Saudi Energy, formerly the Saudi Electricity Company, has invited bids for 380 kV substations and associated overhead transmission lines serving five renewable plants across the Western, Southern and Central regions. Connection work has become the constraint on a generation programme with tens of gigawatts under contract.
Saudi Energy has invited bids for a set of 380 kV substations and associated overhead transmission lines to connect five renewable power projects to the national grid, in a tender that names the Mozeraah and East Al-Amoah wind farms, the North Asir wind project, and the Mastura and Tumair solar photovoltaic plants across the Kingdom's Western, Southern and Central regions.
The utility, which until recently traded as the Saudi Electricity Company, owns and operates the transmission and distribution network that every independent power project in the Kingdom ultimately connects to. Its tender pipeline is a more reliable indicator of when contracted generation will produce than the generation contracts themselves.
That distinction is becoming the central issue in the Saudi power build. The Saudi Power Procurement Company has signed power purchase agreements covering more than 47 GW of renewable capacity, and expects to award around 14 GW more during 2026. A power purchase agreement obliges a developer to build a plant. It does not, on its own, create the substation, the transformer bays or the several hundred kilometres of line that move the output to where demand is.
The geography makes the problem sharper than it would be elsewhere. Saudi solar and wind sites are chosen for resource quality and land availability, which puts them in Al Jouf, Hail, Madinah, Asir and Najran rather than in Riyadh or the Eastern Province where industrial and residential load is concentrated. Every one of the round seven projects put to qualified bidders in January sits away from the main load centres.
Work of this kind is already under contract. Hyundai E&C holds two 380 kV transmission line packages in the Medina and Jeddah regions worth about $389 million between them. One of the two, the Kulais 380 kV transmission network, runs roughly 180 kilometres to link a coastal solar facility at Kulais into the existing network near Mecca — a single line, for a single plant, at a cost that would fund a mid-sized substation programme in most markets.
The network has grown accordingly. Saudi transmission circuit length at the 230 kV and 380 kV levels rose from 37,783 circuit kilometres in 2018 to 49,649 circuit kilometres in 2022, an increase of about a third in four years, and that expansion largely predates the current renewable pipeline.
Some of the connection burden is being pushed into the generation contracts themselves. When ACWA Power and Saudi Energy signed the power purchase agreement for the 2,313.5 MW Rabigh 2 expansion in April, the scope included developing, financing and building an extension to the 380 kV substation serving the site as well as the plant itself. Bundling the connection into the project company removes an interface, and with it one of the more common causes of a plant standing complete but unable to export.
Storage is being added to the same network at pace. SPPC has contracted about 2 GW and 8 GWh of grid-scale batteries, on top of more than 16 GWh procured directly by the utility from BYD and Hithium at sites including Riyadh, Qaisumah, Dawadmi, Al Jouf, Rabigh, Tabuk and Hail. Batteries do not remove the need for lines, but they change what a line has to carry: a battery at the receiving end lets a circuit run closer to its rating for more hours, which is a cheaper way of raising throughput than building a second circuit.
Beyond the national network, the Kingdom is also linked outward. The Saudi-Egyptian electricity interconnection, built by a consortium led by what is now Hitachi Energy for the Saudi and Egyptian utilities, gives the two systems the ability to exchange power across different daily and seasonal peaks.
None of this is glamorous procurement. Substations and overhead lines do not produce record tariffs or press conferences with ministers. But the Kingdom now has more generation under contract than it has connection capacity to absorb on the same timetable, and the tenders being issued this spring will determine which of the plants signed in 2025 and 2026 can actually export when they are finished.