Abu Dhabi will soon be home to a 5.2-GW solar farm – snagging the top spot on the global solar energy plant leaderboard.
That's part of a gigascale project set to be built in the capital of the United Arab Emirates by Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company aka Masdar, and Emirates Water and Electricity Company. The firms note it'll be the world's first '24/7' solar photovolatic plant coupled with a Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) to match.
What that means is the solar plant will be able to supply energy even when the sun's not out – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Between the 5.2-GW solar plant and the 19-GWh BESS, the project will deliver up to 1 GW of baseload power every day gathered using solar panels. That should be enough to power 750,000 homes.
And just how large a plant are we talking about? The US Department of Energy estimates that it takes 1.887 million solar panels to generate just 1 GW of power. Going by that, Abu Dhabi's 5.2-GW plant could require nearly 10 million panels to get the job done.
Let's try to estimate the sort of space needed for this kind of thing. The Al Dhafra solar plant, inaugurated in Abu Dhabi in November 2023, has 4 million panels installed across 8.1 square miles (21 sq km). So Masdar's new project will likely need 20.25 square miles of space (52.44 sq km) – not counting the BESS. That's nearly 10,000 football fields.
The project will cost US$6 billion, and is set to be commissioned in 2027. Mohamed Jameel Al Ramahi, CEO of Masdar, told CNBC that it'll be "managed through a smart integrated solution to allow dispatchability at any point of time during the day or night."
With that 5.2 GW figure, it beats out the Power Construction Corp of China's 3.5-GW solar farm in the counry's Xinjiang province. This facility was said to be the world's biggest solar farm last June.
The new project in Abu Dhabi not only earns the UAE major bragging rights, but also gets it closer to its Net Zero by 2050 target.
Source: Masdar via PR Newswire