ACWA Power has signed a partnership agreement to develop a large-scale wind energy and battery storage project in Kazakhstan with the country’s ministry of energy and a sovereign wealth fund.
The Saudi Arabian energy and water infrastructure development company said yesterday that the deal was signed with the Central Asian country’s Samruk-Kazyna sovereign wealth fund, together with its Ministry of Energy.
While details were not specified in a release sent to media including Energy-Storage.news, ACWA Power said the deal covers a 1GW wind energy and battery energy storage system (BESS) project, scheduled for completion in 2027.
It marks ACWA Power’s entry into the Republic of Kazakhstan, where the company said an initial investment of US$1.5 billion will be made, supporting Kazakhstan’s aims of meeting 50% of its energy needs from renewable sources by 2050. ACWA Power said that the wind-plus-storage project will directly displace fossil fuel resources.
Saudi Arabia’s Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman Al Saud – the country’s energy minister – attended a signing ceremony, along with Kazakh energy minister Bolat Akchulakov and the chairmen of the boards of ACWA Power and Samruk-Kazyna.
It’s the latest in a series of similar deals signed by ACWA Power with governments across Asia: in February a memorandum of understanding (MOU) was inked with the government of Azerbaijan for battery storage; last November ACWA Power signed an MOU with the government of Indonesia covering energy storage and green hydrogen development activities.
ACWA Power has developed more than 44GW of projects across a dozen different countries since founding in 2004, with the company active in areas including renewable energy generation, desalination plants and green hydrogen.
It has been awarded a contract to deliver what is thought to be the world’s biggest off-grid BESS to date, a system with at least 1,200MWh capacity for the Red Sea Project luxury ‘sustainable resort’ off the Saudi coast. Financial close was achieved on that project late last month, with Huawei set to provide the BESS solution.
In October 2021, the Kazakhstan Ministry of Energy, National Wealth Fund and a state owned utility signed an MOU for a wind-plus-storage project of a similar scale to ACWA Power’s, with Total Eren, the independent power producer (IPP) subsidiary of TotalEnergies. The BESS portion of that project is to be supplied by Saft, which TotalEnergies also owns.
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