Why Not Make Turbines at Wind Farms?  

The New York Times has a post wondering if it makes sense to manufacture large wind turbines on site at wind farms instead of trying to transport and erect ever-larger monoliths from centralised manufacturing facilities - Why Not Make Turbines at Wind Farms?.

Since wind turbines are so difficult to transport, why not manufacture them on site — at a wind farm?

Clipper Windpower, a wind developer and manufacturer, is considering doing exactly that at a site in South Dakota. The company hopes to build a 5,000-megawatt wind farm (even bigger than the “world’s largest wind farm” that T. Boone Pickens once planned) in an area southeast of Pierre, the state capital. The farm alone would require 2,000 turbines — enough perhaps to justify, say, its own tower factory.

“The project is of a size that you can start to think about dedicated manufacturing for that project,” Peter Stricker, the vice president for strategic project development at Clipper, said.

One option would be a “gypsy plant” to turn out turbine parts temporarily. Mr. Stricker said that it could be either an “industrial tent structure,” or mounted on a flat-bed. Another possibility would be a more permanent factory.

“The industry is paying too much of its overall margin to just getting pieces delivered,” Mr. Stricker said.

He offered no firm time-line for the South Dakota project, but suggested that it would not be operational until at least middle of the next decade. One big hurdle, he said, was transmission — getting the wind power from lightly populated South Dakota to the cities that need it. A proposed 3,000-mile, $10 billion to $12 billion transmission line in the Upper Midwest called the “Green Power Express” would help.