How this team of experts guide 80-metre turbine blades down our roads with just millimetres to spare

How this team of experts guide 80-metre turbine blades down our roads with just millimetres to spare These massive blades are the largest objects moved through our streets. This is how it’s done. It is just after midnight on a winter morning when we gather at the Port of Newcastle. In the background coal ships slink by, in the foreground an almost inconceivably vast wind turbine blade lies along the spine of a truck bed like some sort of alien life form strapped to a gurney in a sci-fi film. It’s so big that it’s hard to fit it all into the frame of your eye from any reasonable perspective. At its tip it tapers to the length of schoolkid’s ruler. Towards that tapered end it has a jagged edge like a cartoon dragon’s teeth, a shape designed to reduce noise as it slices through the air. Peering up at its midsection, you could be looking at a warship’s prow from the ocean’s surface. A team of transport specialists are making last-minute preparations to move this beast through the sleeping streets of suburban Newcastle and the coal villages of the Hunter Valley, along the Golden Highway to a hillside outside Wellington on the NSW Central Slopes, where it is to be raised upon a tower as part of a Squadron Energy wind farm that will soon be generating enough electricity for about 220,000 homes. It seems absurd that this thing can be moved at all, let alone along busy roads, but the man in charge of this circus, Steve Spiller, seems impossibly calm. Jovial, even. Form and function Wind turbine blades, explains engineer Dr Rosemary Barnes, are the largest single-component objects that humans regularly either build or seek to move. Artefacts of the modern world tend to shrink as technology advances, but wind turbines, shaped by both economic and physical forces, keep growing. Longer turbine blades scoop up more wind and generate more electricity with each rotation, says Barnes, who has spent a career designing, building and repairing turbines and blades around the world and now runs a renewable energy consultancy. A dozen huge turbines need fewer gearboxes, less cable and wiring, less maintenance, less concrete and steel to generate as much electricity as dozens of small ones. As the turbines grow in length, so do the forces exerted upon them. In extreme conditions, a large blade might bend 10 to 15 metres from a straight line. Imagine, says Barnes, a diving board wilting under the weight of a herd of elephants. “They have to survive that transfer of force hundreds of millions of times over a life of about 30 years. Every time the blade is in the three o’clock position, gravity is bending it one way, and then when it goes into the nine o’clock position, it’s bending the exact opposite way, and it keeps repeating like that as it spins. It’s just like if you bend a paperclip back and forth repeatedly, you know that small load is not going to break it, but you do it enough times, and you get fatigue loading, it is going to break.” All this means that not only must a blade be handmade from tough, light composite materials, they are stronger when they are crafted in a single piece, rather than disassembled for transport, which brings us back to Spiller and his crew in Newcastle. The monster they are about to move is 82 metres long and weighs just over 20 tonnes. The port The crew is doing last-minute checks on vehicles and equipment. Craig Carpenter is inspecting the Kenworth truck and the purpose-built trailer he is about to drive. The trailer has a long spine that can be extended to suit its load, and six sets of axles at the rear. Tonight Carpenter’s load from front grille to blade tip will be 92 metres long. Carpenter picked up the nickname Blade Runner One for his smooth driving while moving blades in Western Australia last year, but just as crucial is Freddie Scheepers, who is “steerer” and will pursue Carpenter in a van close behind the truck. Scheepers must not only keep his own vehicle on the road, but when necessary will use a remote control to steer the rear axles of the trailer. He keeps in constant contact with Carpenter so at any given moment the two know exactly where the blade tip is in relation to the road and the rest of the rig. “Those two are very, very close, and they’ve got a really good bond. They know what the other bloke is going to do before he does it.”Steve Spiller, Project Manager When the front of the rig moves upwards and is forcing the tip towards the ground, Scheepers will also be able to raise and lower the blade itself, the last metres of which rest in a hydraulic jack that sits over the axle sets. “Those two are very, very close, and they’ve got a really good bond,” says Spiller, watching Carpenter and Scheepers make final preparations. “They know what the other bloke is going to do before he does it.” Mayfield Macca’s The convoy pulls out at about 1am. There are two police cars, as required by law when moving a load of this size in NSW. There are four pilot vehicles which help manage traffic around the truck and trailer. Scheepers’ steering van hunts along behind the blade like a sheepdog, and we follow in a four-wheel drive with Spiller, the project manager. Also in tow is a Transport NSW vehicle with a couple of observers, there to see if anything can be learnt or improved for future runs. After this, there are still another 195 blades to go, let alone the turbine hubs, tower sections and generators. “When you pull back the curtain, this is what building a wind farm looks like – thousands of individual movements, decisions and people are needed to get every component to site,” Squadron Energy’s chief executive Rob Wheals later observes. “At 80 metres long and shaped like a banana, each blade is one of the most challenging pieces of infrastructure to ever move.” From Spiller’s radio we can hear occasional chatter from the pilot vehicles, but he leaves the “Bladerunners” to their own quiet comms channel so they can concentrate. Before we’ve even left the Port precinct the blade tip sweeps out over a cyclone fence, clearing it by