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.
Image: Rex J Andrews
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.
A tower section being taken over a median strip. Image: Rex J 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.
Road furniture and nightmare ports
The degree of difficulty of installing a 5-6 MW turbine with a 150 hub height and blades of 85m or more is explained by a neat paper written by Icubed Consulting directors Nick Canto and Rod Hetherington.
Each turbine of that size needs between 12 and 14 over-size-over-mass vehicle trips.
Each of those trips needs an escort, the makeup and number of which differ depending on the state and the size of the piece of kit.
“Practical limits for road transport are reaching a ceiling now. Unless there is a change in technology, nominally in terms of concrete hybrid towers, two-part blades, or blade transport systems, then wind turbine tip limits of around 230 -240m will likely become normalised,” Canto and Hetherington wrote in that 2021 paper.
Today, turbines with tip heights above 300m are being seen in planning applications as developers say bigger is the only way to make projects economically viable, and they’re being enabled by transport engineers pushing the limits of what roads can take.
But no amount of transport engineering will get around some obstacles
“There’s a few different things that are hitting the top end of the road corridor envelope, overhead obstructions like bridges, traffic lights, signage gantries, that kind of road furniture, that’s all limiting the diameter of turbine tower sections,” Canto told Renew Economy.
Intersections are a real problem for longer and longer blades.
Not all intersections are this easy; some require multi-point turns to get through. This is first 115.5 metre-long Vestas V236-15.0MW wind turbine blade is transported by road from Port of Hanstholm to the Østerild Wind Turbine Test Center in Northern Jutland, Denmark.
Underpasses, which ring many of Australia’s major ports and have ruled some shipyards out of the turbine game entirely, are a “massive headache”, Canto says.
Newcastle is now the only port in New South Wales that’s suitable for wind turbines, as a low 5 metre bridge outside Port Kembla means it can’t handle turbines bigger than 4 MW.
The Gladstone port is also a “nightmare”.
“There’s no easy way to fix [a 5.2 metre high] bridge that’s causing that constraint. If we’re going to have a central Queensland multi-gigawatt zone, we can’t be running two to three trailers [a day] along an entertainment precinct [as the alternate route],” Canto says.
Sometimes, the roads simply can’t be changed and it’s the developer or the turbine manufacturer which needs to do the redesigning.
In Tasmania, the road to the 211 MW Granville Harbour wind farm is lined by World Heritage national parks, which are not the kind of trees developers are allowed to snip to temporarily widen a track.
In the end, on the advice of Rex J Andrews, Vestas rejigged the project to have taller hub heights and shorter blades in order to get the rotors to the site but achieve the same capacity factor.
Design on the move
The machines used to move turbines are in a state of constant innovation to handle the bigger parts.
There are trailers that bookend tower sections between them to get the parts lower to the ground, so they can fit under bridges; there are trailers with more wheels to spread the load, or narrower axles to fit down tighter streets; and there are the famous cantilevered trailers that delivered Acciona’s mammoth 923 MW MacIntyre project.
MacIntyre’s tight turns and narrow environmental corridors meant using a cantilever trailer, which bolts the fat end of the blade to the trailer and swings the tail into the air. It dramatically cut the amount of farmland and vegetation that needed to be cleared and the number of new roads and sidings built.
But they have a downside: Canto says these trailers are slow – a conventional blade trailer can tear along at 70-80 kph – and the high tail means they can’t be used when wind speeds rise.
However, they may be needed more often if more manufacturers continue to follow, and extend on, GE’s curved blade.
Rex J Andrews’ operations manager Warrick Andrews says the design is proving to be a particularly tricky blade to manoeuvre because the tail swoops so low it gets very close to the ground.
In New Zealand, his colleague Stokes is having to nut out a new kind of trailer entirely for a tricky corner. He won’t reveal publicly the idea they’re trialling, but does say it involves driving blades backwards for 30km.
How do you solve a problem like Queensland
Every state has its problems but none come close to Queensland – and not just because of the LNP government.
