ACWA Power, PIF's Badeel and Aramco's SAPCO have reached financial close on seven renewable projects totalling 15,000 MW, of which 12,000 MW is solar. The $8.2 billion package includes $5.9 billion of senior debt and covers plants at Bisha, Humaij, Khulis and Afif, with operations targeted between late 2027 and mid-2028.
ACWA Power, the PIF-owned Water and Electricity Holding Company (Badeel) and Saudi Aramco Power Company (SAPCO) have reached financial close on seven renewable energy projects totalling 15,000 megawatts, the largest single financing package the Saudi programme has produced.
Twelve gigawatts of that is solar. The five photovoltaic plants are Bisha in Asir at 3,000 MW, Humaij in Madinah at 3,000 MW, Khulis in Makkah at 2,000 MW and two projects at Afif in Riyadh Province, Afif 1 and Afif 2, at 2,000 MW each. The remaining 3,000 MW is wind, split between the 2,000 MW Starah and 1,000 MW Shaqra projects, both in Riyadh Province.
Total investment across the seven plants is about $8.2 billion, or roughly SAR 31 billion, with $5.9 billion of senior debt provided by a group of local, regional and international banks. The consortium has said the plants are scheduled to begin operating between the second half of 2027 and the first half of 2028.
The power purchase agreements behind the portfolio were signed with the Saudi Power Procurement Company in July, in the presence of the Ministry of Energy, under the National Renewable Energy Program. Financial close is the step that converts those contracts into a funded construction programme: the lenders are committed, the equity is committed, and the developers can begin drawing money and issuing notices to proceed.
The change in unit size is what distinguishes this phase of Saudi solar from the last one. Sudair, commissioned in 2023, is a 1,500 MW plant and was for a time among the largest in the world. Bisha and Humaij are each twice that. Building at 3,000 MW on a single site alters the engineering problem — module supply, inverter counts, water for cleaning, construction labour camps and, above all, the transmission needed to move the output — in ways that are not simply a matter of repeating a 1 GW design three times.
ACWA Power has already taken one plant across that threshold. The company has begun full commercial operations at Al Shuaibah 2 near Jeddah in Makkah Province, with a commercial operation certificate covering 2,060 MW, following the earlier 600 MW Al Shuaibah 1.
The competitive rounds are running in parallel and are producing smaller but still substantial plants. Under round five, SPPC signed agreements for the 2,000 MW Al Sadawi project in the Eastern Province with a consortium of Masdar, Korea Electric Power Corporation and GD Power Development, part of a 9,200 MW package that also covered thermal capacity. The same round produced three further solar plants totalling 1,700 MW — the 1,000 MW Al Masaa in Hail, awarded to SPIC Huanghe Hydropower and EDF Renouvelables at 5.1 halalas per kilowatt-hour, the 400 MW Al Henakiyah 2 in Madinah and the 300 MW Rabigh 2 solar project in Makkah.
Price is the reason the pipeline keeps lengthening. In the sixth round, awarded in late October, the 1,400 MW Najran solar project developed with Masdar was contracted at a levelised cost of 1.09682 US cents per kilowatt-hour, which the Ministry of Energy ranked as the second lowest recorded for solar generation worldwide. Numbers at that level are contracted over long terms and depend on cheap land, exceptional irradiation and a single creditworthy offtaker, but they leave little argument about what the marginal unit of Saudi generation should be.
Round seven adds another 3,100 MW of solar to the pipeline, at Tabarjal II in Al Jouf, Mawqaq in Hail, Tathleeth in Aseer and South Al Ula in Madinah, with qualified bidders named at the start of January and awards still to come.
None of this is yet electricity. The distinction between a signed agreement, a financed project and an operating plant is the one that matters for anyone tracking how much solar the Saudi grid actually carries, and on the current timetable the 12 GW financed here does not begin contributing until the back half of 2027. What financial close does establish is that the banking market will fund Saudi solar at this scale, in a single package, at a price the offtaker is willing to pay.