Shams Dubai and DEWA Net Metering: How the Scheme Works for a Business

Shams Dubai is the reason a Dubai business can put PV on its own roof and have the meter run backwards. It is also the part of a solar project that a facilities manager cannot delegate and forget, because the scheme is administered by DEWA, the paperwork is signed by parties who must be enrolled with DEWA, and the rules sit in a versioned document that DEWA updates.

A warning first. Everything below describes how the scheme has been working and what DEWA and the other utilities have published. Connection rules, capacity limits, fee schedules and credit treatment change by circular, sometimes quietly. Treat this as orientation, then confirm every number that matters against dewa.gov.ae and the current version of DEWA's DRRG connection guidelines, which your consultant should hand you by version number and date.

What Shams Dubai actually is

Shams Dubai is DEWA's programme for connecting distributed renewable generation — in practice, rooftop solar PV — to the Dubai distribution network, launched in 2015. DEWA's technical framework for it is published under the heading DRRG, Distributed Renewable Resources Generation, and that phrase is what you will see on the forms.

The commercial mechanism is net metering, and it is worth being exact about what that means here. A bidirectional meter records import and export separately. Generation you consume on site never reaches the meter at all and simply reduces what you buy. Generation you export is recorded and credited in kWh against future consumption on the same DEWA account.

What it is not is a feed-in tariff. DEWA does not pay cash for exported energy. A credit balance offsets future consumption; it is not converted into a payment, and a balance left behind when an account closes is generally not paid out. That single fact is why the whole design conversation in the rooftop solar guide is about self-consumption rather than about filling the roof.

Dubai's direction of travel is not subtle either. The Dubai Clean Energy Strategy targets 25% clean energy by 2030 and 75% by 2050, and rooftop solar has been signalled to become mandatory on Dubai buildings by 2030. If that mandate firms up on the published timetable, the queue for enrolled contractors gets longer, not shorter.

Who can apply, and what is actually being approved

In broad terms the scheme is open to DEWA customers — residential, commercial and industrial — with a suitable roof and an active DEWA account.

Three practical points decide whether your particular building qualifies:

• The applicant is the DEWA account holder. If your company is a tenant and the landlord holds the electricity account, the landlord is the applicant, or the account arrangement has to change first. On a leased warehouse in Jebel Ali or DIP this is usually the longest-lead item in the whole project, and it is a landlord negotiation rather than a technical one.
• Landlord and free-zone consent comes before the utility. A DEWA approval does not give you the right to fix anything to someone else's roof. Get the landlord's written consent to the penetrations and the added load, and the free zone authority's approval where the premises sit inside one.
• The system is sized against your electrical connection, not your ambition. DEWA's framework relates the permitted generating capacity to the premises' connection and connected load, and it is a technical assessment made on your actual supply. Your consultant establishes this figure early, and it can be the real cap on the project rather than the roof.

Equipment matters too. DEWA publishes eligibility requirements for PV equipment, and modules and inverters are expected to meet them. Ask your contractor to confirm in writing that every model quoted is currently eligible: a module acceptable on last year's list is not automatically acceptable on this one — a reason to fix the equipment schedule against the brand comparison criteria rather than a wattage.

The enrolled consultant and contractor requirement

This is the part readers most often get wrong, and it is the part with the least room for interpretation.

Design and installation work under Shams Dubai must be carried out by companies enrolled with DEWA for this purpose. DEWA maintains and publishes lists of enrolled solar PV consultants and contractors, and it publishes the enrolment conditions for companies that want to join those lists.

At the time of writing, DEWA's published enrolment conditions required a company to already be enrolled with DEWA as an Electrical Consultant or Electrical Contractor, to hold a Department of Economy and Tourism trade licence with the matching activity — electrical fitting contracting for contractors, buildings electrical engineering services for consultants — and to have at least one graduate electrical engineer under its sponsorship with experience supervising electrical design or works to DEWA's Regulations for Electrical Installations. DEWA has also reported certifying over a thousand individual solar PV specialists in a single year, which tells you the enrolment process runs at the level of named engineers as well as companies.

Enrolled firms are also categorised, and the category governs the system size a firm may take on. The widely repeated shorthand is categories A, B and C, but the thresholds attached to them in third-party articles are not consistently sourced, so do not plan around them. Ask the contractor for their DEWA enrolment certificate, category and expiry date, then check the name against DEWA's published list yourself. Ten minutes, and the highest-value check in the whole procurement.

The application, inspection and connection sequence

The shape of the process is stable even when the details move. In outline:

1. Survey and design. The enrolled consultant or contractor surveys the site, establishes the permitted capacity against your connection, and prepares the design and drawings.
2. Application to DEWA. The enrolled party submits the connection application and design through DEWA's channels. DEWA's builder and contractor services have been moving onto digital platforms, so the submission route itself is one of the things most likely to have changed since this was written.
3. Design approval or NOC. DEWA reviews and issues its approval to proceed. Nothing should be installed on the roof before this exists in writing.
4. Installation. The enrolled contractor installs to the approved design. Changes on site are re-submitted, not absorbed.
5. Inspection and testing. DEWA inspects the completed installation against its DRRG requirements.
6. Meter and energisation. DEWA replaces the meter with a bidirectional one and the system is connected and energised.

