The Top 100 Infrastructure Projects

The Top 100 Canadian Infrastructure Projects report will be released January 14. All new subscribers this month will get a copy. For more information, contact us.

What’s the key to a successful project? If you ask PPP Québec’s President and CEO Pierre Lefebvre, he’ll say one word: sponsors. His agency closed the financing for their Highway 30 project this September, just as the financial crisis was building. “The secret is a good consortium, or team,” he says. “A good sponsor helps the transaction move forward.”

In this case, it didn’t hurt that the sponsor was Spanish giant Acciona . “The Spanish banks were happy to help out one of their own large companies,” says Lefebvre.

Lefebvre is talking specifically about moving public-private partnerships (P3s) forward, but his advice holds for any of the Top 10 (and Top 100) projects. Somewhere along the way, someone had to fight for each one of these projects. In today’s economic climate, with credit costing more than it once did, and lenders feeling more anxious than they ever did, a project champion is more important than ever before.

The Toronto Transit Commission certainly fought to get the Spadina Subway Extension off the books and onto our list. And that’s just one of the sizeable new projects that moved into the Top 10 this year. For the first time ever, a renewable energy project is in our number-one spot. B.C.’s massive Port Mann/Highway 1 project also made our Top 10.

Of course, some juggernaut projects are still with us — Bruce A, after increasing its project scope last year, is in our Top 10 for the third year in a row. The Canada Line, a true megaproject, is moving its way towards completion, with a few milestones reached this year.

The Top 10 as a whole represents $23.5 billion in capital. Not surprisingly, all of that money was spent on transportation and energy projects. What is surprising is how those numbers shift when our list of Top 100 Canadian Infrastructure Projects is broken down. In the end, Ontario has the most projects on our list, but it’s largely due to the number of hospitals under construction, many of which will be completed in 2009. That should make for an interesting year of research and a very different list for 2010.