our strategic and technical planning show that in the next five years, there will be a need for additional capacity — with huge schemes planned everywhere — particularly in preparation for the World Cup. For the past three years, many of the projects were in the planning stage, but now we are seeing them start, including port and metro schemes and many others,” said Kahramaa’s technical director, Ahmed Al Naser.
Qatar’s next planned independent water and power plant called Facility D will be located at the Qatar Economic Zone near Doha and is expected to have a power generation capacity of 2,400MW and a desalination capacity of 130 million g/d. The desalination component will partly use reverse osmosis technology; it will be the first time the country has employed it on a large-scale scheme. “The water reservoirs project is one of the largest in the world in terms of the size of reservoirs and will increase the capacity of water storage by 10 times. So the storage capacity will be about 3,500m gallons,” said Al Naser.
The dignitaries who will be attending the conference include Essa bin Hilal Al Kuwari, President of Kahramaa, Maryam Saeed Al Mohannadi, Head of Water Strategy Section, Ministry of Environment, Frank Harrigan, Director, Department of Economic Development, Ministry of Development Planning and Statistics, Meshal M Al Shamari, Director, Qatar Green Building Council, Qatar Foundation, Hassan Qasem, Senior Infrastructure Engineer, Ministry of Municipalities and Urban Planning, and Abdulaziz Ahmed Al Khal, Director of Masarak, Qatar Mobility Innovations Centre.
The Peninsula
