NREP is Saudi Arabia’s National Renewable Energy Program, the auction-based procurement architecture behind the Kingdom’s 130 GW renewable capacity target and 50 percent renewable electricity-share commitment under Vision 2030 and the Saudi Green Initiative. Launched by the Ministry of Energy and operated through the Saudi Power Procurement Company (SPPC), NREP procures large-scale solar photovoltaic and wind generation through competitive Independent Power Producer (IPP) tenders and 25-year Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs). As of January 2026, NREP had run six completed auction rounds awarding cumulative capacity in excess of 30 gigawatts, with Round 6 alone awarding 4.5 GW across five projects in October 2025 — including a wind project with the world’s lowest-ever levelised cost of electricity for wind energy — and Round 7 qualified bidders confirmed for an additional 5.3 GW of combined solar and wind capacity. The institutional architecture combines four central counterparties: the Public Investment Fund (PIF) as strategic capital sponsor; PIF-owned developer Badeel; ACWA Power as the principal IPP developer and operator; and SPPC as the central counterparty for all PPAs. The four-counterparty model has converted Saudi renewable procurement from a series of bespoke negotiations into one of the most operationally efficient auction architectures in global energy markets, producing record-low solar tariffs in successive rounds and the world wind LCOE record in October 2025.
The Saudi Energy Minister, HRH Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, has chaired the SPPC and personally presided over major NREP awards, signalling the cabinet-level political weight attached to the programme’s delivery. By the end of 2025, Saudi Arabia had tendered approximately 64 GW of cumulative renewable energy capacity through NREP and its predecessor mechanisms, with 20.6 GW tendered during 2025 alone, 12.3 GW grid-connected by year-end, and approximately 30 GWh of battery energy storage system (BESS) capacity tendered with 8 GWh grid-connected. The cadence has been sufficient to position Saudi Arabia as the world’s tenth-largest renewable energy investor by 2025, and the Goldman Sachs assessment of the underlying capital requirement — approximately USD 235 billion in clean energy investment to 2030 under the official strategy — captures the scale of the financial mobilisation NREP is designed to channel. The substantive analytical question that frames every assessment of NREP, however, is the gap between the headline 130 GW target and the realistic deliverable trajectory. GlobalData’s March 2026 assessment projects Saudi renewable capacity at 74.2 GW by 2030 — well short of the 130 GW target — given a build-out cadence requiring 23 GW per year against the current 5-6 GW per year actually being added. The gap is not the failure of an unsuccessful programme; it is the structural arithmetic of the most ambitious renewable build-out target ever announced by any major hydrocarbon economy, set against the supply-chain, transmission infrastructure, land-allocation, and contractor capacity constraints that bound how fast even the most operationally credible auction architecture can scale.
Quick Facts
- Established: 2017 under Ministry of Energy
- Strategic anchor: Vision 2030 — 50% renewable electricity by 2030; 130 GW capacity target (raised 2023)
- Institutional architecture: Ministry of Energy (policy) · SPPC (off-taker / tender authority) · PIF + Badeel (capital sponsor / co-developer) · ACWA Power (lead IPP developer)
- Energy Minister / SPPC Chairman: HRH Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud
- Cumulative capacity tendered (end-2025): ~64 GW
- 2025 capacity tendered: 20.6 GW
- Grid-connected capacity (end-2025): ~13 GW (12.3 GW per Ministry of Energy)
- BESS tendered: ~30 GWh; grid-connected: ~8 GWh by end-2025
- Round 6 awards (October 2025): 4.5 GW across 5 projects; investment >SAR 9 billion (~USD 2.4 billion); world’s lowest-ever wind LCOE
- Round 7 qualifications (announced Sept 2025; finalised by Jan 2026): 5.3 GW solar + wind
- Capital requirement to 2030 (Goldman Sachs): ~USD 235 billion
- Required annual build-out to hit 130 GW: 23 GW/year
- GlobalData 2030 forecast: 74.2 GW (well short of 130 GW target)
- Saudi global ranking (renewable energy investment, 2025): 10th
What NREP Is
The National Renewable Energy Program was established under the Ministry of Energy in 2017 as the institutional answer to a structural problem Saudi Arabia faced as Vision 2030 launched: how to convert the Kingdom’s substantial solar irradiation and wind resource advantages — among the highest-quality renewable resources globally — into operational generation capacity at the cadence Vision 2030 commitments would require, given that Saudi Arabia in 2017 had effectively zero utility-scale renewable capacity in operation and lacked the institutional procurement architecture, regulatory framework, and developer ecosystem that comparable renewable build-outs in jurisdictions like the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Spain had developed over preceding decades.
