Bids were submitted by France’s Alstom, a team of Canada’s SNC Lavalin and the US’ GE, and a consortium of Europe’s ABB and Iraq’s Uruk Group.

However, Sewa has confirmed that issues over pricing have delayed an award on the project. “The pricing has been a little unsteady with nobody knowing what will happen with material costs,” says a source at the utility.

“We have been in negotiations for two weeks over the reduction in the pricing of the project,” says Khaled Ali, a business development manager at SNC Lavalin.

The SNC Lavalin and ABB groups have both submitted offers for the complete 1,900MW plant, while Alstom has bid for a split contract. If the French firm is successful, it will build the plant in phases of about 500MW.

Sewa is also in direct negotiations with GE for a 400MW extension to the existing Hamriya plant.Together with the existing 400MW of capacity at the site, the two projects will take the size of the Hamriya plant to 2,700MW by 2013 (MEED 17:1:08).

Two new desalination plants are also planned at Hamriya. Sewa is evaluating bids for the project to build a 40 million-gallon-a-day (g/d) multi-effect distillation plant from France’s Sidem, Italy’s Fisia Italimpianti and the US’ Aquatech.

It has also received six bids for an 80 million-g/d reverse osmosis desalination plant.