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The Rocky Road To Wind Power
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times has an interesting story on the logistical problems involved in transporting disassembled towers that will reach more than 250 feet in height from ports or factories to the remote, windy destinations where the turbines are erected. In Idaho trucks laden with tall turbine parts have slammed into interstate overpasses requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs. In Texas the constant truck traffic is tearing up small roads in the western part of the state where the turbines are being rapidly erected. And in Maine a truck carrying a big piece of turbine got stuck for hours while trying to round a corner near Searsport."
"'It left a nice gouge in Route 1,' said Ben Tracy, who works nearby at a marine equipment store and saw the incident. On a per-turbine basis, the cost of transportation and logistics generally varies from around $100,000 to $150,000, said John Dunlop, an engineer with the American Wind Energy Association, and experts say that transportation logistics are starting to limit how large — and as a result how powerful — wind turbines can get. There is talk of breaking a blade up into multiple pieces, but 'that's a very significant structural concern,' says Peter Stricker, vice president at Clipper Windpower who added that tower bases were getting too large to squeeze through underpasses. But a partial solution may be at hand. While vast majority of turbine parts now travel by truck, in Texas and elsewhere, some wind companies are looking to move more turbine parts by train to save money. But even the train routes must avoid low overpasses when big pieces of wind turbines are aboard. 'It's not your typical rail-car shipments,' said Tom Lange, a Union Pacific spokesman."
or blimp.
You can always expect problems when you're transporting large things along a windy road. I'm sure the initial issues will blow over, and they'll tackle the remainder with much gusto.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
If we don't solve the size problem it will lead to an erection problem.
FTS: " In Idaho trucks laden with tall turbine parts have slammed into interstate overpasses requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs"
You're supposed to put them on the truck parallel to the ground.
Just saying.
No sig today...
...Green energy does create jobs.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Trucks carrying "oversized loads" are more likely to have difficulties than other trucks.
Same as it's always been.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
So wind power is doomed because a few truck drivers don't know their shit? Come on.
How much carnage does the average coal mine produce? Typically ripping apart a huge, huge chunk of the countriside (for open cut), innumerable trucks and other big machines trundling around, not to mention the massive construction required for the actual power generation plant itself.
This type of story strikes me as particularly stupid: "big objects hard to move around" doesn't equate to "wind power worse than other types of power" as the summary seems to imply.
I also find it hard to believe that the truck traffic for installing windmills is coming through at such a huge volume that it is actually degrading any half-decent road. That would involve tens of thousands of trucks, surely?
Read Pynchon.
There are alternative designs that do not have that sort of problem. For example, Windspire is a 30' tall wind turbine that can be erected even in densely populated areas.
So it doesn't have to really go on the highway unless the tower factories are located in a place that doesn't have access to shipping. Of course rivers and waterways only go so far and sooner or later the towers have to hit the road.
And the Diablo canyon nuclear power plant was part way finished before they realized they were putting it in backwards and had to start over.
Play Command HQ online
People from the 1920s and 30s would have LAUGHED at us for making these arguments if we made them back then.
Folks today don't want to make investments for the future. THey don't want to take any risks. It's like society has had its balls collectively cut off.
Look at the space program! We've been in limbo for decades and now that they finally want to do something INTERESTING again people are like "it's too expensive!" or "it's too risky!"
Let the people who take on the challenge accept the risk, as it's always been. Let's invest in our future. Let's stop being pansies. PLEASE.
The insurance policies should cover this damage - wait, they DID ship them with insurance, right?
The insurance companies, once they get fed up of paying for wrecked turbine parts and bridges, will start demanding competent drivers for the trucks, or they won't insure. Therefore the trucking companies will have a choice - deal with the union so they stop providing idiots who don't bother checking the height of their load and their maps, or they can pay the repairs out of their pockets.
This is how capitalism is SUPPOSED to work.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Observations,
These are very special hauling requirements, so they require a much more specialized design. I am uneasy about that generic hauling truck trailer shown in the picture.
1. If the blades are 50 yards long, then designing a hauling truck like an old fire engine ladder truck might be better. Those had a rear cab and movable wheel carriages in the back.