It’s not a state that anyone working there wants to criticise in public.
But in private, sources from across turbine manufacturers, industry groups, transport and consulting say the irritations are myriad.
They include a years-long process to lift power lines, bridges that aren’t being fixed but having their weight limits adjusted downwards, and the biggest one – police requirements.
NSW requires about six off-duty police officers compared to 18 to 20 in Queensland for a similar-sized turbine, according to a transport source.
The requirement is from decades old legislation, which a 2023 review by the Queensland Transport and Logistics Council recommended be changed to allow pilots instead.
The high police requirements mean delays are happening if enough off-duty officers aren’t available on the day of a move, even after all other permits are secured
And despite the abundance of caution, these rules still didn’t prevent a turbine tower part from getting stuck under a bridge earlier this year.
A stuck turbine tower in Queensland. Image source: Facebook, City Watch – Keeping Ipswich Safe!
The police issue is one Queensland Renewable Energy Council CEO Katie-Anne Mulder has been working to change since she joined the organisation from the mining sector two years ago.
“We just want to make sure that [turbine transport is] done in the most efficient way possible,” she told Renew Economy.
“We’re the only state that requires police escorts for all of the transport requirements. Other states have moved to piloting or other arrangements [such as only for the largest loads]. We’re keen to work with the government on how we can focus on making that happen.”
She says the 2023 review could be a starting point for discussions, but she’s likely to be fighting up uphill battle with a government that has shown it really doesn’t like wind technology.
The Queensland LNP government cancelled or killed two wind projects this year which already had state development approval in hand, and “called in” several others for review.
It dismissed renewables generally in the state’s new five year energy roadmap, which claims no new wind or solar projects will be built between 2030 and 2035.
Queensland’s challenge is not entirely governmental, however.
One of the factors driving up the cost of building wind projects in Australia is the fact that the best, and easiest, sites have already been taken.
Queensland’s projects are now often in mountainous terrain and more difficult than those in other parts of Australia, Andrews says, citing one job where they needed to hook eight prime movers to a single load to get it up a slope.
“There’s a big difference between Queensland mountains and the [completely flat] Southwest REZ [renewable energy zone, in NSW]. The Southwest REZ is going to be difficult to get to, because you’ve got some big turbines and you’ve got some big distances,” he says.
“The distance is a real thing. The fatigue of the drivers, the maintenance of the equipment, the volume of people required to get the numbers of deliveries up, it’s a beast in its own right.
“But in Queensland, generally the hard job starts when you get to the wind farm due to the steep gradients.”
Everyone has their foibles
NSW, at least, is investing in road infrastructure.
The state government is spending $128 million on a ‘Port to REZ’ program to upgrade 19 roads and highways so huge wind turbines and other “oversize equipment” can get to the initial renewable energy zones.
The program is between the Port of Newcastle, the only port in the state that can handle the huge parts developers are now ordering, and the Hunter zone and the Central West Orana renewable energy zone around Dubbo and Dunedoo.
But even then, Andrews is still considering Adelaide and Geelong as the likely candidates for moving equipment to NSW’s Southwest REZ, because Newcastle is a long way from the port.
Separately, the Port of Newcastle will also be busy handling work for REZs closer to it: currently there are 57 wind proposals in the development stage that have a development application lodged or approved, according to RenewMap.
But each jurisdiction has its own foibles, Andrews says.
South Australia is the most lenient about the number of vehicles needed in a convoy. Western Australia gets nervous about blades, requiring 11 vehicles for a single rotor because of the big road trains that share the highways.
New Zealand’s tighter, steeper roads and weight-limited bridges means more wheels are needed than in Australia. Victoria’s Portland port is excellent for turbine part deliveries, but some of the bridges heading inland can’t handle as much weight.
With road widths and quality now the limiting factor, the next challenge will be on turbine manufacturers to design sectional towers and two-piece blades.
It’ll cost more to install, but if developers want to keep going bigger, something has to give and at some point Australia’s millions of kilometres of roads will meet their limit.
