A week ago, the tallest wind turbine ever built stood in eastern Germany at partial height, waiting for calmer air so it could finish growing. That wait is over.<\/p>\n
We covered that strange, slow-motion climb<\/a> when it stalled. If you don’t wanna read it (I get it, we can’t all read about turbines during a work day), the short version is that it builds itself near the ground, then pushes its own top up through a lattice tower, because there’s no crane on Earth that reaches high enough to do it the normal way.<\/p>\n On September 28th, the inner tower locked into its final position at the Schipkau site in Brandenburg. The structure now runs 1,198 feet (365 meters) from the ground to the tip of its highest blade, with the hub sitting 984 feet up. That’s the tallest wind turbine in the world and the second-tallest structure in Germany, with only the Berlin TV Tower, about 10 feet taller, still ahead of it.<\/p>\n GICON, the Dresden engineering group that designed and built the thing, declared the milestone the next day. “365 meters \u2013 this is an overwhelming moment for our entire team,” said founder Jochen Gro\u00dfmann in the company’s announcement<\/a>.<\/p>\n It was a well-earned moment. The lift was supposed to wrap up around September 20th, and it didn’t, because gusts kept shutting the work down. By September 27th, the structure had only crept to 1,033 feet. There was more tension here than in an episode of Love is Blind, but that’s what happens when you’re dealing with something that actually matters instead of trying to marry a gaslighting stranger after a few weeks of knowing them.<\/p>\n “Safety comes before speed,” Gro\u00dfmann told the German press agency dpa while everyone waited.<\/p>\n If you read our first piece, you know the basic trick, so I’ll keep this short. (It’s worth taking a break from answering emails, trust me.) GICON built an outer lattice tower about 525 feet tall, assembled the nacelle and the three blades at that height, where cranes can still work, and then pushed a slimmer inner tower up through the outer one with the whole 827-ton turbine package riding on top.<\/p>\n Strand jacks did the pushing. A strand jack is basically a hydraulic gripper that climbs a bundle of steel cables a few inches at a stroke, and bridge crews use the same gear to lift whole road decks into place. Here, a set of them walked the inner tower up at about 30 feet per hour until the hub hit 984 feet, and the tower got pinned in its extended position. SPRIND, the German federal innovation agency that commissioned the project, says in its write-up<\/a> that the turbine “serves as its own crane,” which is about right.<\/p>\n And the tower itself is a beast<\/em>. According to the VDI trade outlet Ingenieur.de<\/a>, the lattice mast holds more than 2,200 tons of steel across some 22,000 individual parts.<\/p>\nSo how did they finish it without a crane?<\/h2>\n