Mercury’s wind farm contractors have engineered a way out of a tricky problem – how to get the massive turbine blades to the top of the Tararua Range. The corners on the Pahīatua Track were too tight to get the 55-metre blades around and an attempt to create a bypass track collapsed in a slip. The solution, given the road could not be made straighter, was to make the blades shorter. The innovative technology, the blade manipulator, enables the Vestas blades to be tilted up to a 60-degree angle.
