The Port of Vancouver is set to break a world record this week: unloading the largest shipment of wind turbine blades ever shipped on a single vessel.
The 198 blades — manufactured by wind energy company Vestas, and each nearly 161 feet long — arrived earlier this week on a cargo ship from Taranto, Italy. The blades will be unloaded using the port’s two mobile harbor cranes and moved to a storage area in Terminal 5 at the west end of the port.
The blades’ final destination is the Marengo wind farm near Dayton, owned by the power company PacifiCorp. The farm began operating in 2007, and PacifiCorp is embarking on a $200 million “repowering” project to upgrade the farm’s turbines to capture more wind energy.
It’s one of several projects in the company’s Energy Vision 2020 plan, which is slated to increase PacifiCorp’s overall wind energy generation by 50 percent by 2020.
The Marengo project will replace 351 blades on 117 towers at the Marengo farm, along with upgrades to the nacelles that connect the blades to the towers.
“It’ll take more than one shipment, but this is the main one,” said Tom Gauntt, spokesman for PacifiCorp’s West Coast subsidiary Pacific Power.
It will take at least three months to move the blades from Vancouver to Dayton, Gauntt said. Each blade will be loaded onto a single truck and driven to Dayton via Interstate 84, traveling in groups of three so that all three blades for each tower will arrive at the same time.
The new blades will be about 25 percent longer than their predecessors, Gauntt said, but they can still be mounted on the original 200-foot towers.
“(The towers) are made to be upgraded over time,” he said.
The project is expected to increase the Marengo facility’s output by more than 35 percent. The farm currently generates enough power for 53,000 homes annually, according to PacifiCorp, and with the upgrades that number should rise to about 72,000.
