Still no cats in my home, so no Friday cat blogging, and also no new barfly artwork to present. Instead, I’ll deliver some porn.

Here is a brand new crane that fascinates me since it was announced in April this year.

This is a GTK 1100, a crane specifically build for erecting wind energy mills, at its very first job. (bigger pic)

It is a product of Grove, a U.S. company belonging to the Manitowoc group. But it was engineered and manufactured in Wilhelmshaven, Germany, by a former part of the Krupp group. The idea for this thing came from the junior chief of a German crane operating company, Wiesbauer, which now owns its very first instantiation.

The top high of the crane is 140 meters, 460 feet. Top load is some 100 metric tons, 110 U.S. tons.

The new idea in it is the self-erecting telescopic tower and its bracing. The tower carries a slightly modified top part of a typical telescopic road crane.

So far lattice boom cranes have been used to erect big wind mills. (Here in some recent work on a 5 megawatt tower).

The new GTK 1100 needs only 4-5 truck loads to be transported and it is set up in about six hours. Lattice boom cranes need 15+ truckloads and take days to be erected. Sure, they do have a higher top capacity, but that isn’t needed for these energy mills.

A nice computer animation of the GTK concept shows some details. And last week saw the GTK’s very first erection and job in the field. Good pictures are available in a German crane forum here and here. (Also at the Wiesbauer site: 1, 2, 3, 4.) There isn’t much of technical descriptions out yet, but an unofficial version of a brochure is this pdf from a (slow) Polish site.

Taking a higher point of view, the German concept of subsidizing wind energy for a certain time shows success. Guaranteeing high, but constantly decreasing, sponsored wholesale prices, resulted in a big push for related industries. There are now new companies for engineering and building these mills, the crane manufacturers are booming, the farmers are happy about the new crop. Over the last years some 200,000 new jobs have been directly and indirectly created through alternative energy production.

For a nation with few natural resources and little terrain, these are welcome new Volkswagen, Mercedes and BMW like companies. Exporters built on knowledge and capability that allow a decent amount of national imports without running catastrophic deficits.

Sure, electricity prices have gone up a bit because of the subsidies. But less dependence on fossil energy and on foreign money may help to avoid future resource wars that would come at a much higher price.