Bahrain’s Electricity & Water Authority (EWA) has received proposals from three groups for the planned 100MW Askar solar independent power project (IPP).

EWA opened technical proposals from the following three groups on 6 December:

• Acwa Power (Saudi Arabia)/ Mitsui (Japan)/ Al-Moayyed (local)
• Alfanar (Saudi Arabia)
• GS E&C (South Korea)/ Phelan Energy (South Africa)

The commercial proposals will be opened at a later date following evaluation of the technical offers.

The planned 100MW photovoltaic (PV) solar plant will be located at a landfill site at Askar in the southern governorate of Bahrain.

MEED reported in May that EWA was hoping to sign the power purchase agreement (PPA) for the project before the end of 2018, having received proposals from 26 companies in April for a concept study.

The project is part of Bahrain’s plans for 5 per cent (250MW) of its total power capacity to come from renewable energy sources by 2025. Manama aims to increase installed clean energy capacity to 700MW by 2030; it wants to achieve this by implementing a number of solar, wind and waste-to-energy projects.

Bahrain’s first renewable energy project was commissioned in July 2014. The 5MW distributed PV solar project was developed by state oil company Bahrain Petroleum Company (Bapco) in collaboration with Bahrain’s Oil & Gas Authority (Nogaholding), EWA and the University of Bahrain.