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Publish Date : 14-Jun-2016

Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) has invited bids for two new solar energy plants in the north of Saudi Arabia, as part of the much scaled-back solar power program announced recently under its 2020 national economic plan.

Each with capacity of up to 50 megawatts, the plants, will be built to support larger current power plants at the sites of Al Jouf and Rafha, which run on traditional fossil fuels, diesel and natural gas.

The tenders follow a recent announcement by Khalid Al Falih, the minister of energy, industry and mineral resources, that the country would significantly scale back its target for solar energy due to the fall in oil and gas prices since the original targets were set four years ago.

Saudi Arabia had, under the King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy (Ka-Care) plan, set out to build 41 gigawatts of solar producing capacity by 2032, with over half to be up and running by 2020.

With solar to provide 3.45GW, the country's economic road map, Vision 2030, now envisions a total of 9.5GW for all renewables by 2023 . Even that lower target seems large given that there is negligible capacity now, requiring over 860MW per year of new capacity.

Steve Griffiths is Vice President of research and a professor at Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi, which works with Ka-Care on developing regional renewables and was part of a group including Saudi's Abdul Latif Jameel that bid in 2016 for a Dubai solar contract with a record low per kilowatt-hour price.

Griffiths said, "It is clear that they have got to get away from burning oil for power and solar with gas is a step in the right direction. The precedent here is to not get sucked into policy structures like those in Europe [that is, complicated feed-in tariff-style pricing] and the [independent power producer] model works as a lower-cost option as long as you have a reliable off-taker," as has been the case in Dubai.

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