Estimating & Assurance
Class A–D electrical estimates with stated accuracy, traceable benchmarks, and sign-off rigor that survives board and funder review.
BEng · MSc · MRICS · MCIOB · CCP · CET · PQS · GSC
Sharib
Maradukhel.
I make the electrical number defensible — before it becomes a change order, a claim, or a surprise at sign-off. Cost estimating, risk & procurement advisory for data center, mission-critical, rail and healthcare capital programs — built to AACE 18R-97 and CIQS estimate-class discipline. Director, Electrical Cost Management.
18+Years, cost & risk leadership
$5B+Program sign-off value
15%Forecast variance reduced
8Professional credentials
Contributing Author — Construction Economist, Journal of the CIQS
Creator — The Electrical Cost Toolkit
18+ years — Canadian infrastructure & mission-critical
About
The single-line diagram is the cost plan.
I lead electrical cost management for some of North America's most complex infrastructure programs. Across 18+ years in consultancy and contractor environments, I've helped owners, boards and government sponsors make defensible capital decisions on programs exceeding $5 billion — from Class A–D estimates and lifecycle costing to quantitative risk analysis and procurement strategy.
My work sits at the intersection of engineering and commercial strategy: translating electrical design complexity into cost intelligence an executive can act on.
As Director, I set cost governance standards across an infrastructure portfolio, hold ultimate sign-off on estimate assurance, and build the cross-disciplinary MEP estimating teams that deliver it — while developing the next generation of the discipline, from graduate to director.
MRICS · MCIOB · PQS
How I work
Three commitments behind every number.
01 Defensible, not just accurate
Every estimate carries traceable benchmarks, documented assumptions and stated accuracy — built to survive board scrutiny, funder review and the bidder who says you're wrong.
02 Translate, always
Technical complexity is the raw material, not the product. The product is a capital decision an executive can own — clear risk, clear trade-offs, clear recommendation.
03 Build people, not just estimates
The estimates will be superseded; the professionals won't be. Graduate-to-director development is how a cost practice — and a profession — compounds.
Perspectives
Positions I'll defend in any boardroom.
"The square foot is dead."
Data centers broke area-based estimating. Capacity — $/MW, kW per rack — is the unit mission-critical buildings are bought and built in.
From the weekly series →
"Contingency is not a confession."
A percentage is padding; a portfolio of named risks with a drawdown plan is a defensible funding position. Cultures that shame contingency produce the overruns they fear.
From the weekly series →
"The single-line diagram is the cost plan."
Quantities are arithmetic. Where the money concentrates, where the risk hides, where the design will grow — a trained eye reads it all off one drawing.
From the weekly series →
Services
Advisory for electrically intensive capital programs.
Six disciplines, one outcome: capital decisions that survive board scrutiny, funder review, and the market's final vote. Typical engagements include estimate assurance and peer review, pre-tender risk and procurement strategy, bid evaluation and reconciliation, whole-life option analysis, and executive briefings on electrical cost risk.
Risk & Contingency
Quantitative risk analysis built from named risks — asymmetric, defensible, with a drawdown plan rather than a padding percentage.
Procurement Strategy
Long-lead gear, owner-furnished equipment, escalation clauses and delivery-model advice for volatile electrical supply chains.
Lifecycle Costing
Whole-life analysis with the standing to recommend the higher capital option — because the cheapest system is often the one you regret.
Cost Governance
Portfolio-wide planning frameworks and reporting standards that reduced forecast variance by 10% at program level, 15%+ across the portfolio.
Team Leadership
Building cross-disciplinary MEP estimating functions — resourcing models, QA protocols, and graduate-to-director career pathways.
Rail & Transit
Data Centers & Mission-Critical
Healthcare
Institutional
Energy & Grid Infrastructure
P3 / AFP Delivery
01Diagnose
Rapid review of the estimate, single-line, schedule and market context — where the number is exposed and what it can honestly support.
02Analyze
The technical work: build-up or assurance, named risk quantification, escalation and procurement strategy, whole-life options.
03Defend
Board-ready advice: documented assumptions, traceable benchmarks, and a position built to survive funder scrutiny and the market's vote.