2. Also the trailer design in the picture is horrible regarding height. Design a trailer with lengthwise side support that allows blades to travel four or five feet lower. This could also incorporate hydraulic lifting to raise the trailer over bumps and low spots. Think lowrider cars that jump up.
3. Additional tires on the truck and trailers to distribute weight and save the roadways. Heavy equipment haulers here in TX once in a while have as many as 50 wheels per tractor\trailer(s). For max wheels see this site (the bottom picture).
http://www.goodtransportationinc.com/
4. I hope for low interstate overpasses that trucks could exit, then take the service road up, over (and adjacent) to the interstate then return to the interstate.
5. And a lead car with laser height and side measurement device to alert the hauling convoy of incorrect, changed, or terrain shifted height/side measurements.
I know this is blitheringly obvious. But plan and triple check. Just yesterday in Dallas a large fork lift plowed into a 14 foot 5 inch clearance underpass and thoroughly shattered the first cement beam.
http://www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dws/wfaa/latestnews/stories/wfaa090722_wz_tootall.6696c458.html
Thanks,
Jim
I often wonder why they build them with a single-stem trunk? Surely a triple- or quadruple-stem trunk could give added stability with a lower materials cost, and greater ease of transportation, if greater assembly time.
For that matter, why not have two (or, of course, more) propellar sets one above the other? Harness not too much less than double the amount of power without needing larger individual propellar blades.
I'm sure there are fundamental reasons why these wouldn't work, but I'm not an engineer.
Tubes are extremely strong, so you don't really need multiples. Plus, all of these turbines have the capability to rotate, as far as I know, and rotating one turbine around one tube is a lot easier than rotating a gang of them around without their blades hitting something.
They're just keeping it simple. Some of the generator bodies are the size of a small bus, they just don't look like it from far away.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
"Trains better than trucks - film at 11."
If I wasn't bound by privacy agreements, I could post a picture of a 120 foot long distillation column 15 foot in diameter getting trucked down the interstate. It is far larger than any of these wind turbines and took up 2 lanes of interstate while traveling 40 miles an hour. The types of things transported by industry in America are heavier and larger than wind turbine blades. This story is ridiculous. Maybe they should focus stimulus money towards already crumbling roads and bridges? There's no chance roads just started crumbling after a few loads of wind turbines.
The solution is a weight-mile tax, so that truckers pay the full cost of the damage they do to the roads. But good luck getting it enacted, because the national trucking industry hates the weight-mile tax system.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Living in Texas, with oil and gas, wells I can personally attest to damage done by service trucks to our road. This is due to to constant need to move the product to market, or service the water that comes from the wells (yes gas and oil wells produce water too).
I have seen these trucks that carry the crude oil from gas wells get into accidents. I have seen bridges totally destroyed from burning oil under them (concrete breaks down under the extreme heat).
Do we write about the millions of dollars in damage our oil trucks create yearly? Or do we single out a few accidents in trucking, carrying oversize loads instead.
Do we even hear about the oversize building moments that tie up traffic? Do we hear about the daily fatal accidents from truck accidents? Or do we single out a few trucks that just happened to be carrying wind turbine parts?
I could be wrong, but isn't it likely to be really windy at the site of the wind farm? Couldn't that make airships impractical?
Hmm..
Problem: giant airfoil blades are too heavy for current helicopters: current helicopters need bigger airfoils to get the thrust at a reasonable power level. Some kind of giant blades are necessary...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
It is very windy. You are likely to get blown by a grue.
The larger the turbine and the higher it gets, the more efficient they are, both in construction and operating costs and in electricity delivered. see : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_design#Turbine_size
They are getting close now to maximum size because of materials science limitations (cost/benefit), and also because of the transportation limits mentioned in the article. Much larger ones could be built directly adjacent to a seaport dock then barged to a direct sea or coastal installation point, but once you have to transport them on land, it gets iffy. Notice the shuttle has to be flown back piggyback when it has to land at edwards-there's simply no reasonable way to move the thing on land, just too big.
