The Renewable Energy Project Development Office has prequalified 49 developers for the tender. Four large-scale solar projects will be built via the procurement exercise.
The list features 49 bidders, including some of the most prominent players in the global solar industry. France’s EDF and Total Solar will participate, as will Spain’s Solarpack, Acciona and TSK. Germany’s ib vogt is also on the list, as is China’s Jinko Solar, Canadian Solar and GCL. South Korea’s Kepco will also compete, along with Japan’s Marubeni. In addition, Saudi Arabian utility ACWA Power is also participating, along with UAE-based Masdar, U.S. module manufacturer First Solar and Indonesian utility Tenaga Nasional.
REPDO will use the third round of the kingdom’s National Renewable Energy Program to select developers to construct four solar power projects, with generation capacities of 80 MW, 120 MW, 300 MW, and a mammoth 700 MW. The Saudi government has stated that the selected projects must contain at least 17% local content.
In March, REPDO said that the second round of the program – designed to allocate 1.5 GW of large-scale solar capacity – attracted 250 bidders.
In the first round of the procurement program, REPDO assigned 300 MW of solar capacity to a single facility: the Sakaka solar project, which is now operational.