Five-year alliance contracts together worth around $5.3 billion have been awarded to upgrade and expand aging English and Welsh electricity transmission networks. Work will include building links to the U.K.’s increasing number of wind farms and also to new generating plants.

National Grid plc (NG), London, will negotiate with six joint ventures on final details of the contracts, which will be extendable to 10 years. Joint ventures, including equipment suppliers, design firms and contractors, must consider the whole-life aspects of assets in their care.

Two alliances, East and West, will cover high-voltage overhead transmission and buried electricity cables. Four other contracts deal with substations. The contracts cover only England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own arrangements.

The alliances are modeled on four eight-year collaborative contracts for gas pipeline work awarded in February 2005, says NG's U.K. construction director, Rowan Sharples. In those contracts, NG leads some teams, while the contractors head others. Contracts even award bonuses for collaboration between different alliance teams, which might be in adjacent areas and require coordination, says Sharples. There are no failure penalties, only achievement bonuses, he adds.

Balfour Beatty Group, among the gas alliance contractors, also has won one of the new electricity contracts covering the eastern region. The company expects the new deal to be worth over $1 billion in the initial five years. Such integrated service contracts are “an increasingly important factor in driving our growth and in enhancing our relationships with blue-chip infrastructure customers,” according to Chief Executive Ian Tyler.

A consortium of Amec plc, Babcock International Group plc and Mott MacDonald Group is preferred bidder for NG’s western overhead-line alliance. The four substation contracts are split among 12 firms in four teams. U.S.-linked firms in the teams are Jacobs and PB Power. Other participants include AREVA, Mitsubishi Electric and Siemens.