Milestone

DEWA commissions 793 substations across Dubai in first half

By Staff Writer  |  15 August 2026

Dubai Electricity and Water Authority commissioned 793 new 11kV substations across the emirate in the first half of 2026, taking the number of medium voltage substations in service to 47,723.

The authority said the construction and associated works involved 624,340 man-hours, completed under its quality, efficiency and safety standards.

Substations step voltage levels up or down so that power can be carried efficiently over distance and delivered safely to homes and businesses. Rashid Bin Humaidan, executive vice president of distribution power at the authority, said it now has around 53 substations at 33kV and 47,723 medium voltage substations at 11kV and 6.6kV in service.

The authority has previously recorded customer minutes lost for electricity averaging 0.82 minutes per customer a year, and electricity transmission and distribution losses of 2 per cent.

Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, the authority's managing director and chief executive, said: "We aim to anticipate future growth requirements and consolidate the emirate's position as one of the leading cities globally in developing advanced infrastructure that ensures the highest levels of quality of life."

He said the authority will continue to keep pace with the expansion of new residential areas, commercial centres, investment projects and business hubs in the emirate, and added: "We adopt the latest global technologies to maintain the highest levels of performance, driving sustainable economic and urban growth for decades to come."

What the practitioner should take from this

A commissioning figure of this size is a statement about a rolling programme of small, repeated contracts rather than about any single project. Nearly eight hundred substations in six months is more than four a day, and programmes of that shape are usually delivered under framework agreements with call-off orders.

Framework delivery changes where the commercial risk sits. Three points follow.

The first is that the individual call-off, not the framework, usually carries the time obligation. A contractor holding a place on a framework has no guaranteed volume, and an employer issuing call-offs has no guaranteed resource. Where volumes rise sharply, the constraint is normally the contractor's capacity, and the contract rarely says who bears the cost of that.

The second is the treatment of repeated design. Where a standard substation design is used hundreds of times, an error in the standard detail repeats hundreds of times with it. The contractual question is whether the design responsibility sits with the party that produced the standard or with the party that used it, and whether any limitation of liability is expressed per order or across the framework as a whole.

The third is energisation. Commissioning a substation depends on an outage on the existing network, and outages are controlled by the employer. Where a call-off programme is built on assumed energisation dates, and those dates move, the contractor's remedy depends entirely on whether the outage is an employer obligation or a stated risk of the works.