Now completed, the two new wind
farms in Oahu and Maui generate enough
energy to power more than 40,000
commercial businesses and domestic
homes. Buckner plans to keep the crawler
on Oahu for five years to carry out
maintenance work.
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tonner on the Maui project to navigate
the tight roads. In the end, however, “we
wanted the higher capacity crane to deal
with wind challenges, and we had the
narrow track crane on the island,” Long
says. Other challenges included increasing
wind speeds, which, on several occasions,
reached 17 mph (27 km/h). “We faced
consistently high wind speeds on the
project, and the CC 2800-1 NT efficiently
and effectively handled the wind,” Long
says. “Having the higher capacity crane
gave us more working days on the project.”
If the narrow roads weren’t challenging
enough, the steep grades of the
mountainous terrain added to the project’s
difficulties. “We were travelling unusually
high grades of upto 17.5 %,” explains Long.
At the Kawailoa Wind project in Oahu,
the crawler was used to build 30 additional
2.3 MW turbines. To complete the task,
the crawler was configured with full
counterweight, 102 m of main boom and
a 12 m fixed jib offering a 10 degree offset,
a company spokesperson said. The lifts
required the crawler’s maximum capacity
in that configuration of 95.2 tonnes.
For the construction of the 1.5 MW
turbines in Maui, the crawler was
configured with 84 m of main boom and
a 12 m fixed jib. The crane’s upper
structure was fitted with 180 tonnes
of counterweight.
Buckner lifting a turbine rotor in Hawaii with the
Terex CC 2800-1 NT narrow track crawler crane
SITE REPORT
INTERNATIONAL AND SPECIALIZED TRANSPORT
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AUGUST 2013
21
