DEWA closes $2.70 billion Noor Energy 1 refinancing ahead of target
The 950 MW fourth phase of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park has restructured its debt early, with DEWA pointing to lower financing costs and savings over the plant's life.
DEWA has closed a $2.70 billion debt package for Noor Energy 1, the 950 MW fourth phase of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park. The deal landed well ahead of its target date.
Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, DEWA's Managing Director and CEO, announced the close at Al Sheraa, the utility's headquarters. Lenders, sponsors, partners and the team that worked on the transaction were in the room.
DEWA says the restructuring lowered the cost of financing the project and will generate substantial savings across its operating life. The utility did not disclose who the new lenders are, the interest rate, the tenor, or the value of the savings.
Those omissions leave the figures from the earlier arrangement as the only public yardstick. At the end of 2025, the project company had AED 8.57 billion outstanding under a syndicated commercial banking facility, against AED 9.10 billion twelve months before. The effective interest rate on that facility fell to 6.43 percent from 7.73 percent in 2024. Alongside it sat an AED 682 million mezzanine facility and AED 294 million of short-term financing. All of those numbers describe the structure that has now been replaced.
Three technologies on one site
The phase splits into 600 MW of parabolic trough capacity, a 100 MW concentrated solar power tower and 250 MW of photovoltaic panels. The tower rises more than 263 metres and is fed by roughly 70,000 heliostats that track the sun and bounce radiation onto the receiver.
Storage is what separates this project from a conventional solar farm. The thermal system holds 5,907 megawatt hours and can keep energy on hand for up to 15 hours, so stored heat still drives generation after dark. DEWA puts the output at enough electricity for about 320,000 residences and a cut in carbon emissions of roughly 1.6 million tonnes a year.
Noor Energy 1 was set up by a consortium to design, build and operate the fourth phase. DEWA holds 51 percent, ACWA Power 25 percent and China's Silk Road Fund 24 percent. Original investment in the independent power producer scheme was AED 15.78 billion, and the plant was inaugurated in December 2023.
Al Tayer described it as a national asset and the largest single-site concentrated solar power development in the world, calling it a cornerstone of the Dubai Clean Energy Strategy 2050. The participation of international, regional and local financial institutions, he said, shows confidence in the UAE, in Dubai and in DEWA, and reinforces the emirate's standing as a destination for long-term sustainable investment.
DEWA characterised the plant's current availability as world-class and said the financial structure is built to hold reliability and sustainability through the project's lifecycle. The solar park has grown phase by phase since the first unit began operating in 2013, with the utility leaning on partnerships with international developers and investors to add capacity under the IPP model.
The test of this deal will be the rate. A plant designed to run for decades now carries a 6.43 percent effective rate in its last published accounts, and the cost of the new facility has not been made public.
