When people come to Vancouver, they will be able to look up from the downtown and see the turbine spinning.

Premier Business Partners:

Morrison Hershfield

A chance juxtaposition in a customer’s mind resulted in the creation of a new multipurpose attraction called The Eye of the Wind for 4,200-foot Grouse Mountain, a ski resort that overlooks downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. It’s a win-win from the wind for the environment and excitement.

“The reason this site was chosen is because the owner of Grouse Mountain, Stuart McLaughlin, decided he would like to reduce his carbon footprint and make his resort more energy-efficient,” recalls Pat Boyle, general manager of Leitner Poma of Canada Inc., which is part of the Leitner Group of companies. “Originally, we took the owner and a couple of the managers from Grouse Mountain to Europe to show them our new tramways, and while we were there, we showed them our prototype Leitwind wind turbines, and at that point they said, ‘We want one of those.’ That was in 2006, and since then, this project has evolved from being a wind turbine to being a wind turbine with an elevator and a viewing platform capable of holding 36 people.

“The biggest challenge was designing something that had never been done before,” he points out. “It was continuous, small, detailed challenges that we ran into. For instance, because the turbine has a viewing platform, it’s considered a building, not a structure, and had to be designed to the national building code of Canada, which significantly changed the design requirements.”

The viewing platform on the site was built by Sigma Composite of Lyon, France, part of the Leitner Group, an Italian company with its head office in Sterzing, Italy, that manufactures snow groomers, ski lifts and wind turbines.

Another challenge was finding an elevator small enough to fit inside the turbine and that could withstand the movement of the tower from the wind and the motion of its own blades. Finally, a Finnish elevator company, Kone, was located, whose marine division has an elevator that is designed for installation in cruise ships and meets the requirements for the turbine tower.

Ensuring that passengers in the elevator don’t get seasick from the motion of the blades is another consideration. So limiting power production during viewing hours is being considered as well as limiting viewing during particularly windy periods.

“It’s going to give Grouse Mountain about 25 percent of the resort’s power needs, and it tends to be windiest when it’s stormy and cloudy in Vancouver,” Boyle notes. “I think we’re going to find on a pleasant sunny day there tends to be not too much wind, and when it’s cloudy and stormy and rainy, that’s where the majority of the wind and power production will be.”

The movement of the tower in the wind and from the blades’ movement could be as much as one-half meter each way, Boyle estimates. He thinks people visiting the platform when it is swaying will have differing reactions to this. “A percentage will think it’s wonderful, and a greater percentage will think: no way,” he laughs. “We’re learning as we’re going – nobody’s ever done this before.”

In addition to the design challenges, the $6 million project also had access restrictions. Most people get to Grouse Mountain by tram, and the only access road is not plowed in the winter.

“A 13-kilometer logging road runs up from North Vancouver to the top of the mountain,” Boyle explains. During the winter, all deliveries are on the smaller of two tramways that carries 40 people. It is usually used for freight except when the resort is very busy. A 100-passenger tramway is used all the time to transport people.

Major supplies like fuel, lumber and large objects are delivered by truck during the summer and fall. “Once they’re set for the winter, they are able to transport everything else on the tramways,” Boyle says.

Ground site preparation and construction of the foundation for the turbine began in the fall of 2008. Erection of the turbine was started in mid-September 2009. “We knew that we didn’t have enough time to do the site preparation, the foundation and then the erection all in one summer,” Boyle emphasizes. “They get a substantial amount of snow at Grouse Mountain, from 6 to 30 feet.”

The foundation is on solid rock, so drilling 32 6-inch-diameter holes for rock anchors took approximately one month. Half the anchors are 45 feet deep and half are 60 feet deep. A bottom hammer drill specifically designed for drilling large holes through rock was brought in by a subcontractor.

The 65-meter tower was assembled in three sections. One concern was having enough horsepower and equipment to truck the 60-foot-long, 120,000-pound base section of the tower up the steep grade of the logging road’s last half-mile.

Each of the three tower sections has ladders and platforms installed for the workmen to access the area where they can bolt on the next section. “These guys love it,” Boyle says of the workmen. “This is part of the excitement of the whole thing – to get up a couple hundred feet in the air.”

The turbine is located approximately 50 feet from the edge of the mountain. Its blades, which are 37.5 meters (123 feet) long, were flown by Sky Crane helicopter from a barge in Vancouver’s harbor to the top of the mountain because they were too long to be trucked around the curves on the logging road.

Subcontractors did the foundation and electrical building, installed the rock anchors, supplied the crane and erected the turbine, and transported the turbine components from Washington state, where they were built. “We supervised the erection, did all the electrical engineering and installation of electrical components, and also commissioned the wind turbine itself once it was erected,” Boyle says.

“This is really an iconic structure,” Boyle emphasizes. “It’s going to be a symbol in Vancouver and will get people thinking about alternative energy sources. When you come into Vancouver, you’ll be able to look up from the downtown core and see the turbine spinning. I was very concerned about a lot of negative response from the public, but since we set it up, we’ve gotten overwhelmingly positive response.”