By: Energy Storage

The state-owned Saudi Power Procurement Company (SPPC) has revealed the qualified bidders for its second build-own-operate (BOO) BESS tender, totalling 3GW/12GWh of capacity across six projects.

The shortlist released this week (30 June) contains a mix of domestic and international companies, including investors, EPCs and BESS suppliers.

They include regional state-owned IPPs ACWA Power (Saudi) and Masdar (UAE), France-headquartered firms EDF and TotalEnergies, Japanese conglomerate Marubeni as well as numerous Chinese companies. BESS suppliers in the list are Envision Energy, Tesla and Gotion.

The BESS suppliers are listed as ‘technical members’ only, while EDF and Total are in as both ‘managing member’ and ‘technical member’. The list doesn’t reveal which companies might be partnering with which other ones.

The tender, run by SPPC’s Principal Buyer arm, is the second of its kind in Saudi Arabia. Launched in April, it is seeking companies to deploy six large-scale battery energy storage system (BESS) projects:

• The 500MW/2,000MWh Samha BESS ISP, Site Location: Qassim province
• The 500MW/2,000MWh Al-Leeth BESS ISP, Site location: Makkah province
• The 500MW/2,000MWh Al-Henakiyah BESS ISP, Site location: Madinah province
• The 500MW/2,000MWh Khulis BESS ISP, Site location: Makkah province
• The 500MW/2,000MWh Sadawi BESS ISP, Site location: Eastern province
• The 500MW/2,000MWh Ashyrah BESS ISP, Site location: Makkah province

Qualified bidders were revealed for the first tender, totalling 2GW/8GWh across four projects, in January 2025 though no update has been issued since.

Energy-Storage.news published an ESN Premium feature on the Saudi and UAE markets back in January. Projects covered in that piece, combined with this new tender, mean there is some 77GWh of large-scale BESS under development, procurement or construction in the two countries combined.