White Paper on District Cooling Towards Establishing District Cooling Regulations for Kuwait

: الوثيقة البيضاء في تبريد الضواحي في دولة الكويت

Abstract

District Cooling (DC) has a better overall cost effectiveness during its lifetime than systems at individual buildings, is more reliable, more energy efficient and environmentally has a lower carbon footprint. The expected rapid growth of air conditioning capacity in Kuwait (the third largest in the GCC) due to the planned construction of new cities according to the Kuwait Urban Development Plan 2035, is an important factor to take into consideration and the need to allocate substantial budgets for the construction of new power stations.

However, current practices and laws make it difficult to take advantage of district cooling, let alone recognize its benefits. Among the challenges are overly low power prices distorting the real value of District Cooling at high density loads thus making District Cooling to incorrectly appear of value at high level of cooling density.

Potential District Cooling providers hesitate to offer their services fearing the jeopardization of their assets, because the business is not regulated by the government and due to the lack of well-planned DC projects in some neighboring countries which contributed to damaging the image of the business. Additionally, potential users of District Cooling systems are hesitant when a system is offered to their property because they are unsure whether the system is economically beneficial or is backed up by governmental supervision.

Only governments are capable of remedying the situation by creating regulations to establish DC as a utility very much in line with water, power, natural gas, and other utilities.

This White Paper is concerned with these regulatory aspects charting a course to bridge the gaps and to overcome challenges, thus clarifying the requirements of regulations for District Cooling in Kuwait.
Kuwait has special challenging climatic conditions; emphasis is made on using Not-In-Kind cooling technologies suitable for those climatic conditions. This is thought as important in order to move gradually to sustainable cooling technologies and not rely entirely on electric power to produce cooling, thus reducing on-peak electric loads on the grid and moving gradually from reliance on fossil fuel for energy production. Furthermore, the gradual phase-down of traditional refrigerants and the introduction of new refrigerants, that are all flammable to various degrees, makes the task of handling those new refrigerants much more difficult given the large banks needed with traditional air conditioning systems. District Cooling will reduce greatly the banks of these new flammable refrigerants thus helps reducing the risks associated with handling and using flammable refrigerants.

The White Paper (WP) was formulated based on a request from the Energy Efficiency Team which was formed under the umbrella of the Supreme Energy Committee and headed by the Ministry of Electricity and Water and Renewable Energy (MEW&RE) as part of the Team’s workplan. The Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS) hosted a two days’ workshop in October 2020 with the attendance of major stakeholders to discuss the current situation, challenges and future plans in order to:
• Recognize the gaps and challenges in the DC regulation requirement.
• Identify local institutional and regulatory decisions needed for implementing DC in Kuwait.
• Create a road map for the initialization of DC regulations in Kuwait.
• Structure the institutional set-up needed for the regulations.
• Define milestones and timelines for creating the regulations.

Date of Award	Apr 2022
Original language	English