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EWEC (Emirates Water and Electricity Company), the Abu Dhabi-based off-taker for water and power projects, has announced start of construction on the 1.5 gigawatt (GW) Al Ajban Solar Photovoltaic (PV) Independent Power Project (IPP), located in the Abu Dhabi emirate.
The annuncement was made on the offtaker's handle on the X social messaging platform on Tuesday.
An international consortium of EDF Renewables and Korea Western Power Company (KOWEPO) with Masdar as the local shareholder was awarded the project in April 2024 with a 30-year Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) inked the following month.
The EDF-led team submitted levelised cost of 5.1921 fils a kilowatt-hour (kWh) or about 1.413 $cents/kWh to win the project, according to Dubai-based project intelligence news portal MEED.
The financial close was achieved on September 2024 with backing from six top-tier banks and financial institutions.
The project company Ajban PV3 Energy is 60 percent owned by a local holding company owned by Masdar and 40 percent by a foreign holding company, equally owned by EDF Renewables and KOWEPO, according to the project’s official website.
The plant will span over 20 square kilometres with more than three million PV modules, and employ bifacial PV module technology mounted on a single axis tracker system.
The grid connection and transmission engineer is Energo Consult while the owner’s engineer is Fichtner. The Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) contract was awarded in July 2024 to Huadong Engineering Corporation (HDEC), also known as PowerChina Huadong Engineering Corporation (HDEC), which is a subsidiary of Power Construction Corporation of China (POWERCHINA).
In April 2024, Zawya Projects had reported that the project is scheduled to start commercial operations in the third quarter of 2026.
Al Ajban Solar PV is EWEC’s third utility-scale solar PV plant in Abu Dhabi.
(Writing by Deva Palanisamy; Editing by Anoop Menon)
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