The Ethiopian Electric Power Corp. has awarded the Italian construction firm Salini Costruttori a contract to build a hydroelectric power station consisting of three giant dams on the Blue Nile, 700 km northwest of the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa. The contract is worth €3.35 billion.
Pietro Salini, managing director of Salini Costruttori, said that the hydroelectric station in question represents the biggest contract assigned to an Italian general contractor, adding, "We win plants like these because our ideas are competitive. The Blue Nile [‘Millenium'] dam project, as other projects we are developing around the world, is ours; it has been conceived by Salini both on a technical and a planning level. These ideas contribute to the evolution of the overall construction and plant design sector."
The Ethiopian government, through Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation, is the purchaser of the Millennium Hydroelectric Project, which features a plant with an installed power generation capacity of 5,250 MW and an annual production of 15,000 GigaWH. The first units will be active from September 2014. The plant will increase the hydroelectric power available in Ethiopia to 10,000 MW by 2017.