Wind turbine blade transportation challenges

Posted by Brajeshwar 9/13/2025

Wind turbine blade transportation challenges(spectrum.ieee.org)

106 points | 143 commentspage 2

ofalkaed 9/16/2025|

70 meters is not actually the limit as this article suggests, I know the Duluth/Superior port receives 80 meter blades which are then trucked out and I think they plan on going bigger but don't recall the details. Saw some of the trucks hauling those 80 meter blades last year when I was there, it was impressive.

Edit: Reading about it some, the blades I saw might not have been 80m, it looks like the 80m blades might have gone right onto a train. I was told by the person I was with that they were 80m, I didn't measure.

jauntywundrkind 9/16/2025||

Surprising no one, the military is also showing interest in WindRunner too. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2480857-how-the-us-mili...

I enjoyed the last submission on WindRunner. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39690182

p1mrx 9/13/2025||

Sadly, an LLM rejected my idea of building an enormous helicopter drone from wind turbine blades. They can't spin fast enough to generate sufficient lift.

eightysixfour 9/13/2025||

Alternative, can you make a turbine blade that can be an (inefficient) wing when bolted to a fuselage and engine? Effectively fly the blade there, using it as a lifting surface area.

brikym 9/17/2025|||

I thought about this as well. The blades are asymmetric so you can't use two as wings unless the wind farm orders half of their turbines to rotate in the opposite direction.

eightysixfour 9/23/2025||

What is the barrier for that? Seems like a reasonable compromise.

nielsbot 9/16/2025|||

How do you get your plane back? Or would you just dispose of it like a rocket booster? :)

mxfh 9/16/2025|||

The carrier host fuselage would need huge controls surfaces anyways, could just use them as normal wings when flying for itself with way less drag.

Or just do self mounting Multicopter using the big wing as lift surface for the long haul.

They already use propellers for mounting anyway, its wild out there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1gUm_W1z28

eightysixfour 9/23/2025|||

Make the fuselage small enough to truck it back.

IshKebab 9/13/2025|||

Why is that sad? That's way outside LLM training sets.

p1mrx 9/13/2025||

It's a fairly straightforward physics question, and Gemini Pro thinks the thrust to weight ratio is too low, by more than an order of magnitude, even before adding the weight of the frame and propulsion system.

tim333 9/13/2025||

Straightforward physics suggests the lift is a function of how fast you spin them. I'm sure with a fast enough spin you could get enough lift. Maybe rocket engines on the tips?

chopin 9/13/2025||

The tips need to stay subsonic. A bigger rotor must turn slower. AFAIK the tips of current wind turbines are already close to this limit.

tim333 9/13/2025||

Still subsonic speeds can produce a lot of lift. I mean jet aircraft weighing 200 tons lift off at about 160 mph. But googling wing tip thrust, jet engines are probably more practical than rockets.

unfitted2545 9/16/2025||

Computer says no

quotemstr 9/16/2025||

> During flight, the hold is only pressurized to about the level of the peak of Mt. Everest, to save energy.

Everest's peak is about 29,000 feet above sea level. I imagine this thing flies at, what, 40,000 or so? Why bother pressurizing the cargo hold at all if people can't breathe anyway? You have all the headaches of compression but none of the advantages. Am I missing something?

margalabargala 9/16/2025||

I don't know, but at a random guess, with such immense cargo volume, there could be a danger of implosion during an emergency descent if the hold was unpressurized and the inflow rate was not sufficient. It may have been cheaper to pressurize than have rapid inflow.

bluGill 9/17/2025||

they shouldn't be flying very far, and thus won't even make it to 40k feet before heading down. If you are going more than 500 miles (i made that up but it is a good number to start with) build a new factory. Iowa has kept one factory busy for more than a decade transporting less distance than that.

cratermoon 9/17/2025||

How difficult would it be to come up with a design for a blade that can be made and transported in segments and assembled full length on site? https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/8/1112

lkbm 9/17/2025|

> Shipping them in multiple pieces and reassembling them on-site won’t work because the joints would create weak spots. Junctions would also add too much weight compared with that of blades made from single pieces of polymer, says Doug Arent, executive director at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory Foundation and emeritus NREL researcher.

cratermoon 9/17/2025||

Counter, from the linked paper

> While blade segmentation poses serious challenges, the wide variety of possibilities and the potential benefits are bound to lead to further developments in this field. Furthermore, segmentation appears most likely to be cost effective for very large, offshore turbines or on-shore turbines with promising conditions, but accessibility issues.

mandeepj 9/16/2025||

How are they going to do last mile(s) delivery then?

> onshore wind-turbine blades can be built to a length of 70 meters, max.

Interestingly, that is the length of Falcon 9 as well. Spacex has used 44 wheeled trailers to transport it.

Noted: Radia’s plane will be able to hold two 95-meter blades or one 105-meter blade

CarVac 9/16/2025||

Doing some pixel counting suggests a nacelle diameter of approximately 152 inches, which is close to the 155 inches of the A350's Trent XWB or the smaller of the various 777 engines (in particular, not the largest GE90).

taeric 9/16/2025||

My grandfather in law used to love discussing the difficulties of transporting giant turbine blades. Always reminded me of the sheer difficulty with large solutions that are often not immediately obvious.

Krasnol 9/16/2025||

The final paragraphs read like stories from the war.

"Yeah we hope to survive despite..."

Bad times.

bandyaboot 9/16/2025|

Ok, hear me out. How powerful of a battery would we need to turn the blades and nacelle into a helicopter?

And just think. Once it arrives on site, you have a big ass grid storage battery to install!

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