Masdar closes $6.1bn for world-first gigascale round-the-clock solar-plus-storage project in Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi future energy company Masdar has reached financial close on a 5.2 GW solar photovoltaic plant paired with a 19 GWh battery energy storage system (BESS) in Abu Dhabi, a configuration the developer says is the world's first gigascale renewable project capable of delivering power around the clock. Total capital investment is put at US$6.1 billion — US$5.1 billion of debt from thirteen lenders and US$1 billion of Masdar equity.

The close, announced on 13 July 2026, is the moment an idea first floated eighteen months ago stops being a press release and becomes a funded, under-construction asset. How the project got here — and who ended up supplying it — says a lot about where the global solar-plus-storage market is heading.

Where the idea came from

The project was unveiled at Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week in January 2025, when Masdar and the Emirates Water and Electricity Company (EWEC) announced plans for what they called the world's first large-scale round-the-clock renewable gigaproject: a 5.2 GW solar field spread across roughly 90 square kilometers, wired to 19 GWh of batteries, delivering a continuous 1 GW of clean power day and night.

The motive was straightforward. The Gulf's grids have historically balanced abundant daytime solar against gas-fired generation after dark. But electricity demand in the UAE is climbing fast, and much of the new load is from AI-driven data centers — demand that runs around the clock and cannot simply wait for the sun. Masdar has explicitly linked the plant to the UAE's ambition to become a global hub for artificial intelligence research, and the project is widely expected to help power energy-hungry data centers, although no offtaker has been formally confirmed. EWEC is the anchor buyer.

The engineering logic is equally plain: 5.2 GW of panels generate far more than 1 GW during daylight hours. The surplus charges the battery fleet; after sunset, the batteries carry the full 1 GW on their own until the sun returns. What makes the configuration remarkable is not any single component but the ratio — roughly 3.7 kWh of storage for every watt of solar — and the sheer scale of it. At 19 GWh, the battery fleet exceeds the installed grid-scale storage of most countries, and Masdar has described it as the largest battery storage system ever funded.

The supplier story: how the shortlist changed

When the project was announced in January 2025, the preferred-supplier line-up read like a who's-who of Chinese manufacturing: CATL was named preferred BESS supplier, JinkoSolar and JA Solar were named preferred module suppliers (2.6 GW each), and Larsen & Toubro and POWERCHINA were selected as preferred EPC contractors.

By financial close, the picture had shifted. The signed battery contracts went to BYD — 11.275 GWh for a single storage station rated at 1,644 MW, using its Haohan system built on a 2,710 Ah Blade cell — and to Sungrow, which agreed in May 2026 to supply 7.5 GWh of its PowerTitan 3.0 system alongside 2.6 GW of PV inverters. Jinko Solar and JA Solar retained the module supply, and EPC duties remained split between Larsen & Toubro and POWERCHINA. Masdar broke ground on the first phase in October 2025, with commercial operations expected in 2027.

Neither developer nor suppliers has publicly explained why CATL, the original preferred BESS supplier, did not appear among the signed contracts. What the episode demonstrates, however, needs no explanation: at gigascale, an eighteen-month gap separates the announcement shortlist from the contracts that actually get signed.

From demonstration to asset class

The financing itself is the story's second act. The US$5.1 billion debt package — provided by First Abu Dhabi Bank, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank, HSBC, Standard Chartered, BNP Paribas, Bank of China, KfW IPEX-Bank, Natixis, Société Générale, Crédit Agricole CIB, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and Dubai Islamic Bank — is one of the largest ever assembled for an integrated solar-plus-storage project. Masdar is framing the close as evidence that round-the-clock renewable power has crossed from technical demonstration to bankable infrastructure.

The economics supporting that view keep improving. IRENA reported in May 2026 that firm 24/7 solar-and-storage systems had fallen to as little as US$54/MWh in the best locations — a figure that, if anything, strengthens the case that the Abu Dhabi configuration will be copied. Once operational, the plant is expected to create more than 10,000 jobs and avoid roughly 5.7 million tonnes of CO2 emissions a year.