DUBAI 19 January 2021: Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (Dewa) and Emirates Global Aluminium (EGA) yesterday announced that the UAE has become the first country in the world to produce aluminium using the power of the sun.
Under an agreement signed yesterday, Dewa will supply EGA’s smelter with solar power from the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park.
The agreement was signed remotely by Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, Managing Director and CEO of Dewa and Vice Chairman of EGA; and Abdul Nasser bin Kalban, CEO of EGA, in the presence of Abdullah bin Kalban, Managing Director of EGA, Walid Salman, Executive Vice President for Business Development and Excellence at Dewa and a number of officials from both sides.
Dewa will supply EGA’s smelter with 560,000 megawatt hours of solar power annually from the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, sufficient to make 40,000 tonnes of aluminium in the first year with the potential for significant expansion. EGA will supply solar aluminium to global customers under the new product name CelestiAL, said Wam.
Aluminium is used in products and infrastructure from smartphones to skyscrapers. Its uses include applications that contribute to a more sustainable environment from wind farms to electric vehicles, and mass transit to solar panels. The availability of solar power on the scale needed for aluminium smelting has been made possible by the UAE’s significant investment in solar power, including in Dubai by Dewa and its Independent Power Producer (IPP) partners.
The Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, located in Dubai, has a current installed capacity of 1,013 megawatts using photovoltaic solar panels. DEWA is implementing an additional 1,850 megawatts of projects using solar panels and Concentrated Solar Power (CSP). Eventually, this capacity will reach 5,000MW by 2030.
EGA’s sourcing of solar power from Dubai’s electricity grid will be tracked and traced through the use of the International Renewable Energy Certification System, ensuring that the energy used to produce EGA’s CelestiAL solar aluminium has been sourced from the sun.
