Saudi’s ACWA Power to establish renewables unit

Saudi Arabia-based power and water plant developer ACWA Power has said it will launch a new company to group its renewable energy portfolio.

ACWA Power RenewCo will be headed by Chris Ehlers, currently chief operating officer of renewables at ACWA Power.

“We currently produce over 1GW of renewable power in markets which have an energy gap,” he said.

“All the power we generate was procured through transparent competitive bidding and is supplied on long-term offtake contracts to entities supported by stable, sovereign backed Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs), which offers significant risk mitigation and in turn has enabled us to deliver competitive tariffs providing stable, long-term revenues to ACWA Power RenewCo.”

He said the company had “enormous potential to increase its renewables portolio”.

The firm has benefitted from increasing interest in renewables in the Middle East and Africa, with nine projects across four countries at a total investment cost of $4.8bn.

These include the 200MW second phase of Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar park it is developing with Spanish engineering firm TSK.

Read: ACWA Power, TSK Win Contract To Build Power Plant In Dubai’s Solar Park

It also lists five projects in Morocco and two in South Africa with 1,165MW of power generation capacity in total.

The firm’s overall portfolio has an investment value of more than $33bn and generates 23GW of power and 2.5 million cubic metres of desalinated water a day, it said.