According to the Energy for Africa website “The 138 MW Gouda Wind Farm in the Drakenstein Municipality is the first wind farm in South Africa using concrete towers”.
Concrete.TV spoke to Concrete Growth director, Santie Gouws, about the award winning Gouda Wind Farm constructed in the Cape Winelands region. The Gouda Wind Farm is South Africa’s first wind farm project in which concrete opposed to the traditional steel was used as a core construction material for the tower structures. The towers are said to be 100 meters high and support the turbine and blades weighing in the range of 170 tons.
Gouws state that “concrete towers for wind turbines have been shown to be more cost effective over the traditional tubular steel towers of hub heights of 90 meters and upwards”.The problems faced within this industry is that all raw or unworked steel in the local manufacture of components were deemed locally sourced for the purposes of calculating local content by the Department of trade and industry.
Ninety percent of the raw materials were sourced locally together with the 500 MPa reinforcing steel production. The Gouda Wind Farm Precast Concrete Towers is unique to precast concrete in South Africa and is therefore fully deserved of being the winner of the 2015 Fulton Award in the category ‘Innovation’ and received a Commendation in the category ‘Civil Engineering Structures over R100 million.
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[Gouda Wind Farm -SA’s first concrete tower wind farm [construction]]
[https://youtu.be/UER8Y1szGQI]