Two scheduling realities are worth planning for. First, elapsed time is driven by review queues and inspection slots rather than how fast anyone bolts panels down, and published timelines vary between sources — assume weeks per stage and build float into the programme. Second, the party carrying programme risk should be named in the contract. "Client to obtain approvals" moves the entire DEWA process onto your desk.

How the credit lands on your bill

Once the bidirectional meter is in, your DEWA bill starts showing imported and exported units. Import is billed at your applicable tariff plus the fuel surcharge and the other components on your bill; export accrues as a kWh credit that offsets future consumption.

Three things follow from that, and they matter more than the headline:

• Self-consumption beats export, every time. A kWh you consume on site avoids the tariff and the fuel surcharge together. A kWh you export becomes a credit you can only use by importing later.
• The value of the credit tracks your own tariff. Businesses on higher consumption bands get more value from the same exported kWh than businesses on lower bands. Your bill is the input, not a generic rate.
• Credit rollover rules are the most-changed and least-verified detail in this whole subject. Published third-party guidance disagrees about whether Dubai credits roll forward indefinitely or reset. Do not model a payback on a rollover rule you read anywhere, including here. Ask DEWA or your consultant to state the current treatment in writing, and note that the Northern Emirates scheme has been reported to work on a calendar-year basis with year-end forfeiture, which is a materially different assumption.

If your load is mostly outside daylight hours, the answer is usually not a bigger array but a look at whether storage changes the arithmetic, which is the subject of the battery storage guide.

Outside Dubai: the other utilities

Solar is regulated per emirate in the UAE, and the four frameworks are genuinely different. The table below is orientation only; each cell is a question to put to the relevant utility, not an answer to rely on.

Emirate or region	Utility	Distributed solar framework	Treatment of exports
Dubai	DEWA	Shams Dubai / DRRG; enrolled consultants and contractors; published equipment eligibility	kWh credit against future consumption; no cash payment
Abu Dhabi and Al Ain	ADDC and AADC, under the Abu Dhabi Department of Energy	Energy-netting framework with a connection agreement; utility-approved consultants and contractors; Abu Dhabi wiring regulations apply	Reported as kWh credit, not a cash payment
Sharjah	SEWA	No broadly published general net-metering programme confirmed at the time of writing; approach SEWA directly for current status	To be confirmed with SEWA
Ajman, Umm Al Quwain, Ras Al Khaimah, Fujairah	Etihad Water and Electricity, the successor to FEWA	A distributed solar programme has been introduced; confirm the current application route and any capacity cap	Reported as kWh credit with calendar-year validity — verify before modelling

Every row is indicative and subject to change. Confirm directly with the utility before committing capital.

The practical consequence for a multi-site business is that a group-wide rollout is four projects, not one. Enrolment lists do not transfer between utilities, so the contractor who is approved in Dubai may not be approved in Abu Dhabi, and the design that cleared DEWA's review may need reworking to another emirate's rules.

Where CoHub sits in this, precisely

This is the article where the distinction matters most, so it is worth stating without any softening.

CoHub holds a UAE General Trading licence. CoHub supplies the equipment and delivers the project as your single commercial counterparty: one order, one proforma invoice, one bilingual UAE tax invoice showing VAT and the TRN, and one party to come back to. Design, installation, testing and utility approval are performed by licensed, utility-enrolled contracting and consultancy partners under CoHub's project management.

CoHub is not a DEWA-enrolled contractor. CoHub is not a licensed engineering consultant. CoHub does not submit your Shams Dubai application in its own name, does not seal drawings, and does not certify an installation. Those acts belong to the enrolled partners, who are named to you before the project starts and whose enrolment you are entitled to verify against DEWA's published list. Anyone claiming otherwise about any supplier is describing something that does not match how the scheme is structured. The documents run as on any CoHub order, per the UAE tax invoice requirements.

What to have ready before you start

Collect these before the first meeting and the project moves months faster:

1. Twelve months of DEWA bills, and confirmation of whose name the account is in.
2. Written landlord consent in principle to roof works, plus free-zone approval where relevant.
3. The as-built roof drawing and the electrical single-line diagram of the premises.
4. Your connected load or contracted capacity, from the bill or the connection documents.
5. Operating hours by day of week, so self-consumption can be modelled rather than assumed.

Send those through the solar quote form or the RFQ form, or message the sales desk on WhatsApp. CoHub does not publish solar prices; a system is quoted after a survey. The section overview sits at solar and renewable energy, and the engineering questions behind the approval are covered in the commercial rooftop guide.