France’s Alstom has been awarded a $978m contract to supply turbines and other equipment for the Yanbu 3 power and desalination plant on the Red Sea coast, Saudi Arabia.

The French firm will provide the basic engineering of the power block, advisory services during engineering and procurement, supervision services during construction and commissioning, and the delivery of steam turbines and generators for five 620MW units.

Alstom will also provide supercritical boilers, electrostatic precipitators and the flue-gas desulphurisation system.

Alstom will provide the equipment to the consortium of South Korea’s Samsung Engineering, China’s Shanghai Electric and the local Al-Toukhi Company for Industry, Trading & Contracting, which is building the 3,100MW plant for the Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC).

The consortium was awarded the estimated $1.5bn contract in December last year.

In mid-November, South Korea’s Doosan was awarded the estimated $1bn contract to build the desalination component of the plant, which will have a capacity of 550,000 cubic metres a day (cm/d).