Gulf Cooperation Council Secretary-General Jasem Albudaiwi said the GCC electricity interconnection produced more than $952 million in financial savings during 2025. He also put cumulative savings since the project began at more than $5.2 billion. The figures were presented at the 31st meeting of the GCC Electricity and Water Cooperation Committee in Manama on 5 October 2026, according to the Saudi Press Agency. Both amounts are thresholds: the report does not give exact totals beyond those lower bounds. They describe savings attributed to the GCC interconnection, not separate national budget gains or a measured reduction in household tariffs.

Albudaiwi also reported that total electricity generation across GCC states reached approximately 876,000 gigawatt-hours in 2025, up 9.6% from the previous year. This is an annual aggregate for the member states. It is not a single-country figure, installed capacity, peak demand, or the amount of electricity transmitted through the interconnection itself. The release gives no country-by-country production table, source mix, or decomposition of the increase. The total therefore indicates the scale of regional generation, while leaving the causes and distribution of growth unspecified.

For water, the Secretary-General put desalinated-water production at around 8.5 billion cubic metres in 2025, an increase of 10.8% year on year. This is a production flow, not water consumption, deliveries to households, per-capita use, or plant design capacity. The statement does not break output down by member state, energy input, cost, or cross-border transfer. The two growth rates are reported as stated in the speech; the article does not derive unreported national values or infer a change in installed infrastructure from them.

The meeting took place in Manama and was chaired by Bahrain’s Minister of Electricity and Water Affairs, Yaser bin Ebrahim Humaidan, chair of the current session. Albudaiwi recalled that the GCC Supreme Council’s 19th consultative meeting in Jeddah on 28 April 2026 called for strengthening the electricity grid and studying the feasibility of water-interconnection projects among member states. That direction is not an approval or financing decision for a specific multilateral water pipeline. In October, the committee discussed supply security, emergency preparedness, and assessing possible multilateral links alongside existing bilateral connections.

The reported electricity savings point to economic value from systems that can support one another, but the SPA account does not publish the calculation method, comparison baseline, or allocation of savings among member governments and users. The figures cannot therefore be treated as a detailed benefit-cost analysis or as a direct effect on retail bills. Likewise, generation totals do not measure new capacity or reliability. The release is useful for keeping distinct three kinds of indicators: annual power and desalinated-water output, annual interconnection savings, and cumulative savings since the grid project began. Water interconnection proposals remain at the study stage in the account.