<
https://reneweconomy.com.au/tight-squeezes-and-tricky-turns-the-tortuous-path-of-transporting-giant-wind-turbines/>
"Moving wind turbine parts from port to site is not getting any easier, as
tighter squeezes and steeper sites test the ingenuity of trucking companies.
It’s the images – photos and videos – showing how tight these squeezes are that
ram home the scale of the challenge of transporting these epic machines,
sometimes many hundreds of kilometres.
During a video call, John Stokes, the “expert problem solver” at trucking
company Rex J Andrews, illustrates precisely how difficult it can be to haul
bigger and bigger pieces of machinery through Australia’s roading labyrinth.
He brings up a photo series of a blade being carefully driven down what looks
to be a narrow side road. As he clicks through, just how narrow it is becomes
very clear: the blade slides by a light pole with what looks like millimetres
to spare.
Another image gallery, another tower section, this time clenched low to the
ground between two bookend trailers. The huge circular piece just clears the
concrete of a roundabout. There’s so little room between steel and road “you
nearly couldn’t fit your hand under”, says the company’s operations manager
Warrick Andrews.
Then there’s the aerial shots of an intersection coming out of Geelong, in
Victoria, on a route up to the Golden Plains wind project. A slash of bright
white concrete curves upwards away from the junction, creating a new path and
avoiding the intersection.
The cause becomes clear in another photo: it’s not the intersection that’s the
problem, but brand new carparks for several fast food restaurants. What was
once a farm paddock, where blade tails could swing as the trailer turned
through the intersection, has been sold off and built up into a retail centre.
These are some of the transport challenges Andrews and Stokes have already
solved. They’re already years into plans on how to move even more massive parts
for seven megawatt (MW) turbines into Australia’s interior next year.
But without changes to the way turbines are engineered – be they blades that
are built in two parts, towers that are part concrete, or use a version of
Fortescue’s self-lifting technology to reduce their overall size – there is a
limit to what transport engineering can do to move bigger and bigger turbines
from ports to Australia’s increasingly challenging sites."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
