Ararat Wind Farm: bring on the blades!
Turbine towers will soon begin rising from the hills, and the blades that will spin from the nacelles have arrived on board the BBC Danube from Brazil. Ahead of a celebration in Ararat to welcome the blades (and the extra construction jobs on the site that arrive with them), let’s take a moment to marvel at the precision and supervision it takes to ship and transport these 50-metre-long, high-tech wind wands.
It could be a scene from Vikings, oars shipped. It’s certainly an advertisement for pulling together—collaboration—and world trade. This aerial shot of the BBC Danube, docked at Portland in Victoria, shows the first cargo of wind-turbine blades destined for Ararat Wind Farm. The 50-metre-long blades landed after their long journey from Brazil, a manufacturing centre for turbine components. The Ararat project is destined to be the third-largest wind farm in Australia, and its long journey to realisation was achieved by a partnership between Renewable Energy Systems (RES), GE and services-and-infrastructure company Downer.
The charter vessel, Danube from above, looking out along the sinuous forms of wind-turbine blades, from stern to bridge and out to a glorious Portland dawn.
The blades are set to turn atop GE 3.2-103 brilliant wind turbines, on towers manufactured in Vietnam and here in Portland at nearby Keppel Prince Engineering.
Welded clips helped secure the deck-stored load of turbine blades destined for Ararat Wind Farm.
Another view of the secured cargo shows 10 blades in the forward stack. This end of the blades will connect to the bus-sized nacelles at the top of Ararat’s 75 turbine towers. The nacelle houses the gearbox that transforms the slow turning of the blades to a faster rotor speed, the generator, the drive train and the brakes!
A job well done! A Portland tug chugs back to the dock. Situated strategically between the ports of Melbourne and Adelaide, Portland was the logical landing place for turbine components destined for Ararat, which is only 200 km inland by road. Tugs put a little grunt into moving the $2.5 billion annual income that the region derives from trade through this harbour facility.
At last the cranes swing gently into action, shifting each 9.5-tonne blade carefully from ship to shore. The backdrop shows the deepwater port of Portland, which specialises in the import and export of bulk commodities such as agricultural and mining products, aluminium and fertiliser, and in this case the means to clean, green energy—these blades have a of total installed capacity of 240MW.
Smooth moves: the brackets that held the blades in comfortable recline on the decks of the BBC Danube, also secure the blades to wheeled transport for their inland journey.
Ready to roll, the blades stretch out behind the truck cabs like bridal veils in the breeze. They’re the perfect match for the windy ridges of Ararat’s section of the Great Dividing Range. As the procession of the first three blades, each with its attendant 12 pilot vehicles, begins the 200-kilometre journey along the Pyrenees Highway, a celebration is gathering in the township of Ararat.
Images: Troy Lowther of 3FB Aerworx, and RES