Saudi Arabia Commits $58.7bn to Its Transmission Backbone Through 2030

Saudi Electricity Company is investing up to $58.7 billion — around 220 billion riyals — in its transmission and distribution networks between 2025 and 2030, according to trade reporting on the programme. Roughly $36 billion is directed at the transmission backbone and $22.7 billion at distribution. It is the largest single grid programme the kingdom has undertaken.

The figures describe a network being rebuilt at a pace that is unusual anywhere.

Around 14,000 kilometres of transmission line are planned — approximately 12,900 kilometres of overhead line and 1,100 kilometres of underground cable. Alongside them, 130 high-voltage substations are to be built or upgraded, adding some 135,000 MVA of transformation capacity.

For scale: 135,000 MVA is more than four hundred times the installed capacity of a single large substation of the kind built for a regional network.

What the network looks like now

The starting point is already substantial. Analysis by REGlobal put the network at approximately 92,999 circuit kilometres across the 132 kV to 380 kV levels as of 2022, with transformer capacity of 474,262 MVA. The higher-voltage tier — 230 kV and 380 kV — grew from 37,783 circuit kilometres in 2018 to 49,649 in 2022.

Growth has continued since. Company reporting for 2025 put transmission and fibre-optic networks up 4.9 per cent on the year, passing 104,600 circuit kilometres of transmission line and 104,400 kilometres of fibre.

That the two figures track each other so closely is not a coincidence. Modern high-voltage line is strung with OPGW — a cable whose outer layers shield the circuit from lightning while optical fibres inside carry protection and control data. Build a kilometre of line and you generally build a kilometre of communications with it.

The target: 160,000 kilometres and nine HVDC links

By 2030 the company aims to operate approximately 160,000 kilometres of transmission line and to have commissioned nine new HVDC links, both between regions inside the kingdom and across its borders.

HVDC — high-voltage direct current — is the technology of choice for moving bulk power over very long distances, or between networks that do not run in step with one another. Saudi Arabia has both problems: a landmass that separates generation from demand by hundreds of kilometres, and neighbours whose grids it wants to trade with.

Trading power across borders

The cross-border work is the most visible part of the programme.

The Saudi–Egypt interconnector is a 3 GW HVDC link running some 1,300 kilometres of overhead line — around 965 kilometres inside Saudi Arabia and 335 in Egypt — joined by a 20-kilometre submarine cable across the Gulf of Aqaba. A first phase of 1,500 MW was targeted for June 2025 and a second for that November. The Japan Bank for International Cooperation lent $207 million toward it in 2023.

Northward, a 164 circuit-kilometre, 400 kV overhead line connects Qurayyat in Saudi Arabia to East Amman in Jordan, with an initial 500 MW of capacity expandable to 1,000 MW, and a GIS substation on the Saudi side. Work on interconnections with Iraq and India is also under way, and an upgrade contracted in March 2023 at the Al-Fadhili HVDC converter station enables 1,800 MW of exchange among GCC countries.

Why the numbers reach 380 kV

Almost all of this is specified at 380 kV or above. That is a deliberate choice rather than an engineering flourish: at a given power, raising voltage lowers current, and lower current means less energy lost as heat over the length of a route. It is the reason long-distance transfer happens at these levels and local distribution does not.

It is also why lines of this class are built the way they are — quad bundles of four sub-conductors per phase to hold down losses and corona, suspension towers through the straight sections, heavier angle and dead-end structures where the route turns or terminates.

Pressly has documented two lines built to that specification in the north-west of the kingdom: the Tabuk 380 kV line, 112.5 kilometres and 309 towers, and the Al-Jawf 380 kV line, 107 kilometres and 279 towers. Both were delivered under the National Grid Reinforcement Programme that this decade of investment continues.

The scale in one table

Figures in this article are drawn from public reporting on the programme and from published analysis of the Saudi network; they have not been independently verified by Pressly. Where a number is attributed to company reporting, it reflects what has been publicly stated rather than an audited figure.