Balfour Beatty awarded part of National Grid’s upgrade project

International infrastructure group Balfour Beatty has been awarded a £363m contract as part of National Grid’s RIIO-2 framework.

The contract is part of the Bamford to Twinstead Reinforcement project, which aims to reinforce East Anglia’s electricity network as part of the country’s green energy build-out.

The company will replace the existing electricity network with a 400-kilovolt overhead line between Bamford Substation in Suffolk and Twinstead Tee in Essex.

As part of the contract, the company will also deliver 11km of underground cable through Dedham Vale and Stour Valley.

The company plans to begin construction in 2025 with a target end date of 2028.

The team will focus on mitigating any disruption to local wildlife and deliver a 10 per cent biodiversity net gain across the entire project.

Chief executive Leo Quinn, said: “This award demonstrates the momentum we are capturing in the energy security and transition market”.

“This latest award will once again enable our expert team to deploy their proven capability to successfully deliver overhead lines and underground cabling works in complex and challenging landscapes”.

The contract is part of National Grid’s Great Grid Upgrade, the largest overhaul of the electricity grid in generations.

However, the company’s plans have attracted plenty of criticism, with communities opposing plans to build pylons across the country.

But this week, Ed Miliband’s clean energy adviser said the government has ruled out burying electricity cables underground as part of its energy strategy.

Chris Stark, the former leader of the Climate Change Committee, now heads the government’s ‘mission control’ department told a Green Alliance event in London: “The government is very clear that it will cost too much [to put cables underground]. It is not my intention that we will push for a plan [in which] we will [put] underground all our cables – our departmental analysis shows it will take too long, and the benefits, frankly, are, I think, overstated … So we don’t want to end up in a situation where we delay the whole project by looking at those things.”