Rural Areas Electricity Company (Raeco) has invited companies to submit bids for the contract to build a new power station in the city of Khasab in Oman.

Raeco has set a deadline of 11 November for the submission of bids.

The firm, which operates outside the main Muscat Interconnected System (MIS) and Salalah grids, owns about 50 small-scale diesel-fired plants and provides electricity for the northern Musandam and the central Al-Wusta governorates.  

The Khasab project is the latest of a number of power schemes the sultanate is pushing ahead with in order to boost capacity to address an increase in demand driven by population and industrial growth.

In April this year, two new power plants began operation. Commercial production at the Sohar 2 plant, owned by the local Al-Batinah Power Company, began on 3 April. Operations at the Barka 3 plant, owned by the local Al-Suwadi Power Company, started on 4 April.

Both new facilities are coastal, gas-fired, combined-cycle plants with a capacity of 744MW and are structured under a build-own-operate (BOT) model. Construction work on the schemes began in September 2010 by a consortium including Germany’s Siemens and South Korea’s GS Engineering & Construction.