An Australian engineering firm has come up with a way to install wind turbine towers that would use 30 per cent less concrete, slash on-site concrete pours by 70 per cent and shave construction time by around 20 weeks – it just needs a developer game enough to give it a first go.
The innovation is a precast wind turbine foundation base that icubed consulting, an engineering firm, is hoping can replace at least some of the wind turbine foundations predominantly used in Australia at the moment, known mass gravity footing.
Rohan McElroy, icubed consulting’s principal structural engineer, says that with the advent of bigger and bigger wind turbines, these solid concrete footings are becoming enormous, requiring upwards of 700 cubic meters of concrete to be poured on around 80 to 100 tonnes of reinforcing steel.
The “exciting innovation project” icubed consulting has been working on for the past two years instead uses between 25 to 30 concrete blocks, or ribs, that are precast in a factory and then transported to site and craned into position – complete with reinforcing and anchor cage bolts.
McElroy says the product has been 100% designed in Australia with the icubed team – which has underpinned around 8 gigawatts (GW) of installed capacity of traditional turbine foundations around the country – in conjunction with Humes Holcim Australia, a specialist in precast concrete.
“We’ve sort of broken apart our in-house software that we usually design the mass concrete footings and started from scratch,” McElroy told the 2026 Wind Industry Forum in Melbourne last week.
“[We’ve] redesigned everything internally, taken it through verification of 3D finite element modelling using state-of-the-art packages, and undertaken external peer review completed by a global engineering assurance body. So we’re quite proud of that achievement.”
McElroy says the big difference between the gravity footing and the precast foundation is that it’s about a 30 per cent reduction in concrete volume for the foundation – and the big benefit is that developers are removing an even bigger proportion of the in-situ concrete pour off-site to a precast facility.
“So there’s around 70% less concrete and reinforcing steel required on site for the installation, and then as a knock-on effect… 70% less water required,” he told the conference.
On the other side of the coin, the reduction in concrete means that there is more backfill needed to infill between the ribs, so there’s a net increase of around 20 per cent additional backfill required to be compacted around the foundation.
But even factoring this in, McElroy says icubed estimates a net positive cost saving per turbine of around 10-15 per cent.
“I won’t get into the nitty gritty dollar values … but I’ll be harping on about this number: 70% less concrete on site, 70% less formwork, reinforcing-bar labor and batching of concrete, 70% less water.”
McElroy says there are construction improvements as well where, in the case of a theoretical year-long construction program, incubed anticipates a project using precast footing to be completed around 20 to 21 weeks early.
“There’s flexibility in the program as well, you can stage the construction of the turbine foundations in a different manner to a typical mass footing,” he said.
“There’s a decreased requirement for batch plants, and then a knock-on effect of decreased requirements for concrete trucks … which also has a knock-on effect into improved maintenance on your internal tracks of the wind farm itself.”
The big question, now, McElroy says, is how to get developers on board in Australia – where precast turbine footings have yet to be used in a large-scale commercial project.
“[They are] already in use in Europe and the States; there’s already precast foundations generating power on wind farm sites,” McElroy told the conferece.
“I think we’re just a step behind what happens overseas. We get comfortable with what we know – and we are, as a nation, really good at delivering wind turbine foundations. …we’ve got skilled labor here and crews that know these forms back to front.
“It just needs to be someone who has the right frame of mind, the right developer who’s willing to take a chance on it.”
McElroy says the sweet spot for the precast footings is probably the 6-7 megawatt (MW) range turbine, while the best-suited projects might be remote mine sites or other examples where there is a scarcity of skilled labor and materials. Projects with tight commissioning schedules or extra large and repetitive projects would also be a good fit.
“There’s a lot of interest in precast footings, for obvious reasons,” he says. “There’s a lot of savings to be had, not just monetarily, but program-wise and risk-wise on the projects.
“But yeah, it’s half the reason I’m here today is someone needs to be the guinea pig in order to take a precast footing design on a new project,” he said.
“We can do as much as we can from the theoretical point of view, which we have done internally. We’ve modelled these foundations to the nth degree, undertaken external third-party review processes… we’ve ticked every box that a typical foundation design goes through to get constructed on site.
“It really just comes down to the right project and the right team willing to take the risk to take the first one into action.”
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