Saudi Arabia’s state-owned Saudi Power Procurement Company has started the qualification process for its second large-scale build-own-operate BESS tender.

Ex-Fluence alumnus Marek Kubik sat down with Energy-Storage.news at last month’s Energy Storage Summit 2026 in London to talk big picture BESS technology trends, including energy density, LDES and sodium-ion.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have emerged as two of the world’s most prominent energy storage markets, with mega-scale projects announced and moved forward at a staggering pace over the last two years. But what does the next phase look like?

DNV has forecast that the MENA region will add 860GW of new solar PV by 2040, and energy storage capacity will grow 10x by 2030.

As we welcome the end of another year and greet the next, here are the top 10 most-read news stories from 2025.

Three BESS projects totalling 7.8GWh in Saudi Arabia have been connected to the electricity grid, technology provider Sungrow said.

Two major Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region projects combining solar PV and battery storage have progressed in Saudi Arabia and Egypt through ACWA Power and Scatec, respectively.

Hithium will supply two projects in Saudi Arabia with ‘the world’s first mass-produced kiloampere-hour (kAh) cells’.

June 2025 saw a total of 7.96GW/22.17GWh of grid-scale BESS enter commercial operations across 109 projects, with over half of that being in China, while the overall first half of the year saw substantial growth.

Progress on BESS projects in Saudi Arabia and Chile totalling a combined 16GWh of energy storage capacity using Sungrow and BYD batteries has been revealed by the projects’ owners.