When a wind energy customer was faced with jammed shipping routes and a tight deadline, our Portland-based specialized transportation, crane services and millwright crews all stepped up to meet the challenge. Along with several other fantastic transportation and logistics companies, our crews helped create an innovative solution for transporting wind turbine generator (WTG) components from the Port of Lewiston, ID, to Alberta, Canada.

This solution was the first of its kind to be executed in the Pacific Northwest. Since there were several other projects being shipped along the typical route that our teams would use, we had to get creative about an alternate method of getting the WTG components where they needed to be. This meant developing an entirely new means of transportation for components coming into the Pacific Northwest, utilizing routes over both land and water.

The components were barged in from the Port of Vancouver and the Port of Longview, WA, to the Port of Lewiston (avoiding trucking on the heavily-congested Oregon and Washington routes) and then trucking them up to their final destination in Alberta, Canada. A project like this would normally take at least three to four months to plan; our crews got the complex planning done in just five weeks.

The result was a massively coordinated effort, in partnership with the excellent transportation and logistics crews we had the good fortune to work alongside. All in all, we made 12 successful voyages up to Alberta.

The details of this highly complex and large-scale project are worth a read — you can learn more about it in our latest case study.