Crawler Cranes Lift Wind Turbines to be Moved Across Lake Michigan
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September 7, 2016 - Broadwind Energy has wanted to ship its wind turbine towers across the Great Lakes for years. The company’s plant in Manitowoc, Wis., has direct access to a deep-water port and had sought an opportunity to load its steel towers onto barges to be shipped by the Great Lakes. When a customer placed an order for Broadwind towers in mid-2016 to be delivered to a wind farm located in Ohio, Broadwind had the chance to put its barge shipping plans into action.
“Transporting wind tower sections on a barge had been a long term goal at Broadwind,” explained Matt Boor, OEM project manager at Broadwind Towers, Inc. “We were granted this opportunity and we had to work quickly to devise a plan for how to lift steel tower sections onto the barge. We immediately began brainstorming in a lot of after-hours sessions with Trans-Link Services, our transportation and logistics partner, to come up with a plan for efficiently loading the towers onto a barge without damaging them.”
Trans-Link, also based in Manitowoc, developed a plan with Broadwind that would have two crawler cranes lift the tower sections from either side in a dual tandem lift, and then crawl them toward the sea wall to be placed on the barge. The key to success for the project, as Troy Flentje, owner of Trans-Link, explained, would be finding crawler cranes with low ground-bearing pressure and a smooth crawling mechanism.
“I had the Manitowoc MLC165 in mind as we were planning the project because I knew that these cranes would have the low ground-bearing pressure we needed,” he said. “With two of these cranes, we were able to crawl the towers toward the barge without using mats or other ground preparations. It has also kept our options open for moving the cranes around the site for other applications.”
The plan worked well, as the two companies saw success straight away. The first dual lift took approximately 20 minutes, and subsequent lifts were completed with increasing speed. Over the course of the project, Trans-Link and Broadwind will ship 138 separate wind tower sections, each of them loaded onto a barge using the two 182-ton capacity MLC165s. The heaviest loads will have the two cranes lifting 70 tons in tandem, each using their 275-ft. boom.
“One option would have been to use a spreader bar and a much larger crane, but I wanted to use two crawler cranes so we could have more maneuverability on the site. Also the 30- to 70-ton sections measured up to 90 ft. long, so we couldn’t ‘belly lift’ them without damage,” Flentje explained.
The project is expected to be completed this month.
