Energy saving project in Oman

In February I spent 2 weeks in Oman, working on plans for energy saving.With the recent rapid economic growth and increased development, there has been a big growth in power demand and the goal of this project, awarded to JICA (the Japan International Cooperation Agency) was to draft energy saving policy, and promote energy saving including improvements in efficiency on the power demand side and by limiting energy consumption.

Oman is situated on the south-east of the Arabian Peninsula in the Middle-East, with the United Arab Emirates to the north-west, Saudi-Arabia to the west, and Yemen to the south-west. The Straits of Hormuz which has been the scene of international tensions is within Oman’s territorial waters. The country has an area of 310,000km2, of which 80% is desert.　The total population is about 3,000,000 of which about 1/3 are foreign residents. Incidentally, Japan with an area of 378,000km2 has a total population of 128,000,000. Oman has a desert climate with summer temperatures reaching 40 degrees in summer. The religion is Islam and Thursdays and Fridays are holidays – Friday is the Islamic day of rest, equivalent to the Christian Sabbath.

Main industries are oil and natural gas, from which most of the government revenue comes from. Nevertheless, as with other Arabian countries, petroleum output is declining and it is said that crude oil and natural gas reserves shall be exhausted in 20 and 40 years respectively. The stated goal is to eliminate the states dependency on oil.

I stayed in Oman for 2 weeks, gathering information from government and power companies, investigating buildings and building services equipment, as well as the electrical appliances available there. Oman is an economically prosperous country with high levels of safety and civic order, and looking at the electrical appliances there showed they were not so different from what is available in Japan.

There is still the feeling that the diffusion and implementation of energy saving has yet to be realised, but this can partly be blamed on the availability of cheap electricity. For example, household energy charges range from 2 to 6JPY per kWh which is very cheap (in Japan the charges range from 17 to 24JPY per kWh). What made a big impression on me was that this is a country where the air-conditioners never stop running during the 6 month summer period. In fact, looking at the power consumption for a single household, 3000kWh ~ 5000kWhiwas consumed during a single summer month. That’s 10 times that of the average household in Japan which uses about 500kWh in one month.

On an office rooftop

Office building substation
The substation is the property of the power company

I will be visiting Oman again in May and August, to accurately measure power consumption and get a good grasp of the conditions there to put together appropriate energy saving policy. I look forward to being able to put together successful proposals using the superior equipment and systems and to help Oman’s energy saving efforts.

Akira Katayanagi