WIND SLOWS TEXAS WIND BUILDING

Strong winds slow construction on wind farm
Kevin Welch, June 20, 2011 (Amarillo Globe-News)

"The very resource wind farm developers want to harness is keeping construction workers up in the middle of the night."

Ken Donathan, construction project manager for the Golden Spread Panhandle Wind Ranch, Cielo Wind Services:] "We're not hanging any steel right now. The wind's too strong…If you want to come out at 1 in the morning, then we will be. It hasn't been good for building, but if you had one built ..."

Not the best work to be doing in high winds (click to enlarge)

"The crews working for Wanzek Construction out of South Dakota are on duty from 1 a.m. to 7 p.m. in two shifts. They have erected at least 11 of the 26-story towers built to hold turbines with blades that would reach from one end zone of a football field to the other. Ultimately, there will be 34 turbines with towers 262 feet tall [with a 78.2 megawatt capacity, enough to serve more than 27,000 homes], but construction above ground level is off and on depending on the wind."

[Anthony Perez, wind ranch project manager, Golden Spread Electric Cooperative:] "Twenty-two mph is our cutoff…And if you have gusts, there's some variations, but it's the crane operators' call."

There is plenty of work on the ground, too. (click to enlarge)

"For every day in the month of May and the first 13 days of June, the maximum sustained wind speed measured at the National Weather Service Amarillo office ranged between 22 and 43 mph, except on two days when it was 16 mph…Once the turbines are operational, high winds will be more of a blessing than a problem because they can operate in winds even stronger than those of the past month and a half before reaching the point [52 mph] when they must be taken out of service…

"Work for the approximately 120 crew members…continues while they're grounded. They attach blades to rotors, maintain roads, move cranes, work on wiring in towers and unload turbine parts from trucks…[P]arts for one full turbine [arrive] every day...There's actually more work to do on the ground…[and] about 75 to 80 percent of the work on the project in general is complete…"