Concentrated solar power: Silk Road investment for ACWA Power

The DEWA CSP project, which was awarded to an ACWA Power led consortium in 2017, is the 4th phase of the Mohamed bin Rashid solar park, the largest single-site CSP plant in the world. The project uses a combination of central tower and parabolic trough technologies to collect energy from the sun, store it in molten salt and produce steam as required to generate electricity during the day and throughout the night. The project is planned to deliver electricity at a levelised tariff of US $7.30 c/kWh 24 hours a day, a cost level that competes with fossil fuel, without subsidy, providing dispatchable solar energy around the clock. The plant will support the Dubai clean energy strategy 2050, which envisages increasing the share of clean energy in Dubai to 25% by 2030.

Silk Road Fund invests under the framework of China’s “Belt and Road” initiative.

Paddy Padmanathan, chief executive officer of ACWA Power, said: “The introduction of a new investor into the DEWA CSP is absolutely in line with ACWA Power’s established strategy of sharing investments with value adding partners who will in turn bolster our projects...This co-investment also is in keeping with our investment strategy of efficiently deploying our own capital to retain a meaningful level of equity interest in each project that is sufficient to permit us to be the long-term investor with de facto control over the investment and for us to remain focused on reliably delivering electricity and desalinated water at low cost.”