Now there's some HUGEMONGOUS mining equipment out there, but it doesn't travel on the roads, and even to transport the things (excavators, dump trucks, crawlers, etc) they have to be partially disassembled and then reassembled on site and they use rail transport as much as they can to get to the site.
Just for fun if you like big land stuff
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebherr_T_282B
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterpillar_797B
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komatsu_D575 (we have two impressive big crawlers here on the farm, serious big oak pushing around brutes, smaller than this bad boy though, one is 114 tons and the other one I don't know, looks to be a scosh bigger)
and I always liked this one, I wanted one as soon as I heard about it when I was a kid ;)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Alaskan_land_train
What's neat about this stuff... real terraforming
In Oregon we actively work with companies installing turbines to make it as easy as possible to transport & install them. We work with the manufactured housing builders as well, but that's another story. Unlike Texas with its oil, or other states and their coal, we don't have locally buried hydrocarbons adding to our economy, so we are happy for the economic benefit from these installations. We've had one wind turbine generator fall of around a corner, while inside a tunnel, which did wedged things up. But you know; it doesn't matter. Truck lines carry insurance. Oregon has had many more cases of cherry pickers slamming into bridges, sometime going right through the bridge. We had a large concrete drain pipe fall off a truck and bust a hole completely thought the deck of another bridge. We had a bunch of lead paint which had been carefully removed to reduce contamination of water and soil and loaded on a barge for shipment. The barge sunk before leaving dock. Oops. The moral of the story is, any industry has its share of shipment issues. If wind turbines are too much of an issue for your state, they are welcome here.
I personally live just off a major highway intersection in North Iowa where a great many wind farms are going up.
It's always a bit of an ordeal when just one truck with tower parts of blades rolls through.
Lately I've been seeing them come through in convoys. (with a bunch of construction occering too!)
It creates a bit of a mess, but usually the drivers get through quite quickly.
The bigger problem to my mind is the semi-local dump trucks. (with trailers)
These guys get paid by the load, so they have little regard for road traffic & safety laws. Since they need in farm country to install roads to the tower site in the middle of the field the do need a lot of gravel, so they tend to make an incredible amount of runs. I've seen roads perfectly fine paved roads become a crumbling pile of garbage in the coarse of one construction season. The DOT knows when this is happening and seems to be able to respond quickly. If they are still using the road they tend to do some quick patches and wait to repave until the project is over.
Just up the road there is a rail transfer station that is getting all kinds of work from wind energy related projects. Currently the majority of it is receiving gear boxes & parts of tower masts.
Also I believe that in Southern Iowa there is a plant right on the Mississippi River that makes turbine blades. The site was chosen because of it's semi-central location, and access to multiple forms of shipping. (Water, Rail, Road) And this was a couple of yeas ago, so these guys are thinking about transportation issues.
I understand what these truckers go through everyday. My company is currently hauling the largest I-beam bridge girders ever built in the midwest. The beam alone is 186 feet long which puts us at an overall length around 240-260 feet. The current issue is the routing provided by each states permitting offices. Some will have you scout the route and hand it in to them so they can authorize it with a permit. But, others will not do that and force you onto the worst roads you could ever be on. Another issue is the rest of traffic on the road. We have fools on a regular basis act like idiots around us especially when we are making a turn. But, we usually have police assistance for the bigger loads to stop the idiots out there.
It's not a question of cherry-picking. Lightning does not ignite dirigibles because they're filled with hydrogen, which does not ignite unless mixed with oxygen. Most dirigibles of the time passed through thunderstorms and were hit by lightning repeatedly, without harm. The problem is that these ships vent hydrogen when landing. If struck then, the ships could ignite. Fortunately, modern blimps don't use hydrogen at all, so there's no chance of them being ignited by lightning.
The lifting power of an airship goes up with it's volume (3 dimensional), while its weight only goes up with surface area (2 dimensional), as a consequence the ship doesn't need to get much bigger to substantialy increase its lifting capability.
So while this thing is just over 6 times longer than the blimp you were in, it's able to lift 160 tons of additional weight.
-- The reader anything less than completely failing to not misunderstand this sig is cursed.