In the desert of Abu Dhabi, steel plates should not be touched when exposed to sunlight at noon. As soon as the sun sets, the load continues to rise. What the Chinese team needs to do is not to generate more electricity, but to ensure that the energy stored during the day in this place with the strongest sunshine is supplied all the way to sunrise the next day.

The sun never leaves work

On November 4, 2026, the POWERCHINA consortium is advancing the northern section of the Abu Dhabi RTC all-weather solar energy storage integration project, with a contract amount of approximately 13.962 billion yuan, covering the design, procurement, and construction of a 2.1GW DC side photovoltaic and 7.75GWh energy storage system, with a construction period of 21 months. The project is located in the Mshayrif area of Abu Dhabi and is jointly developed by Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company and UAE Hydro. The overall plan is 5.2GW of photovoltaic power with 19GWh of energy storage, with the goal of stably delivering 1GW of base load electricity per day and reducing carbon emissions by approximately 5.7 million tons per year after completion. This is the world's first gigawatt level all-weather renewable energy project. The core logic is not simply to connect new energy to the grid, but to use a combination of light and energy storage to turn daylight into a dispatchable base load. The combination of high temperature and high dust in the desert and 7.75GWh of ultra large capacity energy storage requires much higher requirements for temperature control safety, cycle life, and grid support capacity than conventional new energy distribution, storage, and peak shaving projects. The scope of work also includes the 400 kV on-site boosting station and the opposite side station ESF, which can meet the load requirements of data centers that are highly sensitive to power supply continuity. Keywords: integrated light storage, base load power supply

One Chain Going Global

On the general contracting end, POWERCHINA undertakes EPC, responsible for overall design, procurement, and construction promotion. On the device side, JinkoSolar provides 2GW high-efficiency photovoltaic modules, while Sungrow provides 7.5GWh liquid cooled energy storage systems and 2.6GW inverters. The package delivery of Chinese engineering general contracting and Chinese core equipment not only stabilizes the supply chain, but also marks the shift of China's optical storage industry chain from individual combat to system level going global. For domestic supporting enterprises, opportunities are hidden in the segmented links. Liquid cooled units, temperature control pipelines, and Pack level fire suppression systems must withstand high temperatures and dust, and can track the procurement and subcontracting dynamics of Sunac Power in this project; Energy storage EMS, microgrid controller, grid type PCS, and SVG are related to whether the photovoltaic energy storage collaboration can be smooth enough; Photovoltaic brackets, cables, combiner boxes, and energy storage BMS have the opportunity to leverage the Middle East performance of leading companies and reuse them in markets such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The contract on the books is just the starting point, the real threshold runs through these twenty-one months in the dust and heat.Editor/Min Jing