Gruas Burger installs turbines in Chile

Chilean crane service provider Gruas Burger has finished installing wind turbines for the first of three wind farms planned for the region of Antofagasta in the north of the country.

The Valle De Los Vientos Park, developed by Enel GreenPower, is capable of providing 90 MW of power, and makes up nearly a third of the 300 MW capacity of wind farms in Chile. It comprises 45 Vestas V100/2000 2 MW turbines.

To install the turbines Gruas Burger used a Terex CC 2800-1 NT crawler crane. The crawler was required to lift loads up to 100 tonnes in weight and 80 metres high, a spokesperson said. Working radius was around 18 m.

The CC 2800-1 NT has a track width of 5.3 m, 5 x 1.4 m front and rear outrigger pads and 3 x 2.4 m side outrigger pads. It can travel while fully rigged with counterweights, 102 m main boom and LF 2 fixed jib, the manufacturer said.

Raul Burger, Gruas Burger president and owner, said, “Ground preparation is very important when performing lifts, and it’s an aspect one should never skimp on, but there are ways to minimise costs in projects like this. We are very experienced in erecting wind turbines, so we offered the developing company our services with the NT crane so they only needed to build 5.5 m wide roads for the crane instead of 10 m, which is usually needed for a crawler crane. We helped them save a significant amount of money.”

Burger said, “After the access roads and pads were prepared, and the turbine parts in place, we erected each turbine and then crawled with the fully erected crane to the next pad. On average we erected one turbine per day and each turbine required seven lifts. It was indeed a very fast pace.”

“After two months of hard work, we lifted the last nacelle. It was a wonderful feeling to look back and see how much we contributed towards renewable power in Chile in such a short time,” concluded Raul.

Once complete, the Calama joint wind park will have 240 MW capacity. Total investment for the project is expected to be more than US$ 500 million.