ACCIONA, Company of the Year for the Canada-Spain Chamber of Commerce

The Canada-Spain Chamber of Commerce named ACCIONA Company of the Year in recognition of the work the company has been doing in Canada in recent years and its contribution to Spanish-Canadian Relations.

The President of the Chamber, Alberto Echarri, delivered the award last night to the Vice President of ACCIONA, in a ceremony that was attended by the Canadian ambassador to Spain, Jon Allen.

Canada has been a strategic market for ACCIONA ever since the Deep Lake Water Cooling System project in 2002 in Toronto, which provided an innovative air conditioning/cooling solution for an office building using a 100% sustainable methodology. ACCIONA currently has offices in the country's major cities such as Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Calgary and was the first Spanish company to be part of a public-private partnership (PPP) in Canada.

Public-private collaboration

ACCIONA Infrastructure is present in the country at this time with three of its main lines of business: engineering, construction and concessions and some notable PPP projects including one hospital and three highways. The highways include the Herb Gray Parkway (formerly the Windsor Essex Parkway) in Ontario (11 km) which will open to traffic in 2014 and will serve as the province's main thoroughfare and the largest highway project ever undertaken in that province;  the Southeast Stoney Trail highway (25 km) in Calgary, Alberta, a project in which ACCIONA is the builder, operator and concession holder; and the A-30 Châteauguay-Vaudreuil-Dorion expressway in Québec (42 km), where again the company is the builder, operator and concession holder in a 50%-50% arrangement with the ACS Group. This project includes a tunnel under the Soulanges Canal and two large bridges, one over the St. Lawrence River measuring 1,850 metres long and the other over the St. Lawrence Canal in Beauharnois measuring 2,250 metres long (the longest incrementally launched bridge ever built in North America and the second largest in the world. This project was the winner of two of the concession sector's most prestigious awards: the 2008 Gold Award which is given out each year by the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships, a well-known organization in the Canadian concession sector, as part of the National Innovation and Excellence Awards for PPP Projects. It also received the North America Deal of the Year award in the category of financial operation of the year, an award given out by the prestigious PFI publication.

In the hospital sector ACCIONA has the Fort St. John Hospital and Residential Care Facility in British Columbia, which opened in 2012 and was recently recognised by the Vancouver Regional Construction Association (VRCA) with the VRCA 2013 Silver Award in General Contractor over $ 40 million. In addition, ACCIONA built and operated the Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria, a 42,000 square metre, 500-bed facility under a public-private partnership.

In the field of renewable energy, ACCIONA Energy entered the wind power sector in Canada in 2003 with Magrath Park in the province of Alberta, a 30 MW facility developed jointly with local partners. This was followed by the Chin Chute wind farm (30 MW), also in Alberta; Ripley (76 MW) in Ontario, both with local partners, and Lamèque (45 MW) in New Brunswick, the latter 100% owned. The four parks listed here, totalling 181 MW, produce emission-free energy equivalent to the amount needed to power more than 60,000 Canadian homes.

Additionally ACCIONA Windpower has supplied ten 3 MW wind turbines to the Hermanville Wind Farm (30 MW) on Prince Edward Island (east coast of Canada). The wind farm, currently under construction, is owned by PEI Energy Corporation.