The architectural choice NREP made was distinctive. Rather than pursuing a feed-in tariff model (which had structured renewable expansion in much of Europe through the 2000s and 2010s), or a pure regulatory mandate model (which had structured renewable expansion in parts of the United States), or a state-owned development model (which had structured renewable expansion in much of Asia), NREP adopted a competitive auction model with central off-taker counterparty structured around the Independent Power Producer (IPP) template that had matured through the Gulf Cooperation Council during the 2010s. The model’s key features:
Centralised tendering through SPPC. The Saudi Power Procurement Company — established 2021 as the unbundled procurement entity carved out of the Saudi Electricity Company — operates as the single counterparty for all NREP tenders, the single counterparty for the resulting PPAs, and the single off-taker for the generated electricity. The architecture removes the inter-utility coordination friction that fragmented utility procurement produces and allows tenders to be structured at the scale and standardisation commercial capital markets prefer.
Long-tenor PPAs. NREP PPAs typically run 25 years from commercial operation date. The long tenor provides the revenue certainty international project finance lenders require to lend at the scales NREP capacity expansion implies, and provides the developer with the cash-flow visibility required to support the construction debt and equity capital structure.
IPP development model. Each tendered project is awarded to a developer (or a consortium led by a developer) that finances, builds, owns, and operates the asset for the PPA tenor, transferring the asset to SPPC at the end. The model concentrates execution accountability at the developer level while keeping policy and procurement authority with the Saudi state.
Local content and Saudisation requirements. NREP tenders include progressively rising local content requirements — manufacturing of components, employment of Saudi nationals, integration with Saudi industrial development objectives — that align the renewable build-out with the broader Vision 2030 industrial diversification ambition.
Tariff competition with capped reserve. Bidders compete on price, with the Saudi state reserving the right to reject bids above an internal benchmark. The architecture has produced the global record-low solar tariffs that have characterised successive rounds, and the world wind LCOE record set in Round 6 in October 2025.
The combination of these features makes NREP one of the most operationally efficient renewable auction architectures globally. The world-record tariffs that have emerged from successive rounds reflect both the underlying Saudi resource quality and the institutional efficiency of the auction architecture itself.
The Four-Counterparty Architecture
NREP’s institutional efficiency derives from its concentrated four-counterparty architecture. Each counterparty has a specific role, and the alignment between them removes the friction that comparable architectures with more dispersed counterparty roles have historically suffered.
The Ministry of Energy sets policy. The Ministry, under Energy Minister HRH Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, defines the renewable share targets, the capacity targets, the technology mix, the tendering schedule, the local content requirements, and the broader strategic framework within which NREP operates. The Ministry’s policy authority extends to the interaction between renewable expansion and the broader Saudi power sector — the displacement of liquid-fuel generation, the role of natural gas as the complementary base-load technology to renewable variability, the integration of nuclear capacity (planned through Saudi Nuclear Energy Holding Company), and the broader transmission infrastructure expansion required to evacuate renewable capacity from generation sites to demand centres.
