BNSF Logistics develops rail equipment, services to handle increasingly larger wind turbine blades.
Trucks transporting wind turbine blades cause drivers to pause and admire their incredible size as they’re moved down the nation’s highway, but those thoughts quickly turn to annoyance when these truckloads snarl traffic in small towns and along narrow country roads.
BNSF Logistics, a sister company of its namesake Class I railroad Burlington Northern Santa Fe, wants to minimize this logistics obstacle by taking as many wind turbine blades off the road as possible by railing them closer to their final destination.
Since last year, the Flower Mound, Texas-based logistics services provider has been developing special handling equipment to efficiently and safely transport rigid, fiberglass blades exceeding more than 55-meters or 180-feet long by railcar.
“Trucking was the first mode for wind turbine blades,” said Robert Sutton, senior vice president of U.S. projects and rail service at BNSF Logistics. Before 2010, many U.S. land-based wind turbines had blades with lengths up to 42 meters, or about 135 feet, which were relatively manageable to transport on specialized trailer platforms over the road, he explained.
During the past five years, wind turbine manufacturers have been designing and producing their blades longer than their predecessors to harness lower wind speeds and enhance efficiency of their turbine generators. For example, a two-megawatt turbine with the smaller, earlier sized blades may reach its peak electricity output 35 percent of the time in low-wind areas, whereas that same machine with longer blades may now achieve a peak output of 40 to 50 percent.
The downside for logistics and transportation companies is that these longer blades have a wider curve to them, which causes them to exceed the widths of traditional truck trailers and spill across traffic lanes during transport.
“Wind turbine blades of longer than 53 [meters] begin to present a transportation obstacle due to the large turning radius, which hinders right of way or encroachment areas within corners or curves on roads or railways,” noted the U.S. Energy Department in its 2015 report, Wind Vision: A New Era for Wind Power in the United States.
This means that traditional routes for transporting wind turbine components, such as blades, to wind farm developments may become increasingly off-limits to the truckers and they may be forced to take longer, roundabout routes to reach their destination, adding significant transportation costs and risks of potential delays.
“The increased size, mass, and quantity of wind components has resulted in more actively managed wind turbine transportation logistics, making use of a variety of land transportation methods and modes,” the Energy Department added in its report. “This has resulted in increased project costs of up to 10 percent of capital costs for some projects.”
Road To Rail. Domestic transportation spend on turbine blades varies, but is undoubtedly expensive. One industry estimate indicates that to transport a single blade by truck from a Gulf Coast seaport like Houston 700 miles to West Texas costs upwards of $20,000. This would include the associated fees for any state and local municipality permits to move these large loads over the road and across jurisdictions, and the potential need for police or private escorts during portions of the transit.
Once the transit from either the seaport or domestic manufacturing plant exceeds 500 to 700 miles, rail transport becomes a more attractive transportation option from a cost and efficiency standpoint.
The dominant U.S. railroads in the wind energy business today are BNSF and the Union Pacific. Both railroads actively entered this market in early 2003 as wind farm projects across the West took off.
Many of these components handled by the railroads were imported from manufacturers in Europe, Asia and South America and entered via the Pacific Northwest and Gulf ports for onward delivery to new wind farm sites across the Midwest and Southwest.
Once offloaded from ships, the components would be placed on unit trains with 40 to 70 89-foot-long flatcars. For blades that exceeded the length of the flatcars, the railroads added empties to accommodate the overhangs. A 50-car unit train by the mid-2000s, could transport enough components to build about 80 wind turbines and provide delivery from a seaport to an interior destination often within three to four days. Today, unit trains of just turbine blades can range from 60 cars of 24 blades up to 70 cars with 28 blades. “It depends on the length of the blades,” Sutton said.
At the same time, the wind industry’s primary turbine manufacturers, including General Electric, Vestas, Siemens and Gamesa, have begun setting up plants to produce wind turbine components closer to U.S. wind farm construction activity.
