The Ministry of Industry, Mines and Energy has put tender AO 01-2026 on the market for a 300 MW photovoltaic plant at Bazma, in the Kébili governorate, coupled with a 150 MW / 540 MWh battery energy storage system. The site covers roughly 440 hectares. Bids are due by midday on 14 October 2026.
Two features make this tender different from the concession rounds that preceded it.
It is the first Tunisian plant to combine generation and storage
Earlier concession rounds — Tozeur, Sidi Bouzid, Menzel Habib — procured photovoltaic generation alone. Bazma is the first to put a battery system inside the same contract, at a ratio of 150 MW of power to 540 MWh of energy, or 3.6 hours at rated output.
That changes the technical proposition. A bidder is no longer optimising a PV plant against a yield curve; it is optimising a hybrid asset against a dispatch profile, with degradation, round-trip efficiency, augmentation strategy and warranty terms on the battery all bearing directly on the financial model. Grid code compliance also becomes a live design question rather than a box to tick.
It is structured as a concession
The plant is being awarded under a concession agreement rather than through the authorisation regime that governs smaller private projects. That places it alongside the international IPP rounds in structure, with the diligence expectations that come with them: lender’s technical advisory, independent verification of the yield assessment, and construction-phase certification against drawdown.
What it signals
The tender follows a 500 MW solar procurement launched at the end of 2024 and the December 2025 approval of acquisition plans covering approximately 2 GW of wind and 350 MW of photovoltaic capacity. Read together, these point to a procurement pipeline that is widening in both scale and technical complexity, and to storage moving from pilot status into mainstream utility procurement.
For international developers and EPC contractors weighing a bid, the local requirements are the part that is hardest to price from outside the country: evidenced industrial integration, the STEG connection process and its own documentation timetable, land and permitting, and customs treatment of imported equipment.
AIUS works as local partner to international developers, EPC contractors and consulting engineers bidding in Tunisia, and as independent engineer to lenders financing solar projects. If you are preparing a bid for Bazma or a comparable project, we are happy to discuss the local scope.
