Kuwait and Bahrain: Completing the GCC Six

With Kuwait and Bahrain, Arcnex now covers utility-scale renewable procurement across all six GCC states. Both are smaller markets than Saudi Arabia or the UAE, and both do something structurally distinctive that a developer or supplier should understand before assuming the regional playbook transfers.

Kuwait: three bodies, one procurement

Most Gulf markets have consolidated procurement into a single buyer. Kuwait has not, and the difference is worth knowing before you go looking for a counterparty.

Three organisations appear on the Shagaya procurements:

• The Kuwait Authority for Partnership Projects (KAPP), which manages the public-private partnership process.
• The Ministry of Electricity, Water and Renewable Energy (MEW), which is the offtaker.
• The Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR), named alongside them.

For a bidder that means the process authority and the contractual offtaker are not the same body. It is not unusual for PPP frameworks, but it does mean the question "who do I talk to" has more than one answer depending on whether the issue is procedural or contractual.

Shagaya Zone 1 — around 1.1 GW

The larger project combines the Al Dibdibah Power Project with Al Shagaya Renewable Energy Phase III, Zone 1, at approximately 1.1 GW.

Financial bids were reported as scheduled to open no later than mid-July 2026, with a winning bidder expected in the third quarter of 2026 — which is the quarter now ending. This is the Gulf award most likely to land next, and it is worth watching for anyone in the supply chain.

Shagaya Zone 2 — 500 MW

The second tranche, Al Shagaya Renewable Energy Phase III Zone 2, is a 500 MW solar PV IPP within the same park in Jahra Governorate.

The request for proposals was issued in November 2025 to a prequalified field reported as six consortiums and three companies. The submission deadline moved twice — first to 30 April 2026, then to 26 July 2026 at bidders' request — and reporting put the eventual field at seven consortia and companies.

The 30-year PPA

The detail most likely to matter to a bidder is the contract term. Reporting on Zone 2 describes a 30-year power purchase agreement with MEW as offtaker.

That is materially longer than the Gulf norm, and it is not a cosmetic difference. A longer contracted revenue stream changes the debt tenor a project can support, the weighting of residual value assumptions, and how aggressively a bidder can price. It also lengthens the period over which technology and O&M risk sit with the project company — a thirty-year commitment on equipment performance in Kuwaiti summer conditions is a different underwriting question from a twenty-year one.

For suppliers, a longer term raises the importance of warranty depth and long-term service capability relative to headline price. The degradation mechanics behind that are in solar panel degradation and lifespan, and the environmental loading in solar panels in extreme heat.

Bahrain: first utility solar, and a different structure again

Bahrain is the smallest GCC electricity market and the last to bring utility-scale solar to tender, which makes its first project a structural marker rather than just a capacity addition.

The Electricity and Water Authority (EWA) has tendered the Bilaj Al Jazayer solar project in the south of the country, covering approximately 1.2 square kilometres, with commercial operations reported as expected in the third quarter of 2027.

Two things to flag honestly.

The capacity is reported inconsistently. Some coverage describes the project at up to 100 MW and some at 150 MW. We are not going to pick the tidier number. If you are modelling this project, take the figure from EWA's own tender documentation and note which stage of the process it came from — the same discipline we applied to DEWA Phase 7, where capacity moved between the expression of interest and the tender.

The structure is build-own-operate, not the IPP-with-offtake-contract model dominant elsewhere in the region. BOO and IPP are often used loosely as synonyms and they are not: the allocation of risk, the treatment of the asset at end of term, and the revenue mechanism can all differ. A bidder should read the actual contractual structure rather than assume it mirrors the Saudi or Emirati template.

Bahrain has also tendered landfill remediation at Askar in the Southern Governorate in preparation for solar development, which is a reminder that in land-constrained markets, site preparation can be a procurement in its own right and a gating item on schedule.

Targets

Bahrain's stated ambition is to meet 20 percent of electricity demand from renewables by 2035, under its National Renewable Energy Action Plan, with earlier interim targets of 5 percent by 2025 and 10 percent by 2030. EWA also operates a distributed solar programme across residential, commercial and industrial segments.

For a small market, the distributed segment may prove the more accessible commercial opportunity for suppliers than a single utility-scale tender that comes round rarely.

What the six markets have in common, and what they do not

Having now covered all six, the pattern is worth stating.

What transfers: technical capability, Gulf-appropriate product specification, a certification file, and the basic discipline of identifying whether your customer is the utility or the project consortium. These are regional overheads, paid once.

What does not transfer: the contract structure, the procurement authority, the PPA term, the ownership model and the conformity regime. Saudi Arabia runs a single buyer with local content obligations. Abu Dhabi caps developer equity at 40 percent. Dubai procures through its own utility. Kuwait splits process and offtake across bodies and contracts for thirty years. Bahrain is using build-own-operate. Oman is running what increasingly looks like a programme rather than a round.

A company treating the GCC as one market on the commercial terms will misprice. A company treating it as six unrelated markets on the technical requirements will overspend. The distinction is the whole game.

The supply-side requirements are mapped in qualifying as a renewable energy supplier in Saudi Arabia and registering as an energy supplier in the UAE, with conformity in SASO and SABER and ECAS and EQM.

What to watch

• The Shagaya Zone 1 award, expected in the quarter now closing.
• The Zone 2 outcome, and whether the 30-year term is repeated on future Kuwaiti rounds.
• Bilaj Al Jazayer's final capacity and structure, once EWA's documentation settles the question.
• Whether Bahrain follows its first project with a programme, as Oman appears to be doing — the pattern we set out in Oman and Qatar.

A note on sourcing

Arcnex has not seen KAPP, MEW or EWA tender documentation. Capacities, dates, bidder counts and contract terms above come from those bodies' announcements as carried by established trade and regional outlets, and where sources disagree — as on Bahrain's capacity — we have said so rather than choosing. The tender documents are the authority.

Cover the whole Gulf, not just the two big markets

Arcnex now reports utility-scale renewable procurement across all six GCC states, including the markets that get less attention and attract fewer bidders.

• Follow our Middle East energy coverage for tenders and awards across the region.
• Explore the policy and markets desk for the structures behind them.
• Subscribe to The Energy Edit — free, independent reporting, start here.

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