ACWA Power - The Value of Modern Infrastructure
ACWA Power is a desalinated water and energy company that is challenging the conventional strategy of its industry. While its competitors have historically sought to maximise profit by securing contracts with the most-generous possible margins in local markets, ACWA Power has focused on winning competitive tenders for large projects and growing its international footprint. With ACWA’s bids on solar developments reaching record lows, CEO Paddy Padmanathan was coming under increasing scrutiny from analysts and media pundits, who could not understand how they could sustain record-breaking prices. In the latest auction on 5th June 2017, the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) announced it had received four bids from consortiums for the tender of a 200 MW Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) tower project. The ACWA Power consortium submitted a price of USD 9.45 cents/kWh, nearly 40% below the previous worldrecord low price for electricity generated from this technology. The three other bids ranged from USD 10.58 to 17.35 cents/kWh. As analysts struggled to replicate this price in their own models, Paddy put his own team to work to deliver on a promise that ACWA Power could successfully become one of the world’s leading players in modernizing global infrastructure.