How to Lift a Wind Turbine Tower From the Ground
These techniques are designed to get the wind turbine up safely, and staked down with a minimum of work. They also assume that the turbine itself has been mounted on the tower, and that all electrical work has been done for getting power from the turbine through the base of the tower, and that your anchor points and socket have already been placed and all that remains is putting the tower up.
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Things You'll Need
- A wind turbine
- Anchor points for guy-line
- Socket for the tower
- Assistants (strongly recommended)
Instructions
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1
Arrange the turbine and blade so that the blades will be perpendicular to the wind. If you have a chock to keep the blades from spinning, install it. The most dangerous part of raising a wind turbine tower is if the blades start swinging freely.
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2
Hook your guy-lines to the top of the tower, and then to the stake-down points on the ground. If you're using a standard four guy-line layout (four wires going out at 90-degree angles from the turbine), stake down three of them. Run the fourth cable through the anchor point, but don't tie it off yet.
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3
Gently pull on the cable, while an assistant lifts the top of the tower up. The second assistant (wearing work gloves) is in charge of moving the base of the tower to the socket. The person working the guy-wire is keeping control of the cable tension, while the other two people are doing the lifting. When the head of the tower gets high enough, the person on the guy-line will be applying the force while the other two push to keep it vertical.
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4
Put the bottom of the tower in the socket, remove the chocks from the turbine blade, and lash down the last guy-line.
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Tips & Warnings
Most of these techniques are similar to barn raising or lodge-pole raising. Any instructional video of a barn raising will give you most of the pointers on getting your turbine tower up.