what seems like centimetres. Spiller doesn’t flinch. Every move is rehearsed, every distance measured. At a McDonald’s on a roundabout on Industrial Drive in the neighbouring suburb of Mayfield, the cop cars and pilot vehicles splay out to halt traffic coming from three directions, and Scheepers climbs out of his van to flick a switch on the rig to remote control. He adjusts the height of the suspension, and then he steers the rear of the rig around the turn. Speed picks up, at least until the caravan reaches the Hunter Expressway. To make it onto that section, the pilots block traffic on the expressway in both directions while the Bladerunners navigate the rig 80 metres down an off-ramp into what would otherwise be oncoming traffic, then drive a kilometre down the wrong side of the road before crossing back. Spiller seems pleased by how smoothly this dance of traffic and truck is performed. As we head northwest towards the Golden Highway, Spiller relaxes enough to tell his story. He became an expert in moving big stuff almost by accident. At 19, he took a job with a logistics firm and began moving shipping containers. Half a decade later he was moving wind turbine parts, and the work took him around the world with the global giant GE. He has moved bits and pieces of wind farms by sea and land and even air, at one point chartering the world’s biggest aircraft, an Antonov, to move a wind turbine hub and six generators from Leipzig to Adelaide. In Germany, near the Polish border, he recalls coaxing blades through tiny villages on a truck that could raise them to near vertical from the base to navigate tight spaces. In Australia, it’s easier because we have so much space. “I moved 300 blades through Toowoomba without complaint,” he boasts. Today he works for the Ares Group, which was contracted by GE, who built the blade at a factory in China, to shepherd it safely off the ship in Newcastle and on to the Squadron Energy site outside Wellington. Despite the late hour you can tell the convoy is having an impact along the way. In one hamlet we pass within metres of the old coal miners’ cottages. A man in a dressing gown watches on in the pre-dawn from his veranda. His expression is impossible to read in the revolving lights. From the sections of widened road you can see along the way the years of preparation that went into this operation. EnergyCo, the NSW government authority responsible for delivering the state’s five renewable energy zones, has spent $130 million preparing this route. Inland There are rules about moving oversized loads in the dark on the Golden Highway, so the convoy pulls over before dawn. A quiet pall descends across the still convoy, except for cheerful noises from Carpenter’s cabin. He hums and sings to himself and taps out a rhythm before drifting into silence. In bright early light, against the country homes in Denman, the enormity of the blade begins to become more clear. It is longer than whole blocks of the little town. Along the Golden Highway, the convoy at times creeps up to something approaching normal traffic speed, and time passes quickly until we reach the site of the wind farm, headquartered on a sheep and cattle operation on rolling green hills east of Wellington. As the truck prepares to tackle the narrow dirt roads built for the project we are taken into a sprawling site office for a safety induction. Whiteboards on the walls show the progress in the construction of each of the 69 turbines that will soon be operational here. There are posters boosting the “core values” of Squadron Energy, which is owned by Tattarang, the investment company that in turn owned by Andrew Forrest and Nicola Forrest. The values include “Humility” and “Frugality”. It is midafternoon on a hilltop I had last seen two years earlier when Energy Minister Chris Bowen and Forrest attended a sod-turning ceremony. Bladerunner One finally steps out of his cabin and offers up a great two-armed stretch to the sky. By now Spiller has left the site on his way back to his head office in Melbourne. Workers on-site scramble over the blade, breaking it free of its harnesses and lowering it into a cradle by a half-built tower. By the time it is operational it will stand 148 metres from base to blade tip. There’s no getting around the impact the project is having on a beautiful landscape. Construction pads are scraped into the ground by each tower and the new roads hum with the sort of traffic flow you’d expect in a prosperous town. Later I ask farmer John Holland, owner of Uungula, for which the wind farm is named, what he makes of it all. He speaks with a careful, precise manner, aware of the controversy that wind projects attract. Squadron, he says, will clean up after the construction is complete, leaving him with new roads, giving even better access to the property’s ridge lines. He says he has no fear about the impact of the turbines on his stock. Visiting other wind farms, he has seen sheep “camping” under the towers for shade. He reckons the turbines look majestic, but admits that when he saw renders of what they would look like spread across the land he loves he found it “a little confronting.” He thinks renewable energy is a part of the solution for Australia’s growing energy demand, but not the only one. Like many farmers, he opposes grid-scale solar plants taking up agricultural land. But he has practical considerations too. The rent Squadron will pay for each turbine will let the family retire a fair chunk of debt, though he won’t say how much. Nor will he say how many turbines his farm will host. “That’s a bit like asking how much money I’ve got in the bank. It’s a bit rude.” But he is happy to say the income has helped settle the questions of succession that can cause such grief to farming families, and to update equipment and improve fences and dams. “It’s the confidence to be able to run the property the way it should be run.” I ask him what Uungula means. “It’s an Aboriginal word,” he says. “It means wind in the hills.” Get to the heart of what’s happening with climate change and the environment. Sign up for our fortnightly Environment newsletter.