Hyundai E&C lights up the central region of Saudi Arabia

The Riyadh 380kV transmission line construction project, or ST8L, is designed to supply electric power, generated in two power stations including (PP12 and PP13) located in the western part of the capital Riyadh of Saudi Arabia, to the city’s downtown and its satellite city Al Jilah without disruptions. Hyundai E&C received the ST8L project on a lump sum turnkey (LSTK) basis in February 2015 with a bid to build the 256-kilometer transmission lines and 710 transmission towers as well as to modify and reinforce the exiting transmission lines. The construction costs approximately 130 million dollars.

Starting with the Asir electrification project and the Riyadh substation project in the 1970s, Korea’s primary builder came to the front in the kingdom’s transmission and substation market. Over the past three decades, the builder has conducted about 70 transmission and substation projects and built a total of 17,976-kilometer transmission lines accounting for 20 percent of the high voltage electric grid of the country.
In the early stage of the project, workers at the construction site had to establish all new construction infrastructures and address problems with the vastness of the construction area and the complexity of the project. To deal with these, they divided the construction site into four portions (referred to as P).

P-1 and P-2 focus on building transmission lines linked to two units of new power plants. P1 and P2 include the construction of 88-kilometer and 169-kilometer transmission lines, and 240 and 454 transmission towers, respectively. P-3 and P-4 are aimed to modify the existing transmission lines by reinforcing and relocating the transmission lines connected with the existing power plants and substations as well as building additional 10 and 6 transmission towers, respectively.

Among other things, the most challenging construction was incorporated into P-3. The P-3 site was considered too small as it was located within the site of the power plant in operation. To make better use of the space, they designed a four-circuit transmission tower, so-called Star Tower, instead of the conventional double-circuit transmission towers.

Notably the workers feel a special proud of the P-2 construction. They put efforts into specially designing transmission towers to conduct the project in the dangerous terrain. Each special Towers are about 800 meters apart, which is two times longer than the distance between the ordinary ones. 

The construction of the ST8L project began in February 2015.

As of November 2019, the construction site achieved 5,096,362-man hours of no accident throughout all construction processes. Moreover, its outstanding technological prowess and excellent construction capability are well received in the country. It is expected that the ST8L project is able to lay the solid foundation for Hyundai E&C to be awarded new contracts in the central region of Saudi Arabia.