Cool talk

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Dany Safi is the first Arab to be elected to the International District Energy Association's (IDEA) board of directors in its 94-year history. He is also the first regional manager of IDEA's Middle East Chapter and counts several international awards, including the IDEA Unsung Hero and Global Pioneer Awards, among his accolades.

But achieving such success has not been easy. Simply gaining acceptance of the district cooling concept was the first challenge that had to be overcome.

"Convincing the market [of the viability of district cooling] took us a lot of effort and work," said Safi.

One of the first moves for Safi's team was to carry out financial and technical analyses of the local markets to demonstrate the possibilities to future clients.

"People are afraid of new ideas and concepts, they always resist the implementation of new things; it's human nature in my opinion," said Safi. "Those were the main obstacles [to the uptake of district cooling], but I think we have crossed that time now. I look backwards and smile - now everybody wants to be in this business."

And Safi has reason to smile: in less than a decade the Middle East's district cooling sector has grown from a virtual standing start into a multi-billion dollar industry. Its growth is also outstripping that of North America, IDEA's home country, by 2:1 and US $30 billion of investments are predicted for the sector over the next ten years.

Lebanese Safi is an engineer by training, studying a BSc in electrical engineering in France, followed by a MSc in mechanical engineering in the UK. He began his working career with a real estate development firm then joined global air conditioning firm Carrier. He spent several years with Carrier where he was responsible for projects worldwide in locations varying from the USA to Qatar, before beginning his ventures in the field of district cooling.

"I'm basically an engineer and I got involved in the business of district cooling by coincidence to a certain extent," explains Safi. His inspiration came around 17 years ago while based in Abu Dhabi with Carrier. He explains: "We were working on a project that required a large [air conditioning] installation and we found that it was difficult for us to commission the equipment because of a lack of electricity at that time. I had an idea to start using district cooling driven on natural gas. That was the original proposal, to use natural gas as an alternative energy. One of the other main reasons for suggesting such an idea was basically to save energy and conserve the environment," he adds. The concept wasn't new stresses Safi, merely it's implementation in the region. "The district energy concept is 100 years old," he states. "It started in heating in the late 1800s, then the concept of cooling was started in 1922...in the US."

The client accepted the concept, but the implementation of the technology required a structure and legal entity; this was developed over the following years. "It took us years to develop this business until we formed the company Tabreed in June 1998; it wasn't overnight," stresses Safi. During this period of formation Gulf Energy Systems was created, a company that is now 100% owned by Tabreed.

Tabreed was listed as a public stock company in 1998 and today has almost 20 000 shareholders and is one of the largest district cooling providers in the world. In less than ten years the number of direct employees has risen from three to over 460.

This level of growth is expected to continue for both Tabreed and the region's district cooling sector in general. The boom in the Middle East's real estate industry is playing a principal role.

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