Dubai Electricity & Water Authority (Dewa) and Saudi Arabia’s Acwa Power are targeting signing the power purchase agreement (PPA) for the AED14bn ($3.8bn) concentrated solar power (CSP) solar project in March.

Saudi Arabia’s Acwa Power was awarded the contract to develop the 700MW CSP plant in September, and, according to sources close to the scheme is targeting for the PPA to be signed before the end of this month.

The project is likely to reach financial close in May.

Acwa Power will develop the 700MW plant, which will be the largest single site CSP project in the world, for a levelised tariff of 7.3$cents a kilowatt hour ($c/kWh). MEED reported in June that Acwa Power had submitted the lowest bid of about 9.45$c/kWh for the initially proposed 200MW CSP project. The final approved 7.3$c/kWh is the lowest unsubsidised tariff for utility-scale CSP solar in the world.

Acwa Power will develop the project in partnership with China’s Shanghai Electric. The CSP scheme will be developed under the independent power producer (IPP) model. The project will be commissioned in stages, starting in the fourth quarter of 2020.

The 700MW project will form the fourth phase of Dubai’s Mohammed bin Rashid (MBR) solar park, and will be the first CSP project at the park. The emirate had set a target to produce 1GW of CSP solar by 2030, but this may be increased in the future due to the significant size of the awarded contract for the fourth phase.

The benefit of CSP solar is that it allows energy to be stored, so that power can be dispatched during the night.