Avanti equipment in wind turbine towers in Uruguay
The Danish company Avanti Wind Systems has just supplied service lifts and ladder fall safety equipment for five new 2 MW wind turbine towers in Uruguay. The wind turbine park in Cerro de los Caracoles was financed by Spain and is operated by UTE, the Uruguayan state-owned electricity company.
The new turbine towers, which are 67 meters high, have Avanti Service Lifts, which transport service technicians and their tools up towers easily, safely and quickly. The lifts which have room for two technicians and their equipment runs in a wire system independently of the ladder. Avanti Wind Systems has installed more than 12,000 of these lifts in wind turbine towers throughout the world.
The Avanti Fall Protection System has also been installed in the five new towers. This is a system that ensures that technicians climbing the ladders cannot fall. Avanti has developed a system in which technicians fasten themselves with a click-on runner to a rail on the ladder. Thus the system is not wire-based, which means it can be used by several technicians simultaneously.
The new wind turbine park in Cerro de los Caracoles is located just a few miles from the sea on the top of a hill in the otherwise relatively flat Uruguayan landscape. This is the country's second wind turbine park. But the director of the state-owned electricity company UTE, Beto Ruchansky, has told the Merco Press Agency that a further 20 similar projects are in the development stage, and that he expects five of them to be installed in the course of the next 18 months.