Spanish builder and operator of power and water plants ACCIONA announced on Wednesday that it is using the 'Digital Twin' technology to test and commission a mega desalination plant thousands of kilometres away in Saudi Arabia as Covid-19 restrictions prevented its team from travelling to the site.

The Digital Twin - an exact digital copy of the Al-Khobar 1 Sea Water Reverse Osmosis (SWRO) plant in Saudi Arabia - allowed a specialist team in Madrid to begin testing and commissioning at the plant remotely, with only minimal staff on site, according to the press statement.

The Madrid team conducted the first stage of this process from ACCIONA's Water Control Centre (CECOA).

Using advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence, the desalination plant's start up equipment, control system programmes, water and electrical circuits were tested and put into operation with remote supervision, the statement said.

"With the first stage of this process completed successfully using the Digital Twin, the next stages of the commissioning process are continuing as planned and will be completed shortly," the statement noted.

ACCIONA is the Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) contractor for Al Khobar 1, which is expected to be completed in December 2020. The desalination plant will produce 210,000 cubic metres of potable water per day, serving a population of 350,000 inhabitants, making it one of the largest desalination plants in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Ignacio Lobo Gutiérrez, ACCIONA Project Director of Al-Khobar 1, said: "The start-up of desalination plants will, in future, be undertaken by local and remote teams working together thanks to Digital Twin technologies. Because of the pandemic, it is very likely that desalination plants coming on stream next year will be commissioned in this way."

Jesús Sancho, ACCIONA Middle East Managing Director, added: "Industry 4.0 is the new standard. It is already here. COVID has just accelerated its arrival."

Saudi Arabia, with a population of 33.4 million, is the world's third largest per capita consumer of water, behind the United States and Canada, the press statement said.

(Writing by Syed Ameen Kader; Editing by Anoop Menon)

(anoop.menon@refinitiv.com)

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