WSP's US power revenue reaches up to 40% of total as grid engineering displaces transport work

WSP Global reported on 6 August 2026 that power and energy now accounts for as much as 40% of its US revenue, CEO Alexandre L'Heureux said on the company's second-quarter earnings call^[1] - up from approximately one-third as recently as Q1 2026^[1], and from near zero five years ago.

What the numbers show

The shift is visible across several metrics from the Q2 call:

• Net revenue from WSP's top 40 global power clients rose 30% year over year, while US net revenue from those same clients grew 15% and hard backlog from them rose 20%^[1].
• TRC's hard backlog grew 30% and its soft backlog 35% in the same period, with management identifying more than 100 joint pursuit opportunities between WSP and TRC teams.
• WSP now serves the top 60 US investor-owned utilities, a client base that spans generation, transmission, and distribution engineering.
• The company is supporting 22 prospective nuclear sites in the US and is ranked first in data center design by Engineering News-Record.

Overall, Q2 net revenues reached $4.27 billion, up 22.9% year over year, with adjusted EBITDA rising 29% to CAD 815 million - the best second-quarter margin since WSP's IPO. Total backlog hit a record CAD 20.1 billion, up 23% over 12 months.

The TRC acquisition as the structural lever

The revenue mix shift is inseparable from WSP's February 2026 close of its $3.3 billion acquisition of TRC Companies, a Windsor, Connecticut-based engineering and advisory firm with approximately 8,000 professionals and deep relationships across US utilities. The deal, announced in December 2025, was framed explicitly as a move to capture the US grid buildout - TRC's expertise spans power delivery, transmission, distribution, and utility program management, the precise services in demand as utilities race to expand capacity for data centers and electrification.

L'Heureux said on the Q2 call that TRC integration is on track and expected to complete within six months, with salary and benefits harmonization described as substantially complete and a systems cutover planned for 1 January 2027.

Where the grid work is coming from

The demand is not uniform. L'Heureux described the strongest areas as "directly linked to long-term-duration investment themes" - a phrase that covers grid transmission and interconnection work, data center power supply engineering, and nuclear site support. Data center revenue grew more than 20% in the first half of 2026, with the sales pipeline expanding roughly 30% year over year. WSP supports more than six data center sites with over 1 GW of compute capacity each.

The nuclear angle is notable for the grid desk: supporting 22 prospective US nuclear sites means WSP is embedded in the interconnection and grid-integration planning that precedes any new capacity coming online - work that sits squarely in transmission and resource adequacy planning.

What to watch

WSP raised its full-year 2026 net revenue guidance to CAD 16.2-17.0 billion and adjusted EBITDA to CAD 3.10-3.18 billion. The more telling indicator will be whether the power share of US revenue holds at 40% or continues to climb as TRC's backlog converts. The company's US soft backlog reached approximately CAD 10 billion at quarter end, up 9% versus Q1 2026, with the top 20 opportunities representing more than CAD 4 billion in potential revenue - the majority tied to power, data centers, and water.