Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy (KA-Care) is planning to oversee the development of a renewable energy technology and commercialisation programme.

According to a statement released by KA-Care, the programme is aimed at ensuring a significant amount of local content in the kingdom’s ambitious renewable energy plans. KA-Care is planning to issue a request for proposals (RFP) by the end of 2017 for a contract to develop the plan for the programme.

The plan will cover a range of localisation and commercialisation areas and topics. These will include:

• Renewable energy desalination
• Renewables integrated cooling systems
• Microgrids
• Energy storage
• Renewable energy integrated tri-generation systems
• Thermal storage (hot and cold)
• Building retrofits
• Solar process heat

The aim is for companies to contribute towards the cost of developing renewable energy technology centres, which will lead to the creation of a competitive renewable energy businesses in the kingdom.

Saudi Arabia recently received bids for the first project planned under its National Renewable Energy Programme (NREP), which is targeting for 9.5GW of renewable energy to be installed by 2023.

KA-Care was launched in 2010 to oversee the kingdom’s original 54GW renewable energy programme. However, with the Ministry of Energy, Industry & Mineral Resources, through its Renewable Energy Project Development Office (Repdo), charged with overseeing the NREP, KA-Care is expected to be involved in a supervisory and monitory role.