If you’ve driven south out of Pueblo in the last year, you’ve probably noticed the giant wind turbine sitting east of the highway. That’s the Vestas Pueblo plant.
Continuing Wednesday’s visit by Danish wind energy giant to The Broadmoor, where it was trying to win over more than 150 investors and financial analysts from around the world, on Thursday, Vestas brought the group by bus to tour its Pueblo wind tower plant.
This was a big deal: Gov. Bill Ritter made the drive down and spent the better part of an hour speaking and answering questions from this group of financial analysts about the prospects for alternative energy in the United States (Ritter said renewable portfolio standards mandating power generation from renewable sources were unlikely to be rolled back because of the economic impact they’ve brought and that natural gas interests, which once opposed renewable projects, now see gas and wind as complementary).
Vestas says locating its North American manufacturing facilities in Colorado gives it advantages in production times and shipping costs, and also a political advantage in offering a, mostly, U.S.-made product. Before opening the Pueblo plant, Vestas used subcontractors to build most of its towers in North America.
That big turbine outside the plant is a prototype V100. It’s actually 269 feet high, with three blades, each 161 feet long. Vestas says it’s optimized for lower wind speeds and that it’s capable of producing 1.8 megawatts – providing enough energy to produce 20 percent of the plant’s electricity needs.
Thursday was the first time I’ve ever seen the thing budge, so… we’ll see. Heck of a billboard, anyway.
But the V100 is a baby compared to Vestas’ big sellers, which are now 3 megawatt units that stand 300 feet tall. Vestas is also developing a 6 megawatt model designed for offshore applications. No word on how big that goliath will be.
The Pueblo plant makes the towers that the turbines rest on. It’s not as high-tech as the advanced composites that go into making the blades or the gearing and controls inside the nacelles, but, obviously, you can’t have a wind turbine without a tower.
Inside, the Pueblo plant is basically a giant welding shop, albeit a very impressive one. I’d show you pictures, but cameras were not allowed on the tour.
So visualize if you can: Huge slabs of plate steel arrive by train, are carried inside on magnetic cranes, cleaned and beveled, put through a roller, welded at the seam and then welded together into large sections that are painted. Next, ladders, platforms and wiring are installed, then the assembly rolls out on a train to wherever the destination wind farm is.
Vestas aims to fill a “unit” train – a mile-long string of 72 train cars – with each order, as that gives it flexibility over delivery schedules. The Pueblo plant has eight miles of railroad tracks and Vestas has two of its own locomotives on site (one Vestas VP said all of the brass in Denmark want to come to Pueblo to play engineer with the choo-choo).
At peak capacity, the plant is capable of producing 1,300 towers a year.
The plant was ramping up production this spring, just as the economic crisis was taking a bite out of Vestas’ sales (the company says they have since recovered), so it is currently employing about 350 people, rather than the predicted 500. Statewide, Vestas employs about 1,300 people in Pueblo and at plants in Brighton and Windsor, plus a smaller engineering office in Louisville.
Company leaders said Pueblo’s history as a steel town, workforce and the availability of land to build a plant from the ground up were the factors in bringing Vestas to the city (although Pueblo and the state also kicked in $31.8 million in incentives, according to the Pueblo Chieftain, which couldn’t have hurt).
On Wednesday, the company’s leadership said it expects North America and Asia to be the growth markets for the company’s products and for its employment base over the next few years.
A few other neat things about the Vestas plant:
- all of the ladders, platforms, wiring, even an elevator inside the tower sections are held to the steel structure with super-strong magnets, each capable of holding 800 pounds. This technique apparently allows the tower sections to be lighter and stronger, but, if you have a pacemaker, you should probably stay away from a career as a turbine technician.
- the tower sections are rolled from building to building (there are three main manufacturing buildings) on dollies (called “bogeys”) that use 747 wheels to support the massive tubes.
- the tower and turbine you see on a wind turbine is sort of the tip of the iceberg. The tower and turbine of a typical unit weigh about 300 tons, but there’s a 1,000 tons of concrete poured onto the base to keep the giant windmills standing.
