Around midnight on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, news came that Saudi Arabia and Softbank, the giant venture capital fund, would partner to build the world’s largest solar power installation in the kingdom.

Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who announced the memorandum of understanding with Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, looks visionary once again. And vision for the future seems to be the theme for the Saudi economy today. After all, the country’s centralized economic plan is called “Vision2030” and seemingly everyone who meets with the Saudi delegation on its current trip through the U.S. touts the country’s vision.

But this particular vision—massive solar power generation in the sunny desert—is really nothing new . It is part of a long-term strategy that long predates the current Saudi leadership.

The newly announced project is estimated to cost $200 billion through 2030 and eventually produce 200 gigawatts of power. This is big news for a kingdom long known for its oil production, but it is no secret that the country’s leaders want to diversify from oil as a revenue source and also as a source for its own power. After all, if Saudi Arabia produces electricity through other, more efficient and cost effective means—nuclear, solar, natural gas—it can sell more of its own oil.

Back in the 1970s, though, the Saudi oil industry was already using advanced solar panels to run their equipment. At the time, Aramco, the national oil company, was still partially owned by American firms, including Exxon

 

Exxon had a subsidiary called Solar Power Corporation that was making advances in the technology. Aramco struggled to provide electricity to facilities that were isolated in the desert, so the two worked together. Solar Power’s technology was used to power some of these isolated Aramco operations.

Thirty years later, the vision of a solar powered future was even more exciting. Ali al-Naimi, then the Saudi oil minister and formerly the Aramco CEO, shared the bold vision with Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes. It was 2008, and the price of oil was close to the highest it would ever be. Aramco and Saudi Arabia were being flooded with cash from the oil business, and yet he said to her, “we in Saudi Arabia are developing solar energy.”