A huge wing for a wind turbine being driven through Skellefteå.
Trucks with huge cargo have lately passed through Skellefteå in the late evenings. Some seem to be heavier, and some extremely long. They are all followed by multiple yellow cars with blinking lights, but what are they actually? Where are they going?
The trucks leave Piteå at around 20:00 at night, meaning they mostly pass through Skellefteå around 22:00. If you've ever seen one, you will instantly understand what I'm writing about. Some of them are carrying huge containers with the sign "BRED LAST" (meaning wide cargo) on the front and back of the truck, and some are carrying long white structures, spanning off the truck and being carried by another free standing construction on wheels at the end of the structure.
The trucks are carrying parts for wind turbines. There is a park of them currently being built in Tomasliden outside of Bastuträsk. The parts are brought to Piteå by ship and then driven by a Danish company to Tomasliden. The drive, which for a normal car would take less than 2 hours, takes the trucks 6 hours. This is, however, unsurprising, given that the heaviest parts, the nacelles, weigh as much as 84 metric tonnes and the longest parts, the wings, span just over 80 meters.
Safe to say, this is not the easiest transport these truck drivers have driven in their careers.
They drive every night except for on Saturdays, and the transports will continue going through Skellefteå for another week. Due to a previous problem with permits to adjust an especially narrow intersection, most of the parts currently left to transport are wings.