Electricity and Water Authority (EWA)

About the Utility

The Electricity and Water Authority is the Kingdom of Bahrain’s authority for electricity and water, and its Statistical Book is the published statistical record of both systems. Water production, storage, transmission and distribution are reported in the same volume as electricity network reliability, and a single table sets out tariffs and EWA’s unit costs for both services. EWA is assessed as a government service provider: under the Kingdom’s General Satisfaction Index for Government Services it scored 90.90% for January to September 2025, with separate results for its Zayed Town and Seef Mall customer centres and its Virtual Centre. It held 505,821 customer accounts in 2024, most of them current rather than final accounts.

Water System

Bahrain’s water supply rests on desalination: production was 100.0% desalinated in 2022, with groundwater having already fallen to a residual share of the blend. In 2024 installed production capacity stood at 213.22 MIGD, against average daily production of 168.89 MIGD, so plant capacity rather than raw water sets the operating margin, while 722 million imperial gallons of storage in ground and elevated tanks provides the buffer. Demand is dominated by households: per capita consumption was 345 litres a day across all uses, and the domestic sector accounted for most of the water consumed.

Infrastructure & Performance

Transmission pipes ran to 622 km, and the distribution network supplying customers comprised 3,007 km of main pipes in 2024, when the share of aged main pipes eased to 23.4% from 25.1% a year earlier. EWA also reports the difference between water produced and water distributed, which widened between those two years; it is published as a difference, not as a loss rate. Water quality is a consistent strength, with no contaminated samples recorded from the distribution network in any of the five years to 2024.

Investment & Priorities

EWA’s statistics record investment mainly as assets brought into service. The Al Dur 2 Phase 2 water plant was commissioned in June 2022, while average daily output from the Ras Abu Jarjur reverse osmosis plant fell sharply that year. Storage has grown in steps, from 487 million imperial gallons in 2015 to 722 million in 2024, as tanks were added across the network. Renewal of mains is visible in the falling share of aged pipes.

Sustainability & Resilience

Resilience in Bahrain’s system depends on demand and affordability as much as on supply. EWA’s 2024 tariff and unit cost table prices the first subsidised domestic water band for Bahraini customers, up to 60 cubic metres, at 25 fils per cubic metre against an EWA cost of 750 fils. Total and domestic per capita use both edged down in the latest year. On the electricity side, distribution held its reliability indices unchanged across the two latest years.

Key Challenges

1. Maintaining production headroom in a supply system that depends almost entirely on desalination.
2. Renewing ageing main pipes as the distribution network continues to extend.
3. Accounting for the widening gap between water produced and water distributed.
4. Protecting a record of no contaminated samples across the distribution network.
5. Managing household demand under deeply subsidised domestic water tariffs.