Operational Management System In District Cooling Plant Company

This study aimed to determine the operational management systems in the District Cooling Plant company in Qatar. Specifically, it described the firmographic profile of the district cooling plant companies in terms of type of customers, number of years in operation, cooling demand, cooling plant capacity, total plant energy produced, KPI requirement met, electricity consumption, plant HVAC and energy delivered to customers.; analyzed the operational management system in terms of strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in cooling plan company; identified the operational challenges encountered and come up with an Action Plan to address the operational challenges encountered to improve the Operational Management System of the District Cooling Companies in Qatar. Descriptive qualitative research was used. Participants were selected from different district cooling companies based on their direct involvement in the District Cooling Plant with Plant Engineer level with at least 10 experience in the field that have direct access to all desired data needed for this study. Based on the results, it was found out that district cooling plant challenges are: Low delta T syndrome or so low chilled water return from customer ETS, Plant Equipment design challenges. Extreme ambient whether condition during summer was not considered while designing or sizing the equipment. In addition to this, equipment redundancy also not thoroughly considered to improve plant reliability. Manpower selection process and Operations and maintenance program implementation were also highlighted in this study. Recommendations to improve district cooling plant operation performance in terms of plant efficiency, reliability and therefore profitability of the district cooling companies and to ensure success of the DCP business operations were formulated.

Keywords: District Cooling Plants, Operations and Maintenance, Management System