Climbing crane shimmies up turbine towers like a kid up a coconut tree

To build or maintain today's colossal wind turbine towers, you either need an absolute monster of a crane – or something like this. The KoalaLifter self-climbing crane is quick, compact, handles heavy loads and creeps up turbine towers of any height.

Wind turbines are becoming some of the world's largest machines, with some offshore giants standing hundreds of meters tall. And since nearly all of them are horizontal-axis "fan on a stick" type designs, you typically need to lift the heaviest components up from the ground to the top of the tower for installation, maintenance or decommissioning.

To give you a sense for the size of the crane that requires, skip to somewhere around 1:45 in the video below, which shows German company Enercon installing one of its 5.56-megawatt turbines. That's a quarter of the power the biggest ones are shooting for, but it runs 160-m (525-ft) blades, so the generator nacelle has to be considerably higher than that, and the crane needs to be even higher.

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