The Saudi Power Procurement Company (SPPC) operates as the central tender counterparty and PPA off-taker. SPPC’s role is the operational engine of NREP. It runs the pre-qualification process for each round (determining which developers and consortia meet the technical, financial, and Saudisation requirements to bid), runs the technical and commercial bidding, evaluates bids against the published criteria, awards the projects, signs the 25-year PPAs, off-takes the resulting electricity, and integrates the resulting capacity into the broader Saudi power system. SPPC’s institutional authority is what allows NREP to operate at the cadence Vision 2030 requires; without a single, financially substantial, technically credible counterparty, the architecture would collapse into bilateral developer-utility negotiations of the kind that bottleneck renewable expansion in many comparable jurisdictions.
The Public Investment Fund (PIF) and Badeel operate as the strategic capital sponsor and co-developer. PIF holds a substantial portfolio interest in the Saudi renewable build-out through its ownership of ACWA Power (44 per cent stake) and its wholly-owned subsidiary Badeel (formally Saudi Power Generation Company), which co-develops major renewable projects alongside ACWA Power and other developers. The PIF role is structurally important because it ensures that the Saudi sovereign has direct equity exposure to the renewable build-out — capturing the long-term cash flows that the IPP architecture would otherwise direct entirely to international developers — and provides the patient capital that some of the largest projects (NEOM Helios green hydrogen, the Sudair solar complex, the Al Shuaibah solar IPP) require beyond what pure competitive auction economics would support.
ACWA Power operates as the lead IPP developer. ACWA Power, based in Riyadh and listed on Tadawul, has been the dominant winner of NREP tenders since the programme’s launch and operates a substantial fraction of the Saudi renewable capacity in the ground or under construction. ACWA Power’s institutional positioning combines deep Saudi market knowledge, established lender relationships, technical depth across solar PV, wind, concentrated solar power, water desalination, and green hydrogen, and the operational scale to deliver projects at the gigawatt-class capacity rounds that NREP has progressively moved toward. The ACWA Power role is central enough that Saudi renewable expansion is not separable from ACWA Power’s own corporate trajectory in a meaningful way.
The four-counterparty architecture functions as an integrated system. Policy from the Ministry. Procurement through SPPC. Strategic capital and equity participation through PIF and Badeel. Operational delivery through ACWA Power and the broader IPP ecosystem. The system has its own strengths and structural limitations, but as a procurement architecture for renewable expansion at the scale Vision 2030 requires, it is among the most operationally credible globally.
The Auction Rounds
NREP has run six completed competitive auction rounds since 2017, with Round 7 in active qualification by January 2026. Each round has progressively expanded the scope of the programme, the capacity tendered, the technology mix, and the geographic distribution of awarded projects.
Rounds 1–5 built the institutional architecture and delivered the first wave of operational capacity. The Sakaka solar plant (Round 1, 300 MW) was Saudi Arabia’s first utility-scale solar project, achieving commercial operation in 2019 with a tariff at the time among the world’s lowest. The Dumat Al Jandal wind project (Round 2, 400 MW), achieving commercial operation in 2022, was Saudi Arabia’s first utility-scale wind project. Rounds 3, 4, and 5 expanded into multi-project rounds with capacity in the gigawatts, including the Sudair solar complex (1.5 GW, ACWA Power / Saudi Aramco / PIF), the Al Shuaibah complex (2.0 GW), and the broader portfolio of solar projects geographically distributed across Saudi Arabia. By February 2024, SPPC had released the shortlisted bidder list for Round 5 covering 3.7 GW of solar PV capacity.
Round 6, awarded in October 2025, marked the operational maturity of the programme. The round awarded 4.5 GW of capacity across five projects, comprising:
- Najran Solar PV IPP — 1.4 GW
- Sufun Solar PV IPP — 400 MW
- Samtah Solar PV IPP — 600 MW
- Darb Solar PV IPP — 600 MW
- Dawadmi Wind IPP — 1.5 GW (the world’s lowest-ever LCOE for wind energy)
Round 6 represented total investment of more than SAR 9 billion (approximately USD 2.4 billion) and was awarded at a ceremony attended by Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman in his capacity as SPPC Chairman. The Dawadmi wind tariff set the world record for utility-scale wind LCOE — a record made possible by the combination of the Dawadmi site’s wind resource quality, the maturity of the global wind technology supply chain, the institutional efficiency of the SPPC procurement architecture, and the developer competition that NREP rounds reliably generate.
