The rapidly increasing population growth and expansion of urban development are undoubtedly two of the main reasons for increasing global energy consumption. Accurate long-term forecasting of peak load is essential for saving time and money for countries’ power generation utilities. This paper introduces the first investigation into the performance of the Prophet model in the long-term peak load forecasting of Kuwait. The Prophet model is compared with the well-established Holt–Winters model to assess its feasibility and accuracy in forecasting long-term peak loads. Real data of electric load peaks from Kuwait powerplants from 2010 to 2020 were used for the electric load peaks, forecasting the peak load between 2020 and 2030. The Prophet model has shown more accurate predictions than the Holt–Winters model in five statistical performance metrics. Besides, the robustness of the two models was investigated by adding Gaussian white noise of different intensities. The Prophet model has proven to be more robust to noise than the Holt–Winters model. Furthermore, the generalizability test of the two models has shown that the Prophet model outperforms the Holt–Winters model. The reported results suggest that the forecasted maximum peak load is expected to reach 18,550 and 19,588 MW for the Prophet and Holt–Winters models by 2030 in Kuwait. The study suggests that the best months for scheduling the preventive maintenance for the year 2020 and 2021 are from November 2020 until March 2021 for both models.

Energetic and exergetic analyses are conducted using operating data for Sabiya, a combined cycle power plant (CCPP) with an advanced triple pressure reheat heat recovery steam generator (HRSG). Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis is carried out on the HRSG using a recent approach to differentiate between the sources of irreversibility. The proposed system was modelled using the IPSEpro software and further validated by the manufacturer’s data. The performance of the Sabiya CCPP was examined for different climatic conditions, pressure ratios, pinch point temperatures, high-pressure steam, and condenser pressure values. The results confirmed that 60.9% of the total exergy destruction occurs in the combustion chamber, which constitutes the main source of irreversibilities within a system. The exergy destruction was significantly affected by both the pressure ratio and the high-pressure steam, where the relation between them was seen to be inversely proportional. The high-pressure stage contributes about 50% of the exergy destruction within the HRSG compared to other stages and the reheat system, due to the high temperature difference between the streams and the large number of components, which leads to high energy loss to the surroundings. Numerous possibilities for improving the CCPP’s performance are introduced, based on the obtained results.

The present paper reports the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the electricity peak load and power generation in the State of Kuwait during the partial and full curfews imposed in March, April and May 2020 using historic data measured data and the predictions provided by a statistical genetic algorithm model. A quantitative assessment is made of the economic and environmental impacts caused by partial and full lockdowns. Comparison of measured peak demand for 2019 and 2020 with predicted peak demand for 2020 has: (i) enabled an accurate evaluation of residential energy consumption in the state of Kuwait at nearly 18 MWh yearly the highest energy consumption per capita in the world, (ii) shown that the imposition of the curfews to reduce the spread of COVID-19 caused a fall in the demand for electrical power of 17.6% compared with the expected demand and (iii) quantified the reduction in CO₂, NO_x and CO pollutant emissions produced by power plants due to less fuel being consumed. A mathematical model has been developed to predict the peak electric load in the national grid according to climatic data supplied by the Meteorological Department of Civil Aviation of Kuwait and National Control Center (NCC).

The jet impingement technique is an effective method to achieve a high heat transfer rate and is widely used in industry. Enhancing the heat transfer rate even minimally will improve the performance of many engineering systems and applications. In this numerical study, the convective heat transfer process between orthogonal air jet impingement on a smooth, horizontal surface and a roughened uniformly heated flat plate is studied. The roughness element takes the form of a circular rib of square cross-section positioned at different radii around the stagnation point. At each location, the effect of the roughness element on heat transfer rate was simulated for six different heights and the optimum rib location and rib dimension determined. The average Nusselt number has been evaluated within and beyond the stagnation region to better quantify the heat transfer advantages of ribbed surfaces over smooth surfaces. The results showed both flow and heat transfer features vary significantly with rib dimension and location on the heated surface. This variation in the streamwise direction included both augmentation and decrease in heat transfer rate when compared to the baseline no-rib case. The enhancement in normalized averaged Nusselt number obtained by placing the rib at the most optimum radial location R/D = 2 was 15.6% compared to the baseline case. It was also found that the maximum average Nusselt number for each location was achieved when the rib height was close to the corresponding boundary layer thickness of the smooth surface at the same rib position.

Desalination is the sole proven technique that can provide the necessary fresh water in arid and semi-arid countries in sufficient quantities and meet the modern needs of a growing world population. Multi effect desalination with thermal vapour compression (MED-TVC) is one of most common applications of thermal desalination technologies. The present paper presents a comprehensive thermodynamic model of a 24 million litres per day thermal desalination plant, using specialised software packages. The proposed model was validated against a real data set for a large-scale desalination plant, and showed good agreement. The performance of the MED-TVC unit was investigated using different loads, entrained vapour, seawater temperature, salinity and number of effects in two configurations. The first configuration was the MED-TVC unit without preheating system, and the second integrated the MED-TVC unit with a preheating system. The study confirmed that the thermo-compressor and its effects are the main sources of exergy destruction in these desalination plants, at about 40% and 35% respectively. The desalination plant performance with preheating mode performs well due to high feed water temperature leading to the production of more distillate water. The seawater salinity was proportional to the fuel exergy and minimum separation work. High seawater salinity results in high exergy efficiency, which is not the case with membrane technology. The plant performance of the proposed system was enhanced by using a large number of effects due to greater utilisation of energy input and higher generation level. From an economic perspective, both indicators show that using a preheating system is more economically attractive.