49 seconds: Dubai breaks own world record of least power outage time
Dubai Electricity and Water Authority announced that it broke its own record by achieving the lowest electricity customer minutes lost around the world reaching 49 seconds (0.82 minutes) per year.
It measures the average length of time that a customer is without power. In fact, Dewa was already the fastest person in the world in 2024 with a time of 0.94 minutes.
Smart Grid provided by Dewa — which has invested Dh7 billion in this smart and integrated energy network acting as a core backbone of its operations — features advanced solutions to optimise efficiency in the transmission and distribution of electricity, address supply outages with pre-emptive action, improve loss reduction and ensure effective electrical load management, said Dewa CEO Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer.
The Automatic Smart Grid Restoration System is one of the core programmes, he said, adding it was the first of its kind in the region. Impressive centralized systems that automatically search out and discover faults as well as isolate the service while also restoring it without human intervention allows for remote, 24/7 control, management and monitoring of the system — all this with power restoration eventually taking a fraction of time while improving reliability.
We are deploying the latest Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies, particularly artificial intelligence — which we have fully integrated within Dewa strategies and operations. Availability, reliability and efficiency of services are the main aspects of the smart grid which is a pillar of Dewa's strategy," the director said.
Dewa has been rapidly lowering lost customer time from over a 10 years ago, reducing the CML from 6.88 minutes in 2012 to 0.82 minutes in 2025 — far lower than an average of around 15 minutes measured by top utilities across Europe
Similarly, the Dubai authority recently announced that it had cut its processing time from four days to a matter of minutes and followed switching over to artificial intelligence. With the new system, refunds of up to Dh 4,000 are being processed and it includes around 90 per cent of all requests.
This week, the emirate announced that in a bid to boost efficiency, from 2023, 50 per cent of all government services across the country would be carried out by AI agents. With this, the UAE will become the first government in the world to operate 50 percent of its services through agentic AI.
Comments