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.
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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.