Midday Friday I saw the most amazing thing on a southbound truck on I95 pulled over at the Maryland-Delaware border toll plaza.
It looked like 3 windmill blades on a specially constructed truck, and they looked maybe 150 or 200 feet long or more. It was hard because I was looking across about 10 lanes of toll plaza traffic and I could hardly believe my eyes - were there 8 axles under the rear end of the trailer? Were those normal sized truck wheels? I’ve never seen a vehicle that long on a roadway. The trailer was constructed like a cantelever bridge only lighter.
The three objects looked identical, and they were perhaps 6’ or 8’ in diameter at one end and tapered to a smaller and flatter profile at the other. There were some tarps but much of them was visible. Perhaps they could have been some streamlined part like a bridge footing or something, but windmill blades is the closest guess I can get.
Almost certainly the blades to one of these, a wind power generator. Those enormous trailers and blades are a pretty common sight here in West Texas lately, and you’re right, they’re pretty impressive. We have “wind farms,” huge fields with dozens and dozens of windmills, popping up all over around here.
The trucks carrying windmill blades go by my office every day. They are usually in groups of 3, with 2 blades on each truck. I bet I’ve seen over a hundred of them go by since last Winter. I’m obsessed with these things. I must find out where they’re going. I must see the windmills.
My brother is an ME at GE Windpower systems, and these are small blades in relation to some of the next generation generators. They are currently producing windmills with helicopter landing pads on the hub/generator of the windmill. There is huge money to be made in wind energy and the bigger the more power you can generate.
