The cheapest megawatt is often the one a network never loses. That is the quiet message inside the Sharjah grid plan announced at the weekend, a programme worth more than AED 5.2 billion (about 1.42 billion US dollars) from the Sharjah Electricity, Water and Gas Authority, known as SEWA.
SEWA presented the projects on 31 October at the second Sharjah: Future Station forum at SPARK, under the theme From Lab to Market. Most of the money goes to water. The headline asset is the emirate’s first independent reverse osmosis plant, planned at 410,000 cubic metres a day by the fourth quarter of 2028 and meant to serve 1.4 million people.
What the Sharjah grid plan actually contains
On the power side, Hamad Al Tunaiji, who leads power transmission, described four areas of work: reactive power management, smart high voltage grids and substations, moving high voltage networks from a ring layout to a mesh, and a smart substation system. SEWA says the smart high voltage grids and substations will cut grid losses by 25 percent and faults by 40 percent.
Those figures are SEWA’s own. No baseline year, measurement period or cost per project was given, so it is not possible to say how much of the 25 percent has been achieved and how much is still a target. The Sharjah grid numbers should be read as intent, not as audited results.
Why ring to mesh matters for the Sharjah grid
In a ring network, power reaches a substation from one of two directions. In a meshed network there are several paths, so a fault on one line can be bypassed more easily. Reactive power management keeps voltage steady and reduces the current that lines carry without doing useful work. Both are established engineering ideas that pay off when demand grows and the network is heavily loaded.
Smart substations add monitoring and automatic switching, which helps operators find and isolate faults faster. That is where a lower fault count would plausibly come from, although SEWA has not set out the mechanism. A fault that is cleared in seconds rarely turns into an outage, which is one reason utilities track both the number of faults and the time customers spend without power.
The water side dominates the budget
Water takes the larger share of the announcement. Alongside the desalination plant, SEWA plans upgrades to transmission networks, pumping stations and reservoirs that add 270 million gallons of storage, a strategic underground water storage project, and artificial intelligence and GIS tools to monitor the network from a control room. It also cites national targets under the UAE Water Security Strategy 2036, including a 21 percent cut in demand and 95 percent reuse of treated water.
Desalination is also an electricity story. Reverse osmosis plants run on power, so a growing water network adds load to the same system that SEWA wants to make more efficient. None of the published coverage says how much electricity the new plant will draw or where it will come from. Load growth is reshaping costs elsewhere too, as the PJM capacity auction showed in the United States.
What to watch next on the Sharjah grid
Three things will show whether the programme delivers. The first is a published baseline for losses and faults, so the 25 and 40 percent claims can be checked. The second is a cost and timeline for each grid project, since only the desalination date, the fourth quarter of 2028, has been given. The third is the power source for the new plant, whether grid electricity, solar or a mix. SEWA publishes its news on the authority website.
Efficiency is easy to announce and hard to verify. If SEWA publishes its loss figures year by year, the Sharjah grid could become a useful case study for other utilities facing rising demand. Until then, the most reliable number in the announcement is the budget itself, and the Sharjah grid share of it is not stated.
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