PHOTO
Abu Dhabi City Municipality - The Abu Dhabi City Municipality has fully replaced the manual irrigation systems in Abu Dhabi Island with an automated network. The project, which is undertaken in line with sustainability standards, reflects the Municipality’s commitment to implement the vision of Abu Dhabi Government aimed at achieving operational efficiency and preventing wastage of water, a valuable source of energy.
The project depicts the keenness of the Department of Municipal Affairs and Transport on utilizing new technologies in rationalizing irrigation water consumption in agricultural farms, preserving strategic reserves of water as per sustainability requirements as well as water rationalization & energy conservation standards.
The Abu Dhabi City Municipality is also moving ahead with its plans to perpetuate the concepts of sustainable development, drafting new mechanisms & approaches to uphold the culture of energy sources sustainability and conservation, particularly water.
Migrating from traditional to automated irrigation systems required developing a central control irrigation system of high efficiency to supply various greenery particularly landscaped areas with water. The system can monitor and operate Landscaping Irrigation Controllers, cut operation & labor cost, and most importantly, reduce high water wastage rates.
Phase I of the automated irrigation project costs more than AED 14 million, while Phase II costs AED 12 million, and Phase III costs AED 10 million, bringing the total cost of both projects to more than AED 36 million.
It is worth mentioning that Abu Dhabi City Municipality is a pioneer sustainability standards achiever as evidenced by conserving energy sources and adopting successful strategies that contributed to rationalizing consumption of irrigation water. In this context, the Municipality has won the Best Leader Efficiency Water Award at the Water Leakage Summit held in Dubai in 2012. The accolade came in recognition of the role played by the Municipality in rationalizing water consumption, adopting world-class policies & modern technologies, and innovating leading initiatives. The Municipality’s fiber-optic network technology for the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) was rated as the best project at the regional level in the said category.
SCADA, which is a central control system of irrigation networks & stations, and storm-water drainage in Abu Dhabi City & the Mainland, is connected to the Main Control Center via the third-generation (3G) technology, which contributes to cutting manual operation costs by 100% and reducing maintenance costs by 20% by putting equipment into the safe mode during operation. It enables operators to control & monitor stations & equipment and provides them with the necessary tools to follow up these stations. This would lead to higher efficiency in operating stations & machinery and at the same time reduce risk.
SCADA is capable of regulating fresh water used in irrigation by 100% through replacing it with treated water in public places by fixing valves against inlets of water tanks. This method provides information about the amount of water used for irrigation on a regular basis and also gives an overview about the performance of operation & maintenance contractors through key performance indicators (KPI's).
SCADA also contributes to saving approximately 15% of the amount of treated water used for irrigation, which improves the capacity to irrigate new areas, particularly remote and hard-to-reach areas thanks to the Sequence Filling Technology and the Daily Quota system which secure optimal distribution of water to stations tanks when needed in a scientific manner. This ensures regular water supply to remote areas and optimizes utilization of irrigation network.
In addition, SCADA monitors the performance of contractors engaged in operation & maintenance of stations by compiling reports including key performance indicators (KPI’s); with full-blown Internet access from anywhere in the world.
SCADA provides comprehensive, accurate data and information about municipal assets, which would help to estimate the consumption of drinking water as well as treated sewerage, besides calculating water consumption in a specific geographical area and monitoring water quality in the network.
-Ends-
© Press Release 2017
