E-MERGE consortium to work on TenneT’s high-voltage grid

Three consultancy and engineering firms – Witteveen+Bos, Bilfinger Tebodin and Antea Group – are combining their knowledge and experience in the field of electricity grids for a new project consortium: E-MERGE. By bringing together their expertise, the firms can more effectively contribute to the energy transition and provide solutions for the national electricity supply. In the coming years, E-MERGE will be working for grid operator TenneT. On Friday 9 September, representatives of the three firms and TenneT signed an agreement with a minimum term of four years.

Tanja Lendzion, CEO of Antea Group Nederland: ‘The increasing percentage of electricity in the energy mix for Dutch businesses and households is putting stress on our electricity infrastructure. To ensure its reliable and safe operation, restructuring, expansion and reinforcement of the grid and high-voltage substations is necessary. This entails a variety of activities, each of which is aligned to a specific discipline. With E-MERGE, we offer all this to the client in a single organisation.’

Integrated and regional

‘The incentive to collaborate was self-evident, actually,’ adds Witteveen+Bos director Eveline Buter. ‘Our organisations have been working together on large, complex projects for decades. For all three of us, TenneT has been an important client in the energy transition. In the framework agreement, TenneT expressed the desire to organise projects regionally and in an integrated manner wherever possible. This desire led us to consolidate the effective collaboration between our firms into a broadly deployable project consortium.’

Sustainable future

Wim van den Brink, CEO of Bilfinger Tebodin Netherlands B.V., stresses that E-MERGE is not a marriage of convenience: ‘Whereas the strength of one firm lies, for example, in its experience and technical expertise in the field of high voltage, the other partners complement this with, among other things, project management of large and complex infrastructure and installation projects, the carrying out of environmental or soil investigations, and the provision of engagement and stakeholder management. This results in a synergy that contributes to further accelerating a sustainable future.’ 

European tender process

The work for TenneT is the result of a European tender process initiated by the grid operator, ‘EU-300 Technical & Spatial Services’. E-MERGE was awarded two lots. The first relates to engineering, investigation and consultancy services for modifications, new constructions and expansions of high-voltage substations or connections. The second covers the field research and soil investigations necessary to realise the modifications, new constructions and expansions. The EU-300 collaboration agreement between TenneT and E-MERGE has a minimum term of four years with the possibility to extend this to eight.