Abu Dhabi’s Smart Grid

Abu Dhabi has already put itself on the map with its Masdar City project – an entire zero-emissions city to be powered by renewable energy, built with the Middle Eastern government's oil wealth.

Now the emirate that houses the capital of the United Arab Emirates is busy building out a smart grid infrastructure to match, according to an executive of the Danish company hired to integrate it.

But while Masdar is still in the development phases, "We're in the real world," said Morten Hald, chief business development officer for Amplex.

Amplex is in the business of networking utility substations, smart meters and streetlights, and has projects underway in Denmark, South Africa, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey and in the United States in Pittsburgh, Chicago and Washington, D.C., Hald said.

Most of those projects are focused on streetlight networking, a field in which Amplex competes with companies including Echelon (see Will Smart Grid See a Push For Powerline Networking?).

But the Abu Dhabi project, headed by its own Amplex division, will include a host of projects, starting with about 275,000 streetlights along Abu Dhabi's major roadways and eventually expanding to 1.2 million smart meters and substation monitoring and control systems, he said.

The project hasn't yet tackled the job of integrating the renewable power plants being built by Masdar, the government-backed initiative that invests in a number of green tech companies and projects, including the 1-gigawatt London Array wind power project (see Biggest Offshore Wind Farm Will Feed Londoners in 2012).

But Hald said he expects Amplex's smart grid networks will "touch Masdar" at some point in the future. It will also expand to water and sewage system monitoring system, he said.

Amplex is integrating the communications systems of the smart meters in the project, which come from vendors including Itron, Elster, Landis+Gyr and Kamstrup, as well as managing the data that comes from them and the distribution system sensors and streetlights, he said.