“The costs associated with transportation and logistics of the large, heavy components of wind turbines make it desirable for turbine and component manufacturers to set up shop as close as possible to the ultimate point of turbine delivery to improve competitiveness. In addition to other factors, transportation and logistics is one of the main reasons domestic content of wind turbines installed in the United States has grown to 67 percent with over 550 manufacturing facilities around the country supplying components to the wind industry,” the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) said.
In addition to the blades, a wind turbine’s other two heaviest, outsized components are the nacelle/hub and tower sections. There are an estimated 8,000 parts collectively used to manufacture these large machines.
The Energy Department forecasts that by 2030, 20 percent of America’s electricity could be generated by wind power. Reaching this level, however, requires the installation of 7,000 turbines—or more than 50,000 shipments of turbine components by rail—annually by 2018, according to the Freight Rail Works website.
Blades On Tacos. As blades have become longer and incorporated more curvature to accommodate the increasingly larger wind turbines, they’re testing the technical and infrastructural limits of the North American rail transportation system.
Similar to road transport, railroads that move outsized components like wind turbine blades must ensure that all points along a route have sufficient clearance, especially through mountain passes and tunnels.
Earlier this year, BSNF Logistics completed testing of new equipment, or “fixtures,” that helps accommodate and safely transport increasingly large wind turbine blades by both ocean vessel and railcar. The company joined Energo, an engineering firm in the wind energy sector, to develop the equipment.
“Our universal fixtures for both ship and rail transport modernize the wind logistics industry and will unshackle current logistics constraints facing the industry, getting the wind industry closer to that critical self-sustaining cost level,” said Ray Greer, president of BNSF Logistics, in a statement.
BNSF Logistics explained that its universal rail fixtures are designed to handle blades of all sizes, including those now exceeding 45 meters long. Starting late last year, BNSF Logistics conducted multiple rail tests involving the fixtures at the Port of Corpus Christi in Texas.
“The results showed a 35 percent improvement of clearance envelope making rail a viable mode choice for almost any North American destination,” the company said. “Subsequent longer route tests at speed demonstrated superior ride quality with less stress and G-forces borne by the blades when compared to current technologies.”
For ocean transport, the fixtures allow for an increase in the number of blades that can be carried per voyage. Testing of blade stowage with the new fixtures was done at the Port of Houston. A land-based test of the ocean system successfully demonstrated the blade “nesting” capability. BSNF Logistics said the new system will “improve (vessel) stowage rates by a minimum of 25 percent over existing configurations.”
For rail transport, the fixtures include two parts: one to cradle the circular end of the blade, or “root,” that attaches to the wind turbine hub, and the other, referred to by the company as the “taco,” supports the slender blade tip. The fixtures are attached to the flat surface of a railcar and swivel to essentially contour the blades in the direction of the train without significant overhang, which is especially important when trains are moving through curvy, tight areas along their routes.
The company has worked closely with the railroads to deploy the fixtures and conducted several test runs of blades shipments using the equipment between the Port of Corpus Christi to Garden City, Kan. By using these fixtures, BNSF Logistics said the “clearance envelope dramatically increases [the number of] rail accessible destinations.”
BNSF Logistics said it’s been important to gain the railroads acceptance of the fixtures, not just sister company BNSF, since its logistics services to the wind energy industry, as well as other project cargoes, must be rail neutral, the company’s Chief Marketing Officer Jim Craig said.
The company has also focused on the development of rail fixtures to handle other large wind turbine components such as the nacelles and tower sections.
Earlier this year, BNSF Logistics bought the wind tower transportation assets of Vectora Transportation, a Chicago-based third party logistics service provider, and integrated them into its services.
In July, the company acquired Southlake, Texas-based Transportation Technology Services (TTS), which last year developed and tested a stacking tip stand to support wind turbine blades during rail transport. The stands essentially allow blade tips to overlap each other, one on top of the other, on the railcars.
TTS said its resulting High Density Universal Blade Trains allow customers the ability to ship 48 blades on a 72-car unit train, which it noted is a 33 percent load increase over previous railcar loading methods. The company said it has carried out successful rail deliveries of blades in late 2014 using its new fixtures between Corpus Christi and a wind farm in Kansas.