Career
Eighteen years, from the factory floor to program sign-off.
2026 — now
Director, Electrical Cost Management
Altus Group · Greater Toronto Area
Senior technical authority on electrical capital cost across multi-billion-dollar rail and infrastructure programs. Firm-wide cost governance standards, ultimate estimate sign-off for $5B+ programs, and national leadership of the electrical cost discipline.
2021 — 2026
Associate Director, Electrical Cost Management
Altus Group
Executive-level cost leadership on rail and infrastructure programs; program-wide planning and governance frameworks reducing forecast variance by ~10%; directed Class A–D estimate assurance and cross-disciplinary MEP team integration.
2016 — 2021
Associate, Electrical Cost Management
Altus Group
Electrical cost planning and value optimization for transit, healthcare and mission-critical facilities from concept through procurement; tender strategy, bid evaluation and commercial reconciliation for public and private clients.
2016
Senior Cost Consultant
Turner & Townsend · Toronto
Senior cost advisory on critical infrastructure: early-stage scope definition, constructability input, and reporting structures that strengthened executive confidence in forecasts.
2014 — 2016
Electrical Cost Consultant
BTY Group · Toronto
Specialist electrical estimating for healthcare, laboratory and mission-critical environments; cost dashboards that cut reporting time by ~30% and improved decision visibility.
2008 — 2014
Field Delivery & Engineering Foundations
RTG Systems · Satcon Technology · A.W. Hooker
Electrical infrastructure project delivery, commissioning and close-out; power conversion systems testing; and first-principles quantity surveying — the field years behind every estimate since.
Insights
Electrical cost, decoded.
Practitioner analysis on the scope where capital risk now concentrates — written for the people who have to defend the number.
Data centers & mission-criticalWhy $/MW Replaced $/SF in Data Center Estimating
Electrical scope drives 40–50% of data center cost. Why square-foot benchmarks fail on mission-critical projects — and what to price instead.
Read the article → Estimating practiceHow to Read a Single-Line Diagram as a Cost Professional
Quantities are arithmetic. The single-line is strategy. Four things it tells a trained eye — where the money concentrates, and where the design will grow.
Read the article → Cost controlWhere Electrical Change Orders Are Born
Change orders are not construction events. They are estimating events with a delay. The four birthplaces — and how to close them.
Read the article →Writing & Research
Published in the journal of Canada's quantity surveying profession.
Contributing author to Construction Economist, the journal of the Canadian Institute of Quantity Surveyors, published three times a year — alongside a weekly LinkedIn series on electrical cost, risk and the market.
Weekly LinkedIn SeriesElectrical Cost Management: Trends, Risk & Practice
Data centers and $/MW estimating, transformer lead times, grid constraints, healthcare essential power, transit traction power, escalation and procurement strategy — one practitioner post every week.
Follow the series → Construction Economist — Journal of the CIQS · Summer 2026Keeping the Heartbeat of an Airport Strong: The Unseen Power of Electrical Maintenance
Why electrical maintenance is a strategic investment, not a checklist item: airfield lighting, terminal power, ATC systems, backup generation — and the true cost of a single outage, from $50,000+ per hour of runway downtime to millions in operational losses.
Read in the digital edition → Construction Economist — Journal of the CIQS · Spring 2026Data Centres: An Overview
The data center boom from a Canadian cost professional's perspective — what makes these facilities a distinct estimating discipline, from power density and electrical intensity to the market forces reshaping capital planning for mission-critical infrastructure.
Read in the digital edition → Construction Economist — Journal of the CIQS · Fall 2025LRT Delivery & Cost Management
A practitioner analysis of light rail program delivery: why systems and traction power scope is chronically underestimated, and how owners can forecast it better.
Read in the digital edition → Construction Economist — Journal of the CIQS · Fall 2016A Comprehensive Analysis of Hydro, Solar & Wind Power
Comparative generation economics for capital planners — levelized cost, firming, and the electrical infrastructure common to every pathway of the energy transition.
Read in the digital edition →Tools
A free estimating toolkit, built for the profession.
