SNC-Lavalin Group and its partner, IMPSA, have won a contract with BC Hydro.Mario Beauregard/The Canadian Press
SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. and its consortium partner have been picked by British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority as the preferred contractor on a $940-million project to design and build a replacement generating station on Vancouver Island.
BC Hydro and Montreal-based SNC-Lavalin have confirmed that the consortium has been selected and discussions are to begin soon with the aim of signing a contract in early 2014.
"We are pleased to have been chosen as the preferred contractor and look forward to putting our expertise in this area to work for the population in B.C.," SNC-Lavalin spokeswoman Leslie Quinton said in an email Wednesday.
The announcement provides a boost to engineering and construction giant SNC-Lavalin, which has been struggling to remake itself under a new chief executive in the wake of a series of corruption scandals linked to major projects in the Middle East, Asia and at home.
SNC-Lavalin's partner is Latin American energy and hydroelectricity company IMPSA.
The win is an encouraging sign that SNC-Lavalin's engineering and construction unit, which has had backlog problems, "is not imploding as some have assumed," Dundee Capital Markets analyst Maxim Sytchev said in a research note.
The B.C. project is for an underground power station to replace the 65-year-old John Hart Generating Station on Campbell River, one of the oldest facilities of its kind in the BC Hydro electric network.
Bertrand Marotte