Tabreed and IFC to set up a district energy investment platform

Abu Dhabi: National Central Cooling Company PJSC (Tabreed) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, are planning to establish a district energy investment platform in Singapore.

The new venture will invest in district cooling, trigeneration and cooling as a service offering with primary focus on India followed by other South East Asian countries.

The joint venture aims to build on Tabreed’s ongoing development activities in India following establishment of its wholly owned subsidiary in the country and will seek to provide more energy efficient end to end cooling as a service offering through an outsourced utility model for real estate developments, new urban masterplans and ongoing redevelopments across target cities.

South Asia focus

Energy demand in South East Asia is growing twice as fast as the rest of the world. In India, now the world’s third largest energy consuming country, cooling continues to be the largest contributor to this growth with the government’s India Cooling Action Plan forecasting an eight-fold increase in demand through to 2038 and the commercial real estate sector alone estimated to add 100 million refrigeration tons in capacity during this period.

In India cooling as a service market remains in a relatively embryonic stage due to real estate developers making their own individual and varied cooling technology choices, funding capex from their balance sheets to thereafter work with a fragmented ecosystem of service providers leaving significant headroom for cooling utilities like Tabreed to make inroads to deliver life cycle costs savings, energy efficiency improvements and better cooling service delivery through enhanced operations, maintenance and health and safety norms being adopted.

“The size and dynamism of India and other South East Asian countries will keep them at the heart of the global energy system with all roads to a successful global clean energy transition going via India. Sustainable cooling plays a crucial role in materializing this vision,” said Bader Saeed Al Lamki, Tabreed’s Chief Executive Officer.