Berlin When Holger Dechant thinks of the “Easter Package” from Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck, he has ill-wishers. “We can’t really be happy about the package: The logistics in large-capacity and heavy transport cannot simply be switched on and off,” says the managing director of Universal Transport, a company for heavy-duty logistics. In the days when wind power was still booming, he and his employees transported six to seven wind turbines a week. But that was a long time ago, five years to be precise. “The necessary special equipment cannot be moved up and down at will.”
The federal government wants to expand wind power at lightning speed. So fast that in 13 years electricity in Germany should come “almost entirely” from green energies, as Minister Habeck explained last week. Instead of around 1800 wind turbines in the years 2018 to 2020, these – or preferably even more – are to be built per year, as was the case last time in 2017. Habeck wants to change a number of laws. Renewable energies should be “in the overriding public interest and serve public safety” – and other interests such as nature conservation or property rights take a back seat. Authorities should be able to issue permits faster with the argument.
Approving locations quickly is one thing – transporting the wind turbines and construction equipment is another. But the bureaucracy slows things down here. The employees at the heavy-duty logistics company Universal Transport, for example, cannot simply register a trip online with a rotor blade on the loading area, enter the start and end point, length, width and weight and then hope to quickly receive the go-ahead by e-mail including a route plan.
For each transport, the dispatchers have to obtain approvals from a number of authorities, depending on where the journey is to go. Helmut Schgeiner, head of the federal specialist group for heavy transport and crane work (BSK) at the BGL road haulage association, speaks of a “bureaucracy carousel across all federal levels”. If a transport exceeds the usual dimensions, the logistician must ask each owner of the roads whether they are allowed to use them: district, country, federal roads and motorways.
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Each authority checks whether the road can take that much weight, as well as the bridge and whether the vehicle can pass under it, whether it is still able to master a curve. With transports that are now 100 meters long, the answer is difficult. It takes four to eight weeks to get approval. “The approval authorities are not prepared for the large number of transports,” he warns in view of the government’s plans.
One wind turbine means ten heavy goods transports
Ten heavy-duty transports are usually required for one wind turbine alone. There is the steel tower, which consists of several tubes the size of a house – a good 20 to 30 meters long – there are the machine house and the hub, which together weigh a good 70 tons – and of course there are the three rotors, now up to 80 meters long and 5.80 meters higher than ordinary bridges. Only special vehicles are able to lay the leaves so that they reach their destination. All of these gigantic individual parts are joined together by several huge cranes on the construction site, which of course also have to be moved to the spot with heavy trucks.
The BSK counts a total of “60 to 80 individual transports” per construction site. “The preparation of the transports suffers massively from the tough approval processes,” says BSK boss Schgeiner, describing the situation. The responsibilities between federal, state and local authorities are often unclear. “Too much is left to the discretion of individual authorities or even officials,” he complains. In addition, there are different fee rates from place to place, which are only due months after the transport. “Obviously, our customers have no understanding for this,” says heavy-duty logistics specialist Dechant. He counts Siemens Gamesa and Nordex among his customers.
He recalls that the transport companies hardly made any money during the 2017 boom because the approval authorities were overwhelmed, contractually agreed transports were delayed and penalties were due, although the problems were not the responsibility of the logisticians and transport companies. It may be the case that an engineer realizes shortly before departure that a bridge can only hold a load of 100 tons instead of 130 tons. But the crane is on the construction site and costs a lot of money every day.
Approval granted – approval expires
The transport is delayed, perhaps by a week, when the next customer is actually already waiting for his wind turbine. If a vehicle other than the one registered is then used, the permit is no longer valid. Or the transport is not as wide as expected – the permit expires. Dechant therefore recommends that politicians, transport companies and wind turbine manufacturers sit down at one table: “We have to find a solution together.”
The BSK specialist working group recently created its very own Easter package with the Association of German Machinery and Plant Engineering. In a guide, they list which laws and regulations need to be changed so that transport is still possible with larger wind turbines and the number of transports can increase rapidly, as politically desired.
Practitioners not only name a desire for less bureaucracy. It’s also about the lack of parking spaces on the freeway, about a number of slip roads that are no longer suitable for the new transport lengths. And it’s about the question of what an access road to the wind farm, for example, has to be able to do, which in most cases still has to be built, as do many a road to the seaports. Wind turbines are arriving there more and more frequently.
Above all, however, it is about reliability, so that once approval has been granted, it also lasts. After all, there are rarely alternative routes. “It must therefore be clear to everyone involved – including in the administrations – that a route, once it has been approved, must be secured,” the paper says. That means: no sudden construction sites or other obstacles that stop the transport at short notice.
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