Two Gulf utility giants control the lion's share of Central Asia's largest green energy market. At the Tashkent International Investment Forum (TIIF) this month, the two companies set out plans that would take combined committed capital to developing Uzbekistan green energy well beyond $20bn.

Uzbekistan's transformation into Central Asia's Green Energy Champion aiming to produce half its power from renewables. It has been driven, almost in its entirety, by two companies: the UAE's Masdar and Saudi Arabia's ACWA Power. Speaking at panels during the fifth TIIF on June 18, representatives of both firms set out the scale of their existing commitments and a pipeline of projects that confirms Uzbekistan has become one of the most important markets for either company anywhere in the world.

Masdar was first into the market, entering in 2019 with a modest 100MW solar pilot project. ACWA arrived a year later, in 2020, with a far larger opening bet — a 1,500MW plant in the ancient Silk Road city of Bukhara. Five years on, the two companies dominate a sector with billions of dollars deployed that has propelled Uzbekistan past Kazakhstan to become the renewable energy leader of Central Asia. The government's target for clean power's share of the energy mix has risen from an initial 25% to 40% by 2030.

Masdar from a 100MW pilot to a $2.2bn joint venture

Myriam Al Mazrouei, associate director for business development at Masdar, said both the company's regional footprint and its escalating ambitions inside Uzbekistan specifically.

"Masdar was founded 20 years ago as a result of our leadership's long-term vision to invest into renewables," she said, noting that the company now operates in more than 40 countries with a portfolio of 65 gigawatts and a target of 100 gigawatts by 2030.

Within that global footprint, Uzbekistan now occupies an outsized position.

"Uzbekistan was the first entry for us in 2019, with a very small project in order to avoid 100 megawatt solar PV," Al Mazrouei said. "Today we're very proud that we are currently operating more than 2,000 megawatts of portfolio including solar and wind."

The growth trajectory mirrors what Abid Malik, president of ACWA Central Asia, described to IntelliNews back in 2023, when the company's flagship Uzbek asset was a 100MW Nukus solar facility and a 1.4GW wind farm under construction — "a ten-fold expansion," as Malik put it then.

That expansion has continued unabated. In December, President Mirziyoyev personally inaugurated the Nur Bukhara project — 250MW of solar PV integrated with battery storage, which Al Mazrouei described as "the first utility scale project integrated with the battery system" in the country. The company has also broken ground on a further 300MW solar project and is developing a phased standalone battery storage facility in the Bukhara region: 600 megawatt-hours in the first phase, with a further 600MWh to follow.

The most technically ambitious initiative Al Mazrouei described is a Round-The-Clock renewable power concept — a model Masdar has already established in Abu Dhabi that pairs renewable generation with storage to deliver continuous baseload power rather than the intermittent output renewables typically provide. "The project currently is under development which is basically providing a 1 gigawatt base load into the grid from a pure renewable clean energy," she said, adding that Masdar signed an agreement with Uzbekistan's Ministry of Energy in January to develop a version delivering 500MW of baseload power domestically.

Perhaps the most significant announcement was a new joint venture structure that signals how seriously Masdar is now treating the wider Central Asian and regional opportunity.

"Most recently we've announced a JV with TotalEnergies (NYSE: TTE) which basically will cover the development of the project in nine countries including Uzbekistan," Al Mazrouei said. "It's a $2.2bn 50-50 JV. It gives a signal how Uzbekistan is attracting the world's most ambitious player to co-develop a net future."

Masdar's activity is not confined to Uzbekistan alone. Al Mazrouei noted that the company has deployed roughly $1.2bn in Azerbaijan, where its portfolio has grown from an initial 30MW project to 1.2 gigawatts, and is developing one of the region's largest wind farms in Kazakhstan — a 1-gigawatt facility integrated with 600MWh of battery storage.

ACWA 100 gigawatts ambition

Like Masdar, ACWA’s whole business is built around the green transition and Uzbekistan has become a flagship investment for the company.

"ACWA is a leading developer, investor, operator of power, desalinated water, green hydrogen and storage facilities," Malik said. The company's portfolio spans 109 projects across 15 countries, either under construction, in operation, or in advanced development, representing a total investment cost of close to $21bn. Combined generating capacity across that portfolio is approaching 100 gigawatts — "actually not 6 gigawatts right now," he clarified, "and inshallah, within the next few months... we will essentially mark 100 gigawatts soon," referring to additional projects currently in the pipeline.

Beyond power generation, ACWA claims the position of the world's largest desalinated water producer, with the capacity across its projects to produce 10mn cubic metres of water per day. To illustrate the scale, he offered a comparison: "This 10mn cubic metre of water is actually equivalent to the total water consumption of France, Spain and Greece."

ACWA also positioned itself as the only company in the world with a green hydrogen project either under construction or in operation. The flagship is the NEOM project in Saudi Arabia, which on completion will produce 200,000 tonnes of green hydrogen per year for export from Saudi Arabia to Europe and other markets. In Uzbekistan, the company has launched a far smaller pilot — 3,000 tonnes per year — which he described as a step toward supplying clean hydrogen for domestic petrochemical production, in close cooperation with the government.

