UAE state-owned IPP Masdar has reached financial close on what it has claimed is the world’s “first gigascale 24/7 renewable energy project”, supplied by BYD and Sungrow.
The 5.2GW, 19GWh ’round the clock’ (RTC) solar-plus-storage system represents a total capital investment of US$6.1 billion. The recent US$5.1 billion funding of the project came from a consortium of 13 local and international banks, along with US$1 billion of equity funding from Masdar.
The remarkable scale of the project—which Masdar called “the largest and most technologically advanced system of its kind in the world”—enables it to effectively produce 24-hour renewable energy using the combination of solar and battery energy storage systems (BESS). It will deliver 1GW of baseload solar power, Masdar claimed.
BYD and Sungrow are supplying the BESS for the project, totalling 11.275 GWh and 7.5GWh respectively, as per recent announcements. However, CATL was initially announced in January 2025 as the BESS supplier for the whole project, so Masdar appears to have changed its mind.
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Masdar broke ground at the site in October 2025 and expects to begin operations in 2027. It is being built in Abu Dhabi by Masdar and Emirates Water and Electricity Company (EWEC), and is likely to deliver power to AI data centres, based on the comments by EWEC and Masdar executives around making the UAE “a global hub for artificial intelligence research” and “redefining the role of renewable energy for the information age”, but no formal offtake or power supply agreement has been announced.
This article was originally published on PV Tech.
Additional reporting by Cameron Murray.
