Gold Hard Hat Award
Vestas Towers
Submitted by IES Commercial
Danish wind-energy giant, Vestas, continued its building of new facilities in Colorado with its Pueblo project. The wind-tower project consisted of construction on a fast-track industrial production campus consisting of four buildings: a 460,000-sq-ft production facility where the tower sections will be made, a 260,000-sq-ft surface treatment plant for finishes, a 115,000-sq-ft internals building where the hardware will be installed in sections and a 30,000-sq-ft administration building.
The Vestas production complex is the largest of its type in the world, occupying more than 600,000 sq ft in its entirety. Each tower is 300 ft tall, with a 14-ft diameter base and weighs a couple of hundred tons. At full production, the plant will require nearly 200,000 tons of steel per year to produce the towers. The assembled towers are then loaded onto railroad cars at the Union Pacific rail spur that runs next to the factory and shipped all over the United States.
The project team worked in concert to complete a comprehensive BIM design model prior to construction. The model included owner equipment and manufacturing processes so that the facility operators could see how the process would work in a virtual world and to ensure that none of the building elements created conflicts. These conflicts added an additional dimension to BIM.
Project Team:
Vestas Towers
Pueblo
$17 million
Owner: Vestas
General Contractor: PCL Construction Services
Architect: Ware Malcomb
Engineers: IES Commercial, Trautman & Shreve Inc., Nolte Associates, BCER Engineering Inc., KL&A Inc.,