Five calculators, open and no sign-up, applying the disciplines behind a defensible number — the same ones I write about every week:
Class A–D accuracy ranges
Pick the estimate class and the result becomes an expected value with an honest range — not a single figure pretending to certainty.
Three-tier build-up
Ten elements for Class D, a twenty-element intermediate breakdown for Class C, and full sub-element detail for Class B/A — motor controls, lighting controls, heating connections and more. Switching tiers preserves your entered values.
Named risk register
Contingency built from named risks with probability and impact, instead of an anonymous padding percentage.
Compound escalation
Annual rate compounded to construction midpoint — with the effective percentage shown in the audit trail.
Scenario comparison
Snapshot options side by side and read the delta in dollars and percent — the concept-stage trade-off conversation, quantified.
$/kW density check
Because on mission-critical work, square feet stop telling the truth — density governs.
Alongside the cost build-up sit four engineering calculators: kW / HP to amps, building load requirements by type (office, retail, residential and more — e.g. mechanical & plumbing at ~30% of an office building's load), interior lighting by the lumen method (lux per m², converted to fixtures), and indicative cable sizing checked against both ampacity and voltage drop — for estimating, not design.
Starter rates and presets are placeholders — the toolkit is an engine for your own benchmark data. Order-of-magnitude results; assumptions must accompany any figure.
Also free · Value engineering
The Electrical Value Engineering Suite.
A companion toolkit for the decision the estimate can't make alone — first cost versus lifetime cost. Three studies on one set of assumptions: feeder VE (copper vs aluminium, checked on voltage drop and I²R losses), a BOQ optimizer, and lifecycle total-cost-of-ownership for transformers, UPS, generators, switchboards, panelboards and lighting — with a full Excel export.
Also free · Data centers
The Data Center MEP Estimator.
A capacity-factored $/MW order-of-magnitude estimator for data-center MEP — IT load, redundancy (N to 2N+1), cooling and US or Canadian location, with escalation, currency and a full AACE Class 5 / CIQS Class D basis of estimate. Built for the mission-critical work now reshaping the market.
Credentials
Chartered, certified, accountable.
MRICS Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors
MCIOB Chartered Institute of Building
PQS Professional Quantity Surveyor, CIQS
CCP Certified Cost Professional, AACE
CET Certified Engineering Technologist, OACETT
GSC Gold Seal Certified, CCA
CEC Construction Estimator Certified, CIQS
IES Illuminating Engineering Society, Lighting Level 1
MSc, Engineering & Manufacturing Management — Coventry University
Construction Management Certification — Columbia University
Business Analytics Specialization — University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
Electrical Engineering Technology — Mohawk College
Mechanical Estimating Certificate — George Brown College
Beyond the estimate
Where cost management becomes leadership.
The estimate is where I started. What makes it matter is what it protects — a program's certainty, an owner's credibility, the confidence a board needs to commit capital. Across eighteen years I've moved from the number itself toward the decisions it informs, and toward building the cost-management capability that keeps large programs honest.
Speaking & writing
Panels, guest lectures and a weekly series on electrical cost, risk and capital delivery. If you're convening a conversation on infrastructure cost, I'm glad to contribute.
Profession & industry
Contributing author to the CIQS Construction Economist, and engaged where the profession is thinking hardest about cost predictability and estimate discipline.
Leadership opportunities
For organizations building serious cost-management capability on electrically intensive programs, I'm open to senior and leadership conversations where that expertise moves the needle.
Start a conversation
Navigating a high-risk electrical scope or a major capital decision?
I bring clarity where it matters most — on high-risk electrical scope, pre-tender risk and procurement strategy, and the capital decisions that turn on getting the number right. Whether it's an executive briefing, a speaking or writing invitation, or a senior opportunity in cost management, the conversation starts with an email.
sharib_213@yahoo.comPrefer LinkedIn? That's where the weekly conversation happens — connect or DM me there, and mention what you're working on.
Greater Toronto Area, Canada · Serving programs across the United States & Canada
Open to senior and leadership opportunities in mission-critical and data-center cost, and to speaking, panels and contributed articles across North America.