MIDDLE EAST

– Ahmed Al-Ebrahim , GCCIA CEO

organisation is much bigger in terms of capacity , the technology that is employed and the size of the systems that we are using ,” he explains .

The first substation was commissioned in Kuwait early in 2009 , and part of the system went live in the summer of that year . Connecting four previously separate grids . “ By the end of 2011 we had all six member states interconnected , so since that time we ’ ve been operating as a single GCC grid for practical purposes .”

To give an idea of what that meant on the ground , blackouts that in the noughties were something that the Gulf States had grown used to living with became a thing of the past . Since 2009 more than 1,300 potential outages have been prevented through instantaneous intervention by the GCCIA and by the very existence of the interconnector as a regional backbone . “ Consumers would not even have noticed these incidents ”, he says . Critical utilities like hospitals and factories have benefited immeasurably .

When something does go wrong , it can be quickly diagnosed remotely from the control centre or even by online engineers

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