The Saudi Power Procurement Company has published its list of qualified bidders for Round 7 of the National Renewable Energy Programme, covering 3.1GW of solar and 2.2GW of wind. Twenty-two companies qualified on the solar projects.
The Saudi Power Procurement Company has named the developers qualified to bid for Round 7 of the National Renewable Energy Programme, a tranche totalling 5.3GW across solar and wind.
The solar portfolio comprises four projects: Tabarjal II at 1.4GW in Al Jouf, Mawqaq at 600MW in Hail, Tathleeth at 600MW in Aseer and South Al Ula at 500MW in Madinah, together 3.1GW. The wind portfolio is two projects in Madinah — Bilghah at 1.3GW and Shagran at 900MW — totalling 2.2GW, according to Enerdata.
Twenty-two companies qualified on the solar projects, among them Masdar, EDF, Engie, Sembcorp Utilities, Jinko Power, TotalEnergies Renewables, KEPCO and SPIC Shanghai Electric Power, alongside domestic developers.
The wind allocation is the notable feature of the round. At 2.2GW across two sites, it is a larger commitment to wind than earlier rounds have carried, and both projects sit in the Madinah region. Wind and solar are not interchangeable on a grid: solar output in the kingdom peaks in the middle of the day and collapses in the evening, while wind in the right locations runs into the night. A system adding large volumes of solar eventually needs either storage or a generation source with a different daily profile, and wind at this scale is the cheaper answer where the resource exists.
The concentration of both wind projects in one region reflects where that resource is. Wind development is far more site-dependent than solar — a mediocre solar site produces perhaps fifteen per cent less than a good one, while a mediocre wind site can be uneconomic outright — so wind capacity clusters in the corridors where measured speeds justify it.
The bidder list describes the shape of the market. It combines the developers that have taken most of the region's renewable capacity to date with Chinese and Korean utilities, and the presence of Jinko Power alongside SPIC reflects how far Chinese firms have moved from supplying modules to developing and owning projects. For local content, that matters: an owner-operator has a longer relationship with the domestic supply chain than an equipment vendor does.
Round 7 also lands against demand growth the kingdom has been procuring for separately. Data centre programmes are being built at gigawatt scale, industrial licensing has been adding factories at more than a thousand a year, and both consume power continuously rather than at the peaks that Saudi generation has historically been built around. Renewable capacity procured through SPPC is what those loads will draw on.
SPPC has not published a date for bid submission or award on the Round 7 projects.