Saudi Arabia’s Acwa Power has submitted the lowest tariff price for the Noor PV 1 project in Morocco.

The Saudi developer, in consortium with the US’ First Solar, submitted a tariff of 4.797 cents a kilowatt hour ($c/kWh) for the photovoltaic (PV) project. This was slightly lower than the 4.81$c/kWh tariff submitted by the second-lowest bidder, the Saudi/Spanish FRV/Abdul Latif Jamil team.

The Al-Fanar (Saudi Arabia)/Building Energy (Italy)/TBEA Energy (India) consortium submitted the third-lowest price of 6.45$c/kWh.

The Noor PV 1 project will have a total capacity of 135-170MW, and will located over three sites: Ouarzazate, Laayoune and Boujdour. Moroccan Agency for Solar Energy (Masen) has already awarded contracts for more than 500MW of concentrated solar power (CSP) schemes, for the Noor 1, 2 and 3 projects, at the Ouarzazate site.

The tariff prices for Morocco’s first major PV solar project are significantly lower than the tariffs for the country’s major CSP projects at the Ouarzazate site. In 2015, Acwa Power was awarded the contract to develop the 200MW Noor 2 and 150MW Noor 3 CSP schemes after submitting tariffs of 16$c/kWh for Noor 2 and 15.7$c/kWh for Noor 2 combined with Noor 3.

Acwa Power also developed the 160MW first phase of the Ouarzazate scheme, which was commissioned in February this year. The firm was awarded the deal in late 2012 to develop the project under a contract tariff of 18.9$c/kWh, at the time the lowest-ever tariff selected for CSP technology.

The 4.797$c/kWh is also lower than the 5.85$c/kWh levelised cost of energy (lcoe) tariff that Acwa Power agreed with Dubai Electricity & Water Authority (Dewa) in 2015 to develop the 200MW second phase of the Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum solar park in the emirate, which at the time was a world record for a non-subsidised tariff for a large-scale PV solar project.