Subrahmanyan ... a major milestone in our clean and green energy path.

India’s top engineering and construction conglomerate Larsen & Toubro (L&T)  last month clinched two key solar power projects in Saudi Arabia, one at Sudair, located approximately 150 km north of the Saudi capital, Riyadh, and the other at the Red Sea port city of  Jeddah.

L&T says its renewables arm secured the turnkey engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract for Sudair solar photovoltaic (PV) project with a 1.5GW capacity. The contract was awarded by a consortium of Acwa Power and the Water and Electricity Holding Company – a subsidiary of the Public Investments Fund (PIF) of Saudi Arabia – to L&T Power Transmission & Distribution Business.

Coming up in Riyadh Province over a 30.8-sq-km area, the Sudair Solar PV project is said to be the largest solar plant in the kingdom.

On the contract win, CEO and Managing Director SN Subrahmanyan says: “With several GWs of solar EPC experience, L&T has emerged as a global technology player for solar plants. L&T has been a provider of EPC services for several green projects in recent years. We are India’s largest EPC company to build hydel power plants, the largest market player to build nuclear power plants with a total capability of 9360 MWe, including some ongoing projects, on an EPC turnkey basis with the capacity to make important critical components like steam turbines, generators, end shields and other critical equipment.”

 “We have the largest market share of the Flue Gas Desulfurization (FGD) units for fossil fuel power plants. L&T has over 2.1 GW of utility-scale solar projects commissioned and are also operating and maintaining several of them,” he notes.

“We have a diversified renewable portfolio of 32MW floating solar power plants, 135 MWH of battery energy storage projects, 500 micro grids and 14,000 solar water pumps. L&T is also working on potential solutions related to green hydrogen and carbon capture and storage technologies. Securing this project is a major milestone in our clean and green energy path to fight the climate crisis that the world faces,” he adds.

Meanwhile, the renewables unit of L&T’s Power Transmission and Distribution Business also secured the turnkey EPC order for a 300 MW solar PV power plant in Jeddah. The contract was awarded by a consortium of Abu Dhabi’s Masdar along with French group EDF Renewables and Saudi multinational conglomerate Nesma.

The project is coming up in Third Jeddah Industrial City. This large utility scale power plant utilises key technologies including bifacial modules, single axial trackers, string inverters and robots for module cleaning.

Saudi Arabia’s Repdo had awarded the Jeddah power plant contract to the Masdar consortium under a design, finance, build and operate mode.