Switzerland’s ABB has been awarded a $85m contract to provide substations to integrate Qatar’s next independent water and power project (IWPP) to the country’s electricity grid.

ABB will integrate the energy produced from the recently awarded Facility D IWPP to the grid through three substations. The substations will have capacities of 400kV and 220/132kV.

Qatar General Electricity & Water Corporation (Kahramaa) officially signed the contract with the consortium led by Japan’s Mitsubishi to develop the Facility D project on 24 May.

The proposed IWPP is planned to be located in the Qatar Economic Zone (QEZ) near Mesaieed and will have a capacity of 2,280-2,520MW and 123.5-136.5 million imperial gallons a day (MIGD) of water.

About 70-90 MIGD of the desalination capacity will be from multi-stage flash (MSF) / multi-effect distillation (MED) technology, with the remaining 40-60 MIGD coming from reverse osmosis (RO) technology, which has to date only been implemented on a small scale in the country.

Kahramaa owns 60 per cent of the project, with Qatar Petroleum (QP) and Qatar Foundation both holding 5 per cent stakes. Mitsubishi holds the remaining 30 per cent stake.