Dubai Electricity & Water Authority (Dewa) has awarded the contract to build the planned new desalination plant at Jebel Ali to a joint venture of Spain’s Acciona and Belgium’s Besix.

MEED reported in January that the client had received revised offers from three shortlisted bidders.

The client received nine bids for the engineering, procurement and construction contract in August last year, and subsequently shortlisted three bidders to submit their best and final offers.

The Acciona/Besix joint venture saw off competition from France’s Sidem, and a joint venture of Spain’s Cobra and Tedagua with local company Tecton.

The lowest bidder in the initial round, a joint venture of Spain’s Abengoa and local operator Utico, did not make the shortlist.

The planned reverse osmosis (RO) plant will have a capacity of 40 million imperial gallons a day and is due to be operational by April 2020.

In July 2016, Dewa awarded a contract to the Abu Dhabi office of Austria’s ILF Consulting Engineers to provide engineering consultancy services for the plant.

All of Dubai’s desalination capacity is located at Jebel Ali, with two-thirds of the total installed capacity having been built since 2003. With the exception of a 114,000 cubic-metre-a-day RO unit, all of the existing capacity is based on multi-stage flash technology and operates in conjunction with power generation.