The project was announced today by Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber, United Arab Emirates Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology, at the opening of the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Summit 2025. Al-Jaber said the facility would contribute to tackling the “moonshot challenge” of intermittency by generating energy around the clock. He said this was particularly important given the growing demand for energy coming from data centers and artificial intelligence.
The project will be located across an area of land in the Abu Dhabi desert spanning 90 square km. Construction is underway and the project is expected to be operational by 2027, said Masdar Chief Operating Officer Abdulaziz Alobaidli.
“Finding a scalable technology to harness clean energy day and night around the globe has been a challenge … Today, we have the solution,” he claimed. “This is our largest and most ambitious project to date.”
The facility will cost around $6 billion and will be debt-funded, Alobaidli confirmed. He appealed for interest from international offtakers, suppliers, and governments to scale the technology globally.
Commenting on the conditions that made the development possible at this current time, Alobaidli said knowledge has advanced hugely around energy storage.
“There has been lots of energy storage deployment across the globe at a private scale but also at a commercial scale … In Masdar, we have developed new battery storage projects in the UK, the United States, and we are constructing a project in Uzbekistan. All this experience has allowed us to understand the technology better.”
Andy Biffen, executive director of asset development at EWEC, claimed the project will have a major economic impact, providing baseload generation for solar energy.
“Solar generation has always been considered as way of progressing towards targets, but it doesn’t quite get unique, round the clock generation,” he said.
The addition of batteries, which he said have been falling in price, means a project such as this can be structured like a traditional independent power producer project.
In terms of cost to offtakers, Biffen did not give any numbers, but he confirmed that the tariff would be “competitive” and in line with the rest of EWEC’s portfolio.
EWEC has several large-scale solar projects in the region, including the 2 GW Al Dhafra solar project in Abu Dhabi. Earlier this month, it put out a request for proposals for 1.5 GW of solar. Biffen clarified that while EWEC is not the developer on the upcoming Abu Dhabi solar and storage project, he has noticed the supply chain has shifted favorably to enable faster deployment.
Although batteries are the new kids on the block, the understanding is that the technology is such that the degradation of cells and the ability to get the quality from battery suppliers, package it up, put debt around it, and turn it into a five-year agreement is possible, he said.
Masdar and EWEC are still in discussions with top-tier suppliers for the continuous generation project, Alobaidli told pv magazine. He said more details on specific technologies would follow.
