Wind turbines are in demand even in the most remote locations - and even current large turbines can be transported to such hard-to-reach places. This is shown by the photographs of the German transport and logistics company Goldhofer.
The operating company Elecaustro S.A., based in Ecuador, is planning and building Ecuador's largest wind farm "Parque eólico Minas de Huasachaca" in the Ecuadorian Andes. The wind farm in the province of Loja has 14 wind turbines with a total output of 50 megawatts (MW). The heavy haulage company Transportes Montejo from Colombia was commissioned to transport the turbines. Among other things, Montejo has an FTV 550 in its modern fleet to be able to carry out such challenging transports.
Innovative transport technology for special logistics
The FTV 550 is a transport device made by the German transport and logistics company Goldhofer especially for rotor blades, which has a lifting moment of 550 metric tonnes. This makes it possible to transport even long and heavy wind turbine blades of the latest generation with a rotor blade diameter of up to 3.4 metres.
The great advantage of such a blade transport device is that the rotor blades can be rotated endlessly around their own axis in order to take them out of the wind during transport. The rotor blades can also be tilted by up to 60° to pass under or over obstacles. This results in enormous savings in infrastructural interventions.
Narrow mountain roads are no obstacle for modern wind turbines.
In combination with a Goldhofer heavy-duty module type THP/SL, Montejo transported the 73-metre-long blades for a 4MW Dongfang plant to the high plateau. Especially in this mountainous terrain, the Goldhofer FTV showed its full capabilities and Montejo's transport team skilfully turned the wind turbine blades along the ridge while the module combination worked its way up the pass.
This Article is part of issue 04-2022 of the German Wind Power Magazine, the international magazine of the German Wind Energy Association (BWE) about innovations of the German wind industry. You can read the full magazine here, online and for free.