SEPCO, a China-based power construction company and a subsidiary of POWERCHINA, has won the bid for the Group 1-KSB standalone BESS in Saudi Arabia, which is to have a capacity of 500 MW/2,000 MWh. POWERCHINA announced the award on 13 October 2026, when it also reported two other overseas bids that SEPCO had won.

The plant is also known as the Al Khushaybi BESS, and it is to be built in the Qassim Region. Its developer is a consortium of Engie and Haji Abdullah Alireza & Co., which had been awarded the project by August 2026 and which is to build, own and operate it. The Saudi Power Procurement Company (SPPC) will be its offtaker.

Al Khushaybi is one of the four projects that make up the first group of the battery storage programme of Saudi Arabia. Each of the four has been rated at 500 MW/2,000 MWh, which gives it a duration of four hours, and each is backed by a 15-year storage services agreement with SPPC. Together, they represent an investment of more than $1.16 billion.

Once it is in operation, the plant is expected to shift peak load and to smooth fluctuations on the grid. SEPCO has stated that the plant will raise the regulating capacity and the supply resilience of the Saudi grid, and that it will help the grid to absorb wind and solar power. Saudi Arabia is targeting 48 GWh of battery storage capacity by 2030, and the four first-group projects will provide 8,000 MWh of that total.

The two other bids that SEPCO has won are for the civil works of a Sailun tyre plant in Egypt and for a heap leach plant at the Husab uranium mine in Namibia.

SEPCO is headquartered in Jinan, China, and it works as an engineering, procurement and construction contractor on power generation, transmission and energy projects.