PHOTO COURTESY ESAB
Susan, Norm, ET AL
While I post shots of turbines from coast to coast in an effort to get people’s appetites whetted, you guys are asking for specifics for NEO. Over the next few weeks I will post here the suggestions for the steps that I recommend for NEO:
Cleveland manufactures and/or legacy NEO hierarchy. We must simultaneously reach out across the globe. Ideally, a regional (19 county+) wind manufacturing and use development authority with bonding power would be legislated. The development of a successful cluster – like Wall Street or the Antwerp Diamond Exchange – must be created organically, bottom up, and open source. That’s the working philosophy and here is the first step I would spend money to investigate…synchronizing
Cleveland’s Mital steel works with a new, adjacent, single purpose steel turbine tower manufacturing facility.
Organization meetings with the public and
Cleveland’s Mital steel mill, Timken, and local fabricators can lead to a state of the art, sole purpose, dedicated manufacturing operation to mass produce steel turbine towers. Mital Steel can be persuaded to redesign a rolling line to produce heavy plate specifically sized to maximize production efficiency in building wind turbine towers. The 2 ½” thick plate needs to be 50’ plus in uncut length (so it can be rolled into tubes with a diameter of about 13.5’+ ( which is the height of trucking clearance under interstate bridges), and preferably 10+’ wide plate slabs in order to minimize joint welding in the finished tower. Since the preferred size of the steel plate before rolling is too big to truck – the tower fab facility would need to be placed right next to Mital in the
Cuyahoga
Valley. (I blogged about this before Steelyard Commons went up)
.
About 1,500 of these towers were used in the
US last year to support the 2,500 megawatts of wind turbine capacity installed. Each tower may run in the $500,000 range – for the size of a tower to support a 2 megawatt turbine. Output needs to be at least one, if not two, towers completed per day. This equates to a gross return of more than 365 million annually. The process involves rolling the plate into tapered tubular sections, robotically welding the rolled plate together into sections about 70’ long, welding bolt flanges
onto the ends of the sections (Timken already makes these flanges for European manufacturers), sandblasting the section inside and out, priming and painting, and loading for transport by land, water, or rail towards their installation destination. Since each tower weighs from 200 to 400 tons, at a rate of 1 or 2 towers per day (apx 150,000 tons/year) , a steel manufacturer couldn’t ask for a better partner.
Although Martha and I have done some of the research (with Vestas) already, we need to talk with GE, Gamesa in Pennsylvania, and every other tower user to see if a standard tower design can be developed which is usable by all manufacturers. We need to establish standards of interchangeability just as the computer hardware and software manufactures have done.
Who will pay for the salaries and expenses for the organizational work necessary to bring this facililty together? What is the ideal labor model to operate such a facility? Should we begin by investigating partnering with the South Korean company that built the towers for the Bowling Green, Ohio turbines?
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