Malaysian company Pestech International Bhd has won government approval to build an $86 million power transmission line from Preah Sihanouk province to Phnom Penh.

The company’s subsidiary, Pestech Cambodia, in a joint venture with local firm Alex Corporation (ACCL), will commence designing, engineering and constructing the 198-kilometre power line within the next three months, a March 10 filing on the Malaysian stock exchange said.

Construction is expected to be completed within 32 months.

When finished, the 230-kilovolt transmission line will connect an existing Preah Sihanouk substation in Stung Hav district with a West Phnom Penh substation. Both are run by state-owned energy supplier Electricite du Cambodge.

Pestech said in the filing that the project is expected to contribute positively to the company’s future earnings.

In October of last year, the government announced it had commissioned Alex Corporation to build $119 million worth of transmission lines in a build-operate-transfer agreement to construct and run the infrastructure before handing it over at the end of a 29-year lease. Pestech was not mentioned as being part of the deal, nor did the government specify how many lines Alex Corporation had been enlisted to build.

Neither Electricite du Cambodge nor the Ministry of Industry, Mines and Energy could be reached for comment yesterday.

The announcement comes less than a month after Prime Minister Hun Sen officially launched operations at the Kingdom’s first coal-fired power plant in Stung Hav district.

During the launch of the 100- megawatt power plant, which is owned by Malaysian company Leader Universal Ltd, Hun Sen also announced the development of a second, partly Chinese-owned coal-fired plant in the same region, which is slated to open later this year.

The Pestech and Alex Corporation transmission line project, which includes an upgrade to the substation in Preah Sihanouk, will ferry the power generated by the region’s current and future producers to the capital once complete, the filing said.

Dato Sean H’ng, group CEO for Leader Universal, declined to comment on the recent announcement.