Offshore wind turbines are the giants of wind power and their construction is an impressive spectacle. Extremely heavy, massive components are moved on the water by even more powerful equipment.
Over the past decade, the German company Schmidbauer GmbH & Co. KG has established itself as a logistics partner for the offshore industry. This company has not only continuously expanded its fleet of crane vehicles to meet the needs of the industry, but also invested in the service know-how of its personnel.
New 6-axle Scheuerle SPMTs were purchased last year alone. So the crane and heavy-load expert is therefore in action at numerous European feeder ports and ports involved in the construction of offshore wind farms.
Heavy load logistics for the Merkur offshore wind farm
One of the current projects: the transhipment of transition pieces (TPs) for the Merkur offshore wind farm, at the Orange Blue Terminal in the Dutch port
of Eemshaven.
66 ‘Haliade 150’ GE-type wind turbines, which should achieve a standard capacity of approx. 1750Gwh per year, are currently being constructed in the North Sea, about 45 kilometres north of the island of Borkum. The work for the construction of this wind farm started at the beginning of 2017 and it is expected to go into operation at the end of 2018.
Schmidbauer is responsible for the entire on-site handling of wind turbine components: for example, a 48 axle SPMT G4 with 2 x 8.40m spacers transport gigantic tower segments for pre-assembly, in the interim storage facility. There they can be vertically mounted on foundations with the help of an LR 11350 and LR 1600/2 crawler crane and then loaded onto the installation vessel.
They also lifted rotor blades extending up to 75m in length and other tower segments onto the installation vessels and brought the components from the feeder port to their destination at sea.
In addition to heavy load logistics in the feeder port of Eemshaven, Schmidbauer has already made an impressive name for itself in numerous other offshore projects, including providing heavy-duty transport in 2016, for the world’s heaviest monopiles for the Veja Mate project – they weighed 1,300 tons. Or in the port of Belfast in 2017 for the construction of the world’s largest offshore wind farm, the ‘Walney Extension Project’.
