Too big to ship

A while ago, a friend from Texas sent me a video of a truck carrying a wind turbine blade. One single blade. The thing was so huge no more than one could fit on a truck, and it was a special truck, too, of course, to be able to carry the blade. Naturally, the truck caused a traffic jam while it navigated an intersection. This sort of jam had become part of life, my friend told me, what with Texas proudly embracing wind as alternative source of energy.

That friend, by the way, was not the only one that complained about turbine blade transport in Texas but the video he sent me reminded me of the first time I saw turbine blades kind of up close, at the port of Constanta, where a batch had just arrived and was deposited near the route of a tourist bus we were on. Those blades seemed to go on forever and I couldn’t help thinking how the hell does transporting work. Today, finally, I got an answer and that answer was “With difficulty”. More precisely, the answer is “With growing difficulty.” You wouldn’t believe it but the energy transition just ran into yet another obstacle and that obstacle is transport.

“Large wind turbines now have blades of astonishing dimensions. These large cargoes create high wind loads for vessels, require stacking and specialized rigs to transport, as they are also quite vulnerable.” The observation comes from the chief executive of none other than transport and logistics giant DHL and if you, like me, did not hitherto know what “high wind loads” mean, here is Google’s AI definition: “High wind load refers to the aerodynamic force exerted by strong winds on a ship’s above-water structure (windage area). It severely impacts a vessel’s maneuverability, creates dangerous leeway, and puts immense stress on mooring equipment and hull stability.”

We have moved into previously unexplored territories of Terra Ironia if wind turbine blades create wind trouble for the ships that transport them. It is delicious, but not for the logistics companies. DHL’s chief executive is certainly not happy about it, even though he expects that challenging business to generate revenues of 3 billion euro by 2030, from just 600 million euro in 2025. Higher revenues but at what cost sort of situation.

Bloomberg, which cited the DHL gentleman, wrote in the same report that some Chinese company had built a turbine blade that’s 153 m long, to give the turbine a capacity of 26 MW. This is the longest wind turbine blade in the world, for now. I’m sure it won’t stay the longest for, well, long. After all, longer blades mean more wind power getting turned into electricity. As long as you can transport it from factory to turbine site without destroying it or logjamming everything you pass.

Incidentally, something tells me that transportation costs feature somewhere in the final price of a wind turbine and if DHL expects such a jump in revenues from its transition tech transport business, then someone will be paying a premium for those blades. Oh, and there’s the question of wide enough roads for the special rigs required to transport the blades, as duly noted by Bloomberg in its report.

But, as the classic said, wait, there’s more. There is another thing that begins with a B and is giving logistics firms a headache. Yep. Batteries and battery-powered things on four wheels. These are a fire hazard as many discovered after a couple of EV fires on board ships. And what about air transport? Based on DHL’s Meyer’s remarks, Hollywood could make a sequel to “Snakes on a Plane” called “Batteries on a Plane.”

In air transport, per Bloomberg, “any unit over 35 kilograms (77.2 pounds) is classified as dangerous goods because of the potential fire risks. Compounding that hazard is a fragmented web of international aviation rules, making the air transport of large batteries the industry’s “single largest gap.””

Transporting all the batteries that the world will be demanding very, very soon, per forecasts, is going to be difficult, therefore. Dangerous, as it were. Expensive, not to put too fine a point on it.

In fact, it could become more expensive than imagined because, per DHL, the world is also in urgent need of specialised infrastructure to handle the international movement of components for “green projects”. “Some of this stuff is extremely complicated,” per a senior DHL executive. And complicated is a synonym of expensive. Shame about those celebrations of the decline in wind turbine and battery costs over the past two decades.