With ongoing efforts to keep its Blade Runner technology current with handling ever-increasingly longer wind turbine blades, BNSF Logistics said “the combined company will have the most extensive and flexible fleet of wind component handling systems in North America.”
TTS will now become the U.S. Rail, Project Cargo and Engineering Services division of BSNF Logistics, with its founder and president, Scott Landrum, and John Dalman, general manager, remaining in senior leadership roles, along with the current TTS staff staying on board.
Truck Transfers. At some point during the wind turbine components’ rail journey, they must be offloaded and placed back onto trucks for the final leg of their delivery to the wind farm site.
BNSF Logistics has established rail transload facilities throughout the Midwest where these components can be either directly loaded onto trucks or temporarily “laid down” until the wind farms are ready to receive them.
In 2014, BNSF Logistics and Tri Global Energy began setting up the so-called West Texas Wind Energy Logistics Center west of Lubbock. Together, the two companies will manage capacity, optimize routing of turbine components and increase volumes through a central facility to reduce costs on a per-unit basis.
The initial stage for developing the site called for 40 acres, though BNSF Logistics holds the option on the entire 200-acre site. When fully developed, the site will be able to receive, store and load hundreds of turbine components each month.
“West Texas has emerged as the ‘bullseye’ for wind energy projects in North America, due to ideal wind speeds, geography and being at the nexus of the three U.S. power grids. And Tri Global Energy has emerged as a major player in the West Texas wind energy arena,” said TGE’s Chief Executive Officer John Billingsley in a statement at the time.
In September 2014, TGE announced the largest U.S. community-sponsored wind farm project to date. TGE has 16 planned projects in various stages of development and more than 640,000 acres of land under lease for current and future wind farm projects.
While TGE will benefit from its “early adopter” status at the facility, the services and space at the West Texas Wind Energy Logistics Center will be available to the entire wind energy sector, including developers, turbine manufacturers and logistics service providers, BNSF Logistics said.
Other transfer facilities for railed wind components have been established by BNSF Logistics at Wichita Falls and Wellington, Kan.
A major issue currently facing wind turbine shippers is ensuring sufficient trucks and drivers are readily available to deliver components to the wind farm sites. AWEA signaled the industry’s collective concern about the looming truck driver shortage by recently stating, “Transportation companies report a bottleneck as the number of loads is increasing faster than new drivers can be recruited and trained.”
Sutton said a number of trucking companies and their drivers left the wind turbine transport business when orders suddenly dried up between 2013 and 2014.
Breezy Business. The U.S. wind energy industry has thrived and dived during the past 10 to 15 years due to short-term, on-again/off-again extensions of the production tax credit (PTC) program by Congress for renewable energies.
The PTC was put in place by Congress in 1992 and serves as the primary government incentive for wind power development. It’s essentially a federal rebate on the taxes paid by companies that own wind projects.
When the PTC is allowed to expire—as was the case in 2000, 2002 and 2004—new wind farm construction in the United States nearly grinds to a halt while industry lobbyists and Capitol Hill lawmakers secure a renewal. This scenario occurred again in 2012. AWEA estimated that 92 percent of wind installations stopped that year, resulting in an economic loss of $23 billion.
Congress re-extended the PTC in 2013, but at the start of 2014 it expired again and was finally extended during the last two weeks of December. The wind industry is pressing hard for a longer-term PTC extension before the end of this year. Yet the industry, AWEA noted, managed to install about 2,500 turbines across the country during 2014 without the PTC in place.
BSNF Logistics doesn’t expect wind turbine transport ever to dominate its project cargo portfolio. Through its railed and trucked services, the company oversees the transport of far larger volumes of heavy and outsized oil and gas equipment, electrical transformers, and machinery.
“If the wind business takes a two-year hiatus, you have to have something else,” Craig said.
Despite the fickle nature of the U.S. wind energy sector, BSNF Logistics plans to continue investing in turbine component handling equipment and logistics services.
“It’s a multimillion-dollar investment in this service,” Craig said. “We’re convinced that it’s a 20 to 30 year play.”
This article was published in the August 2015 issue of American Shipper.
