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EPM awards civil works contract for second stage of Ituango hydroelectric

EPM awards civil works contract for second stage of Ituango hydroelectric

Empresas Públicas de Medellín (EPM) has awarded the CYS Consortium a contract for the construction of final civil works for the commissioning of generating units 5 to 8 of the 2.4 GW Ituango Hydroelectric Project in Colombia.

The consortium is composed of Yellow River CO. LTD, Sucursal Colombia and Schrader Camargo SAS.

The contract for the civil works was awarded for an approximate value of COP1.075 trillion (US$254.5 million) and will have an execution period of 1,125 calendar days.

The plant is on the Cauca River in northwestern Colombia. From the initial planning of Ituango, implementation of the project was planned in two stages. The first stage corresponded to units 1 to 4 and the second to units 5 to 8. Each of the units has a capacity of 300 MW.

On Nov. 30, 2022, the contract ended with the CCC Ituango Consortium, which was in charge of construction of the main civil works of the first stage. Termination of this contract occurred due to the expiration of the contractual term and after the consortium’s decision to decline EPM’s request to continue the missing civil works of generation units 3 and 4, under a remuneration scheme for unit prices, due to greater efficiency for EPM.

As of Dec. 1, 2022, Colombian company Schrader Camargo, after a contracting process, assumed the execution of the missing civil works for generation units 3 and 4 and complementary works of the Ituango Hydroelectric Project.

For the development of this stage, EPM opened a public request for offers on March 10, 2022, in which 10 firms expressed interest and only one submitted the offer. This process was declared void. On April 24, 2023, EPM opened a new public request for offers for the second stage that concluded with this award. EPM said that accepting this offer means the project schedule is not affected. It also will allow greater economic efficiency, control of costs and execution because EPM will pay the contractor under a unit price scheme, as was done before the contingency that occurred in 2018.