Dubai Electricity & Water Authority (Dewa) has extended the bid submission date for the contract to develop the Hassyan coal independent power project (IPP) by two months to early 2015.

Prequalified consortiums now have until 26 January 2015 to submit proposals for the 1,200MW IPP. The original submission date was 26 November.

In September, Dewa announced that it had invited eight consortiums to bid for the Hassyan IPP. The utility had received 17 prequalification entries in May.

In February, Dewa appointed a consortium led by the UK’s EY as adviser for the project. Dubai has set a commissioning date of March 2020 for the first 600MW unit in the coal plant, with the second coming onstream 12 months later.

Dewa is also pushing ahead with the 100MW second phase of its Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum Solar Park as an IPP. The utility has prequalified 24 firms for the tender, and has set a new bid submission date of 20 November, a month’s extension on the original submission date.

The Netherlands’ KPMG has been appointed as financial adviser and the UK’s Norton Rose Fulbright has been chosen as legal adviser for the planned solar project, which will use photovoltaic (PV) technology. The scheme is scheduled to be fully operational in 2017.

While the installed capacity of 9,656MW in Dubai was easily able to cope with the 6,500MW peak power demand recorded in the emirate in 2013, Dewa is pressing ahead with plans to boost capacity as demand is expected to grow by between 4.5 per cent and 5 per cent a year up to the opening of the World Expo event in 2020.

In addition to the two IPPs, Dewa is planning to expand the capacity of its 2,030MW M Station power facility at Jebel Ali by 600MW. The utility has set a bid submission date of 15 October and is planning to award the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract by the end of 2014.