From the floor of the CANWEA conference in downtown Toronto.
Well my fellow crane folks its time for a math lesson.
First let me set up the classroom for this lesson:
- Understand that a lot of wind farms are going to built in Canada between today and 2025;
- Understand that this is going to take a lot of crane and aerial erection work;
- I hope we are ready for this…
How many wind farms you say, well here come the math lessons.
According to Canweaand their “Windvision 2025” document Canada is poised to construct 55,000 megawatts of wind turbine generated power in the next 15 years.
The key to these projections is the Megawatt or MW and to know that on average one wind turbine generates 2.5 MW of power.
So the first math lesson is:
55,000 MW divided by 2.5MW/turbine = 22,000 wind turbines to be installed in 15 years.
The second lesson is:
22,000 wind turbines divided by 15 years = 1,466 turbines per year.
The third lesson is that these wind turbines will be located on 450 separate locations in Canada:
22,000 wind turbines divided by 450 locations = 49 wind turbines on average per location.
The fourth lesson is 450 farms in 15 years:
450 wind farms divided by 15 years = 30 wind farms with 49 wind turbines per wind farm per year.
Now you do your own math and answer these questions:
- How much equipment and manpower does it take you to move that many wind turbines to their respective locations?
- How many cranes and how much manpower does it take to erect that many turbines at their respective locations?
- How many man years of time will these projects take?
- Ands perhaps the most important question of all; will you be tooled and trained up correctly to take in your share of this massive surge in crane and aerial rigging work now solidly on the near horizon?
Some simple advise, read and understand this document Windvision 2025 and then do your math homework.
From their decide if you are going to be in this business or just staring at a yard full of cranes.
And one last thing THIS IS JUST THE MATH LESSON FOR CANADA!!!
I know their are similar base line number for the USA and they make the scope of Canadian wind farms look small but frankly my mind cannot work with numbers that big so I am sticking with the the Canadian math for now.