The company has been present in Uzbekistan since 2020, when it signed its first project — the Sirdarya gas-to-power plant, a 1,500MW facility developed with a Chinese EPC contractor and backed by the EBRD among other lenders. Construction was completed and the plant entered operation in 2024.

"That was a step in the door, not only for us, for the government of Uzbekistan as well," he said. "The trust they placed in us, and the trust we placed in the reforms, literally worked out, and that was a real success story."

He attributed the project's success to alignment across the full chain of Uzbek institutions involved — presidential advisors, the energy ministry, the ministry of economy and finance, and the ministry of investment. The project was a test case, and its success threw open the doors of the Uzbek market for ACWA.

"Everybody was aligned under the leadership of Mr President," Malik said. "When these reforms were introduced, after thorough discussions internally, everybody wanted to achieve that goal." That alignment, he suggested, is what allowed Sirdarya to function as the proof of concept that subsequent, much larger ACWA investments in the country were built upon.

ACWA Power’s localisation and training

If Masdar's pitch centred on generating capacity development, ACWA is doing the same, but has added a human and manufacturing dynamic to its work in Uzbekistan. Malik emphasised the localisation of the manufacturing of components in Uzbekistan as well as technical education and regional development as part of the company’s routine – aspects that are very important to the president’s development goals of adding value to any project and creating jobs for his young and burgeoning population.

ACWA's president for Central Asia detailed a six-year partnership with Sherin College, a long-established technical institute located near the company's first Sirdarya project.

"We invested a lot of both capital and human efforts in that college to shape their infrastructure, shape their classes, bring new laboratories, bring new courses, bring new curriculum," he said, noting that the company also funded teacher training. The results to date: 200 students enrolled in the programme, more than 100 having completed the first course, with graduates now operating ACWA's PV and wind control rooms directly — including, he noted with evident pride, "a lot of young girls who actually graduated and they are actually operating the platform."

To extend the programme's reach beyond a single region, ACWA brought 78 students from Karakalpakstan — the far-western region the government designated a priority renewable energy zone in August 2023 — to board and train at Sherin College specifically so that the skills pipeline would not be "concentrated only in one geography of the country."

On localisation of the supply chain, the message echoed comments Abid Malik, ACWA's president for Central Asia, gave to bne IntelliNews in an exclusive interview at last year's TIIF: "We at ACWA Power encourage as much local content as possible," Malik said then. "We have been enhancing the manufacturing capacity in the country as it also adds to the human capital, jobs and GDP for the country. We manufacture the turbines here and the blades are being made in Karakalpak." At this year's forum, the company's representative extended that narrative to transmission infrastructure, noting that local manufacturers are now producing conductors and transmission towers for a national grid build-out that he estimated would ultimately require at least 6,000 kilometres of new transmission line.

The scale of ACWA's overall position in the market, established in previous IntelliNews reporting, provides essential context for the forum remarks. The company has invested more than $15bn since its 2020 entry, with plans for a further $5-6bn in the short term, taking total commitments to $25bn by the end of the decade — a portfolio that would make Uzbekistan ACWA's second-largest market globally after its home base in Saudi Arabia. Agreements signed during President Mirziyoyev's June 2025 visit to Riyadh added 1,400MW of new solar capacity, 1,500MW of battery storage and a 1,500MW combined-cycle gas turbine plant for Tashkent, taking the company's total committed capacity in the country above 8,000MW.

The contractual structure underpinning that investment, as Malik explained to IntelliNews, rests on 25-year guaranteed tariffs structured on a "take and pay" basis.

"It's a good deal for the government as they only pay for what they take," he said. "If the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine they don't have to pay — we take the risk." Falling battery costs — from roughly €254 per megawatt-hour in 2012 to €30-40 now, according to Malik — have made storage commercially viable across ACWA's more recent projects, including 600MW in Samarkand and 1,000MW in Karakalpakstan, even though the original Bukhara project went ahead without it.

The transmission bottleneck

Both companies, in their TIIF appearances and in prior interviews, say the main structural constraint facing Uzbekistan's renewable build-out is the grid.

"The biggest problem remains the transmission lines," Malik told IntelliNews. "Forty years ago, you would build a gas-fired plant near the city you want to power. Today you want to build the green generating capacity where the sun shines hottest or the wind blows hardest. Then you have to get your power from these remote locations to where it is needed."

Nandita Parshad, the EBRD's managing director for sustainable infrastructure, made a similar diagnosis in 2023: the previous winter's energy crisis, she said, "had more to do with the inefficient grid than the lack of generating capacity."

That both ACWA and Masdar — now investing not just in generation but in local manufacturing of grid-related hardware, from towers and conductors to battery systems — are addressing the transmission bottleneck directly.