EXCLUSIVE: Saudi Arabia extends bid deadline for second round of renewables programme

18 Dec 2019
EXCLUSIVE: Saudi Arabia extends bid deadline for second round of renewables programme

Saudi Arabia’s Renewable Energy Project Development Office (Repdo) has extended the bid submission date for category B projects under the second round of its National Renewable Energy Programme (NREP).

Developers now have until 20 January to submit proposals for the four category B projects, which are planned to have a total combined capacity of 1.4GW. The bid deadline was extended from 6 January.

The four category B projects are:

• Al-Faisaliah solar PV IPP: Mecca Province, approximately 80km south of Jeddah city (600MW)
• Jeddah solar PV IPP: Mecca Province, approximately 50km southeast of Jeddah city (300MW)
• Qurayyat solar PV independent power project (IPP): Al-Jawf Province, approximately 15 kilometres from Qurayyat city (200MW)
• Rabigh solar PV IPP: Mecca Province, approximately 145km north of Jeddah city (300MW)

This is the second time that the bid submission date for the category B projects has been extended. The client issued the request for proposals (RFP) in July with an original bid deadline of 18 November.

The deadline for the two smaller category A projects under the second round, which have a combined capacity of 70MW is also 20 January.

The two projects in category A are:

• Medina solar PV IPP: Medina Province, approximately 26km from Medina city (50MW)

• Rafha solar PV IPP: Northern Borders Province, approximately 16km from Rafha city (20MW)

Repdo prequalified 60 firms to participate in the bidding process for the second round of the NREP. The prequalified firms include managing partners, technical members and local managing members for category A projects and managing and technical members for category B schemes.

While all of the projects under the second round will be procured along broadly similar lines, the financing requirements will be different for each of the two categories.

For the category A projects, the IPPs will be financed through: “corporate finance procured on the balance sheets of the successful bidders’ consortium members and/or through the raising of limited or non-recourse debt facilities”.

For the larger category B projects, the IPPs will be financed through the raising of limited or non-recourse debt facilities. Each project will be developed under a build, own and operate model, with the winning bidder for each project to sign a 25-year power-purchase agreement with the government offtaker.

The successful bidding group will form a special purpose vehicle (SPV) to operate each plant, and will own 100 per cent of the asset.

Repdo’s advisers for the second round are Japan’s Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) as lead and financial adviser, Germany’s Fichtner as technical adviser and the UK’s DLA Piper as legal adviser.

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