Solar equipment supplied, and the project delivered, across the UAE

CoHub holds a UAE General Trading licence. We supply the equipment and we are your single commercial counterparty for the project: one contract, one invoice, one party accountable for scope, schedule, delivery and warranty. The design, the installation, the testing and the utility approval are carried out by licensed, utility-enrolled consultants and contractors that we engage and manage on your behalf — in Dubai that means companies enrolled with DEWA under Shams Dubai, and the equivalent approved lists in Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and the Northern Emirates. That structure is deliberate rather than a workaround: the utility will only accept an application from an enrolled company, so you get a specialist's stamp on the design and a specialist's crew on the roof, while dealing commercially with one supplier instead of chasing four. What CoHub does not do, and will not claim, is sign as the licensed contractor or the licensed consultant itself.

Your array feeds the building first. Whatever you do not consume at that moment is exported to DEWA's network and recorded by a bi-directional meter, and your bill nets imported kWh against exported kWh. If you export more than you import in a billing period the bill goes to zero and the surplus carries forward as a kWh credit to the next period. Two things follow from that, and they drive the entire sizing decision: there is no feed-in tariff and no cash payment for surplus — the credits only offset future consumption — and a system sized well beyond your daytime load simply banks credits you may never use. That is why we start from your load profile and generally size to daytime self-consumption rather than to available roof area.

We give you a programme, not a slogan, and it is built from four independent clocks: equipment manufacturing and shipping, which depends on whether the modules and inverters are stocked in the UAE or ordered against a factory slot; the licensed consultant's design and the utility's review; installation, which scales with system size and roof access; and the utility's inspection, meter change and energisation, which is outside anyone's control. Rooftop commercial projects typically move in months rather than weeks, and the utility approval stages are usually the longest single item. Your proposal carries a dated programme with the float shown, and we tell you at the time which line is the critical one.

You raise it with CoHub, and CoHub runs the claim. Manufacturer warranties on solar equipment are long — module performance warranties are typically 25 to 30 years with a separate product warranty of about 12 to 15 years, and inverters usually 5 to 12 years with extensions available at purchase — but a warranty is only worth the process behind it, and a Gulf RMA is a logistics problem as much as a legal one. Before we quote, we confirm how each brand handles claims in this region: whether there is a regional service centre, whether a replacement is shipped in advance, who pays freight and labour, and what the turnaround is. We keep your serial-number list, your commissioning records and your purchase documents so a claim opens with evidence rather than with an argument. Exact terms are the manufacturer's and vary by brand and by SKU — we put the actual warranty documents in your handover pack rather than summarising them.

Per kWp installed, yes — and the honest version is worth understanding. Summer brings the longest days and the most irradiance, so monthly energy is high, but instantaneous efficiency falls: heat costs roughly 0.29 to 0.35% of peak power per degree of cell temperature above 25 °C, dust accumulates faster, and humidity and haze scatter light. The result is that a summer noon does not give you the nameplate kW you saw on the datasheet. The commercial point, though, is that your air-conditioning load peaks in the same hours, so a UAE building typically self-consumes a very high share of summer generation. We model this month by month in the yield simulation rather than quoting a single annual figure, so you can see the summer curve against your own consumption curve.

Often not, and we will say so. Under a net-metering arrangement where surplus already carries forward as a kWh credit, a battery is buying you something the meter gives you for free, and it adds capital cost, a Civil Defence approval, a thermally managed room and an asset with its own cycle life. Storage earns its place for specific reasons: genuine backup for a process that cannot be interrupted, a site with weak or no grid connection, significant night-time load that solar cannot reach, or a tariff structure where shifting energy has real value. We size storage against your outage tolerance and your night-time load, we state the usable capacity after depth-of-discharge limits rather than the headline kWh, and if the numbers do not justify it we tell you that instead of selling it.

A PV system has almost no moving parts, so maintenance in the Gulf is dominated by cleaning, inspection and the eventual inverter replacement. A typical O&M scope covers a defined cleaning cycle, annual thermographic inspection of modules, connectors and boards, torque and earth-continuity checks, inverter filter and fan servicing, string I-V verification, and a performance report that compares actual output against the simulated yield. Cost is quoted per kWp per year against a defined scope and response time, because a number without a cleaning frequency attached is meaningless — cleaning frequency is the single biggest driver on a UAE site. We price O&M as a separate, transparent line in the proposal so you can compare it against another bidder's line rather than against a bundled total.

Because a per-watt price quoted before a survey is a guess, and usually a low one that grows later. What actually sets the cost of your system is the roof structure and whether it needs strengthening, the mounting method the roof allows, the distance and route from array to the main distribution board, the shading, the utility's requirements in your emirate, the brands specified and where they ship from, and the scope of O&M you want. We survey, we design, and then we quote against an itemised bill of materials where you can see every line. If you want a rough order of magnitude before committing to a survey we will give you one verbally and label it as an estimate — we will not print it on a page as if it were a price.

The same way as the rest of CoHub, with the documents a UAE finance department expects. You receive a proforma invoice against the approved bill of materials for internal approval and budget release, and the tax invoice is issued in CoHub's name with 5% VAT and our TRN, in the format the Federal Tax Authority requires, with your own TRN recorded on it so the input tax is recoverable on your side. Cash on delivery is available in line with our standard business terms; for a staged project, payment follows agreed milestones — equipment supply, installation, commissioning and handover — set out in the contract before anything is ordered. Nothing ships without a signed proforma, so there are no surprises on either side.

A file you can hand to an auditor, an insurer, a lender or the next facilities manager without going back to anyone. It contains the stamped design package and as-built drawings; the IEC 62446-1 commissioning test records; equipment datasheets, manuals and conformity documents; the full serial-number list of modules and inverters; the manufacturers' original warranty certificates with their claim procedures; the utility connection approval and net-metering confirmation; monitoring portal credentials; the O&M schedule with cleaning intervals and response times; and the commercial file — proforma, tax invoice, customs and shipping documents. If a document is not in that pack, the project is not finished.