The Saudi Power Procurement Company has named the developers qualified to bid for 5,300 MW of solar and wind under round seven of the National Renewable Energy Program. Saudi Arabia expects to award roughly 14 GW of renewable capacity during 2026, against a stated target of up to 130 GW by 2030.
The Saudi Power Procurement Company has named the developers qualified to bid for 5,300 megawatts of solar and wind capacity under the seventh round of the National Renewable Energy Program, opening what is set to be the busiest year of renewable procurement the Kingdom has run.
Round seven is split between four solar photovoltaic plants and two wind farms. The solar projects are Tabarjal II in Al Jouf at 1,400 MW, Mawqaq in Hail at 600 MW, Tathleeth in Aseer at 600 MW and South Al Ula in Madinah at 500 MW, a combined 3,100 MW. The two wind projects, Bilghah at 1,300 MW and Shagran at 900 MW, are both in Madinah and account for the remaining 2,200 MW.
Twenty-two companies qualified to bid for the solar packages, among them Masdar, EDF, Engie, Sembcorp Utilities, Jinko Power, TotalEnergies Renewables, Korea Electric Power Corporation and SPIC Shanghai Electric Power, alongside Saudi developers.
Qualification is a long way from generation. A project in the programme passes through prequalification, bidding, award, a power purchase agreement with SPPC, financial close and then construction, and each of those stages takes months. Nothing in round seven has been awarded, and none of it will produce electricity for several years.
What the round establishes is cadence. Saudi Arabia expects to award in the region of 14 GW of renewable capacity during 2026, and SPPC has now signed power purchase agreements covering more than 47 GW since the programme began. The stated target is up to 130 GW of renewable capacity by 2030.
Pricing explains why the government is willing to keep moving at this pace. In the sixth round, awarded in late October, the Ministry of Energy put five projects totalling 4,500 MW under contract for around SAR 9 billion. The 1,500 MW Dawadmi wind plant in Riyadh Province, taken by a consortium of Korea Electric Power Corporation, Nesma Renewable Energy and Etihad Water and Electricity, was priced at a levelised cost of 1.33803 US cents per kilowatt-hour, which the ministry described as the lowest recorded for wind generation anywhere. The 1,400 MW Najran solar plant, developed with Masdar, came in at 1.09682 cents.
Those are contracted prices over long terms rather than spot costs, and they rest on cheap land, high irradiation, low-cost debt and a single creditworthy offtaker. But they are low enough that new renewable capacity is now the cheapest energy the Saudi system can buy, which shifts the question from whether to build it to how quickly the rest of the system can absorb it.
Delivery is where the programme gets tested. On 1 December, ACWA Power, the PIF-owned Water and Electricity Holding Company (Badeel) and Aramco's SAPCO reached financial close on seven projects totalling 15,000 MW, at a total investment of about $8.2 billion. Those plants are scheduled to begin operating between the second half of 2027 and the first half of 2028, two and a half years after the contracts behind them were signed in July.
That lag is the practical constraint on the 2030 target. Capacity awarded in 2026 will, on the same timetable, be generating in 2029 or 2030. Everything after that arrives too late to count. The awards being made now are, in effect, the last tranche that can contribute to the decade's headline number, which is why the volume being pushed through the programme this year matters more than any individual project in it.
The Kingdom is running the build on two tracks. Very large blocks are negotiated with a standing consortium of ACWA Power, Badeel and SAPCO, which pairs a listed developer with the sovereign wealth fund and the national oil company and can absorb multi-gigawatt commitments in one signature. The rest goes to competitive rounds such as round seven, where international developers bid against each other and where the record tariffs have been set.
The qualification list is also a map of who is willing to underwrite Saudi renewable risk. Emirati, French, Singaporean, Korean and Chinese developers all appear on it, several of them already holding operating or financed Saudi assets. That breadth is what keeps tariffs where they are: the rounds are priced by international competition, not by a domestic cost base.
The geography is shifting too. Round seven concentrates on Al Jouf, Hail, Aseer and Madinah, and the December financing package covers plants in Asir, Madinah, Makkah and Riyadh Province. The programme has moved beyond the sites nearest the existing network, which pushes more of the delivery burden onto transmission. Saudi Energy, the network utility formerly named Saudi Electricity Company, has been tendering 380 kV substations and overhead lines specifically to connect renewable plants, and that work now sets the pace as much as the generation contracts do.
The bids that come back on round seven will show whether the pricing achieved in round six holds. Equipment costs, financing rates and the cost of connecting remote sites to the transmission network have all moved since those tenders were priced, and four of the six round seven projects sit in Al Jouf, Hail and Madinah, away from the main load centres in Riyadh and the Eastern Province. Awards, when they come, will say more about the economics of the next 40 GW than the prequalification list does.