Wind turbine nacelle raised on ARES Group’s 250T hydraulic jacking system at Civmec, Henderson WA. Courtesy of ARES Group.
When Vestas began rolling out turbine components for the Warradarge Wind Farm, 200km north of Perth, the challenge wasn’t just moving 81 V136 3.6MW turbines 340km from the Port of Henderson to site — it was how to load and offload some of the heaviest, most delicate components in the chain: the nacelles.
Conventional practice would have called for gantry cranes: expensive to mobilise, slow to set up, and built to do one job only. Vestas needed an alternative lifting solution that could keep pace with the project’s delivery schedule, without the cost and complexity a gantry brings to every lift.
The solution
ARES Group answered with a custom-engineered jacking system, built by Kennedy Trailers: a hydraulic jack-and-skate unit rated to 250 tonnes, purpose-built to lift and position nacelles with no gantry required.
We didn’t stop at nacelles. Knowing the same handling challenge would recur across the project’s transformer deliveries, we designed the
system with modular attachments — so the same 250T units could be reconfigured to lift complex transformers (TX) as well, turning one piece of equipment into a solution for multiple component types.
The jacks are also truck-mounted, giving the system genuine mobility on top of raw lifting capacity. Rather than sitting idle between lifts,
the same units travel to site as the block truck on heavier moves — folding lifting capability directly into the transport fleet instead of trailing behind it.
The result
The custom jacking system delivered load and offload times up to 5x faster than conventional methods, without the cost or setup time of a gantry crane — a meaningful gain on a project moving towers, blades, nacelles, transformers and containers for 81 turbines across two delivery stages.
Combined with ARES Group’s route planning and heavy-haulage expertise across the 340km corridor from Port of Henderson, the jacking system helped keep Warradarge’s turbine deliveries on schedule, giving Vestas a purpose-built, adaptable lifting solution for one of Western Australia’s largest wind farm builds.
Project Details
Project: Warradarge Wind Farm — Custom Lifting Solution
Client: Vestas
Scope: Design and deployment of a custom jacking system for nacelle and transformer loading/offloading; heavy haulage of turbine
components 340km from Port of Henderson to site
.
Equipment: 250T hydraulic jack-and-skate jacking system with modular lifting attachments and truck-mounted mobility, built by Kennedy Trailers.
Location: Warradarge, Western Australia (200km north of Perth)
Turbines: 81 x Vestas V136 3.6MW
