The number that matters most in the Rabigh 2 financing is the tenor. Al Morjan Two Electricity Co., the project company in which ACWA Power holds a 40 percent stake, reached financial close on 1 October on SR9.69 billion of debt running approximately 34 years, raised to expand the Rabigh 2 combined-cycle plant on the Kingdom’s west coast, ACWA told the Saudi Exchange in a disclosure reported by Argaam. Loans of that length are written against assets expected to earn steadily into the late 2050s. Five banks, Alinma Bank, Riyad Bank and Saudi Awwal Bank alongside HSBC and Standard Chartered, have now put that expectation on their books.
The expansion adds 2,313.5 megawatts of combined-cycle gas capacity in a design the company describes as carbon-capture ready, with commercial operations projected for the second quarter of 2029. The debt sits inside the framework agreed in April, when the consortium signed a power purchase agreement valued at about SR11.5 billion with the Saudi Power Procurement Company. ACWA’s own exposure is deliberately narrow: the 40 percent equity stake and what it calls a limited guarantee covering its share of required reserve liquidity. The plant will borrow, build and repay on its own contract.
A 34-year loan against a single buyer is a credit judgment about that buyer. The Saudi Power Procurement Company is the counterparty on effectively every new generation project in the Kingdom, and the willingness of commercial banks to lend into the 2050s against its contracted payments prices Saudi power procurement as long-duration credit of the most conservative kind. That the lender list mixes three Saudi balance sheets with HSBC and Standard Chartered spreads the judgment across markets rather than leaving it at home.
The structure is the quiet machinery of the whole power build. A developer holding 40 percent and a limited guarantee can carry many projects at once, because none of them sits whole on its balance sheet. The same model, a project company, an offtake contract and long bank debt, stands behind the solar fleet now reaching the grid at Taiba and Qassim and the storage procurement running beside it. What Rabigh 2 adds is scale on the dispatchable side: combined-cycle gas is the capacity that holds the western grid steady under the load of Jeddah, Makkah and Madinah while the renewable share compounds.
The cycle time deserves notice too. The power purchase agreement was signed in April; the financing closed at the start of October. Six months from contract to committed capital is the procurement machine working at its designed speed, and a measure of how routine these closings have become: a commitment approaching SR10 billion to a single plant arrived in the market’s Sunday disclosure feed alongside earnings notes.
What follows is visible from here: construction milestones toward the 2029 start date, the next procurement round from SPPC, and the companion expansions on the watch list, Al Henakiyah among them. The figure to hold onto is the cycle. If contract-to-close stays near six months, the Kingdom can finance new generation roughly as fast as it can tender it, and the binding constraint on the power build shifts to engineering rather than capital.