Two wind farms in Madinah — the 1,300 MW Bilghah and 900 MW Shagran projects — make up 2,200 MW of the 5,300 MW put to qualified bidders under round seven of Saudi Arabia's renewable programme. Wind is moving from a marginal share of the procurement to a structural one.
Wind accounts for 2,200 megawatts of the 5,300 MW that the Saudi Power Procurement Company has put in front of qualified bidders under round seven of the National Renewable Energy Program, a round in which wind carries an unusually large share of the capacity on offer.
Both projects sit in the Madinah region. The Bilghah wind independent power project is sized at 1,300 MW and the Shagran project at 900 MW. The remaining 3,100 MW in the round is solar, spread across Al Jouf, Hail, Aseer and Madinah.
That split — wind taking more than 40 percent of a Saudi renewable round — is a change. The programme has been overwhelmingly solar since it began, for the obvious reason that the Kingdom's irradiation is exceptional and its module costs are set by a global market that has been falling. Wind has been the smaller and more site-specific half of the build.
What altered the calculation was the price achieved in the previous round. In late October the Ministry of Energy awarded the 1,500 MW Dawadmi wind project in Riyadh Province to a consortium of Korea Electric Power Corporation, Nesma Renewable Energy and Etihad Water and Electricity at a levelised cost of 1.33803 US cents per kilowatt-hour. The ministry described that as a world record low for wind generation. It was the only wind project in a round of five totalling 4,500 MW, and it was priced within a quarter of a cent of the solar plant awarded alongside it at Najran.
A wind tariff that close to solar changes what wind is for. Wind and solar do not produce at the same times of day, so a system that buys both needs less storage and less thermal running to cover the same share of demand than one that buys solar alone. When wind was substantially more expensive per unit, that benefit had to be paid for. At 1.3 cents it comes close to free, which is the argument for allocating a larger block of a competitive round to it.
Saudi Arabia's largest committed wind capacity is already financed. The 2,000 MW Starah and 1,000 MW Shaqra projects in Riyadh Province, both developed by ACWA Power with the PIF-owned Badeel and Aramco's SAPCO, reached financial close on 1 December as part of a seven-project, 15,000 MW package, with commercial operation targeted between the second half of 2027 and the first half of 2028.
The connection work behind the next set of wind farms is also under way. Saudi Energy, the transmission and distribution utility formerly known as Saudi Electricity Company, has invited bids for 380 kV substations and associated overhead lines serving a group of renewable plants that includes the Mozeraah, East Al-Amoah and North Asir wind farms. Wind sites in the Kingdom tend to sit where the resource is, not where the demand is, and the line length between the two is a real component of the delivered cost.
Round seven has not been awarded. Prequalification establishes who may bid, not who wins or at what price, and the projects behind it will not generate for several years. The number worth watching when the bids come back is whether Bilghah and Shagran can price anywhere near Dawadmi, or whether that tariff was a function of one site, one consortium and one moment in the equipment market.