China’ Silk Road Fund acquires 24% stake in DEWA CSP project
China’ Silk Road Fund acquires 24% stake in DEWA CSP project
China’s Silk Road Fund plans to acquire a 24.01% equity stake in Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA)’s 700MW Connected Solar Power (CSP) project in the UAE. The announcement was made by ACWA Power, a developer and operator of power plants and an investor in the project.
The agreement was signed by Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD and CEO of Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (Dewa), and Yanzhi Wang, president of the Silk Road Fund. The signing ceremony took place in the presence of Chinese President Xi Jinping, UAE Vice President and Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
The development of the project was awarded to a consortium led by ACWA Power in 2017 and is the fourth phase of the Mohamed bin Rashid Solar Park, the largest single-site concentrated solar power plant in the world.
Paddy Padmanathan, CEO 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. We could not have found a more capable partner than Silk Road Fund to complement DEWA and us on what is the largest single renewable energy project underway in the world today.”
The project will combine a 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 expected to deliver electricity at a levelised tariff of 7.30 US cents per kilowatt-hour 24 hours a day, a cost level that competes with fossil fuel generated electricity without subsidy for reliable and dispatchable solar energy around the clock.
The plant will support the Dubai Clean Energy strategy 2050 to increase the share of clean energy in Dubai to 25% by 2030 and is expected to provide an annual saving of 2.4m tonnes of CO2.
“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,” added Padmanathan.