Round 7, opened for qualification in September 2025 with qualified bidders confirmed by January 2026, comprises 5.3 GW of combined solar and wind capacity. The round will be awarded during 2026 and will continue the build-out trajectory toward the 2030 targets.
The cumulative capacity tendered across NREP and its predecessor mechanisms by end-2025 reached approximately 64 GW, with 20.6 GW tendered during calendar 2025 alone — a substantially accelerated cadence relative to the early-programme rounds. The accelerated cadence reflects both the maturation of the institutional architecture (SPPC’s operational capacity has scaled meaningfully since its 2021 establishment) and the political pressure to close the gap between the 130 GW 2030 target and the actual deliverable trajectory.
Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) Integration
A structural feature of NREP’s third-phase evolution has been the integration of Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) tendering alongside generation tendering. As Saudi renewable capacity scales, the integration of intermittent renewable generation with the broader power system requires storage capacity sufficient to manage diurnal solar variation and the evening demand peak that follows the daily solar generation peak. BESS tendering is the operational mechanism through which the Saudi power system is acquiring that storage capacity.
By end-2025, Saudi Arabia had tendered approximately 30 GWh of BESS capacity through NREP and complementary mechanisms, with approximately 8 GWh grid-connected by year-end. The capacity scaling positions Saudi Arabia among the larger global BESS deployers in absolute terms, and the integration of generation and storage tendering within the same institutional architecture is one of the more operationally sophisticated features of the Saudi renewable expansion compared with peer jurisdictions where generation and storage operate under separate procurement architectures.
The strategic logic for BESS is structural. Saudi peak electricity demand occurs in the late afternoon and early evening, driven by air conditioning loads. Solar generation peaks at midday. The temporal mismatch means that pure solar-and-wind generation expansion cannot, by itself, replace conventional generation at peak demand without overbuilding capacity dramatically. BESS deployment shifts solar generation into the evening peak, allowing renewable generation to displace conventional generation more efficiently. The 30 GWh tendered capacity, when fully grid-connected, will provide several gigawatts of effective evening-peak renewable capacity that pure renewable generation alone could not provide.
Strategic Context — Saudi Green Initiative and the Energy Mix Target
NREP operates within the broader institutional architecture of the Saudi Green Initiative (SGI) announced in October 2021, which committed Saudi Arabia to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2060, planting 10 billion trees, and the 50 per cent renewable electricity share by 2030. NREP is the operational mechanism through which the renewable electricity commitment is being delivered. The energy mix target — 50 per cent renewable, with the remaining 50 per cent supplied by high-efficiency natural gas plants displacing the liquid-fuel generation Saudi Arabia historically used — is structurally significant because it signals a Saudi commitment to phase out the liquid-fuel power generation that has historically consumed a non-trivial fraction of Saudi crude oil production.
The displacement architecture has direct economic implications. Each barrel of crude oil burned for power generation is a barrel that cannot be exported. The Saudi domestic power sector’s historic liquid-fuel intensity has therefore been a structural cost on the Saudi sovereign — both in direct fuel cost and in foregone export revenue — that the renewable expansion is designed to eliminate. Goldman Sachs has estimated that full delivery of the renewable target could free up several million barrels per day of additional Saudi export capacity by 2030, which is one of the more analytically interesting under-discussed dimensions of the energy transition’s effect on Saudi fiscal arithmetic.
The 130 GW 2030 capacity target was raised in 2023 from earlier formulations as part of the broader Vision 2030 mid-cycle recalibration. The 2023 raise reflected both the underlying ambition of the Saudi state and the recognition that earlier targets had been set without full appreciation of how rapidly Saudi power demand would grow as Vision 2030 accelerated. The 130 GW target now operates against demand growth that includes the substantial additional load from the Saudi data centre build-out — including the HUMAIN facilities expanding under the Year of AI 2026 architecture — that did not exist when earlier renewable targets were set.