Following what maritime marketing manager Jim Maloney calls a “very successful” shipment of wind turbine parts through Pier 80 to a California company, the port is working on expanding the niche business, alongside the traditional steel component traffic.<\/p>\n
“This was the first time that towers and other large components were brought through as breakbulk. All the shipments we have had up till now have been containerised,” says Mr Maloney.<\/p>\n
There is no shortage of available open space, with the 69 acre site greatly underused. Forty-tonne gantry container cranes are available on site, while 350 tonne crawler cranes can be summoned from sub-contractor Sheedy Crane and Drayage.<\/p>\n
Rail is crucial for successful long-term operations and the port has been working with Class 1 railroad Union Pacific to get maximum efficiency. “Their specialist wind power division is providing invaluable advice on logistics requirements”, says Mr Maloney.<\/p>\n
There is certainly no shortage of customers and wind projects. One of the biggest independent suppliers and consultants, Pattern Energy (formerly the wind energy division of Babcock Brown), has its head office at the port.<\/p>\n
A number of wind farms are in California, including Altamont Pass and Tehachapi, while Nevada is showing much greater interest.<\/p>\n
US contractors are importing components from older and disused farms abroad for use in small-scale operations. The shipment that came through San Francisco was from Germany. According to the importer, Halus Power Systems, the 0.5 megawatt units have been overtaken by 2-3 mw models in Europe.<\/p>\n
“The older models are being cleared out of wind farms in Germany and Denmark to make way for the newer models, but the older models are still more than adequate for smaller-scale users such as businesses and large farms.”<\/p>\n
San Francisco’s main rival for this sort of project cargo is the San Francisco Bay port of Stockton \u2013 which has the advantage of having much easier access to the main road and rail arterial routes but which is subject to the unpredictable fog that hampers shipping and which led indirectly to the box ship Cosco Busan <\/i>hitting the Oakland Bay bridge.<\/p>\n
Tonnage through the terminal in 2011 is forecast to be 70,000 tonnes, double that of 2010 but far short of the 250,000 tonnes in 2006.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
San Francisco is adding a second string to its bow with emphasis on encouraging wind power shipments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-1782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-north-america"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1782\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1782"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=1782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}