They might not look like it from 200 feet below, but industrial wind turbine blades are enormous—116 feet in their own right on GE's common 1.5-megawatt models. It's not uncommon to see semi-trucks hauling these massive turbine blades around U.S. highways, sometimes requiring a bit of tricky maneuvering.
But what about when you need to get the blades through mountain passes with sharply winding roads? A 2015 video recently surfaced by Reddit shows China International Marine Containers (CIMC) hauling 172-foot turbine blades up Baoding mountain in the Yunnan province. Instead of tailoring the blades behind the truck in a normal configuration, which would be far to long to make the turns, the specialized CIMC trailers hold the blades out in front of them with the tips sticking up at an angle.
[youtube ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cnHui4pFBU&ab&ab_channel=CIMCVehicles[/youtube]
And that's how you build a wind turbine on a mountain top.
Jay Bennett is the associate editor of PopularMechanics.com. He has also written for Smithsonian, Popular Science and Outside Magazine.
