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How to Transport Gigantic Wind Turbine Blades Up a Twisty Mountain Road

I once helped a friend move a sofa up a narrow East Village tenement staircase to her third-floor apartment. That was a nightmarish puzzle of physics and geometry. But this seems considerably worse:

By now you may have seen that GIF making the social media rounds, and I had to dig around a bit to figure out what it’s from. That’s in China’s Yunnan province, where a wind farm was constructed last year atop Baoding Mountain, elevation 2,900 meters (9,500 feet). The 12-ton blades are a whopping 52.4 meters (172 feet) long, and had to be transported to the mountaintop up a winding path riddled with 212 switchbacks and grades as steep as 30 degrees.

The GIF is taken from the video below, which seems to be a commercial for the company that provided the purpose-built trucks. In order to avoid the power lines, tree branches, buildings and other obstacles along the route, an operator has to sit in the back of each truck and control the blade’s orientation and angle:

Incredibly, they transported no less than 90 blades up to the top.

Sources:

Imgur

CIMC Vehicles

WindPower Monthly