By “My God. The sheer scale of this, this is kind of blowing my mind.” -Matt
Hearing about how massive wind turbines are built is one thing, but seeing it is another. Last year, I got to visit the Bekevar Wind Farm in Saskatchewan, Canada, months ahead of its completion in November 2024. As I explored the project construction site, I witnessed firsthand the vast amount of effort it takes to get 36 turbines up and running. I got a taste of a little bit of everything: the nitty gritty of permitting and safety protocols, the complex transportation logistics, and of course, the thrills of crane operation.
So, what did I discover on my turbine travels? What can we learn from Bekevar? And just how do they handle the insane logistics of building such a massive project?
We’ve done a lot of talking about wind turbines on this channel. They’re large machines in a large industry working toward an even larger purpose. But at the end of the day, height comparison charts and explanations of the square-cube law are an abstraction. No amount of stock footage can truly capture just how massive wind turbines are, and the same for the operations and deployment. It’s something that you have to see on the ground to understand. And that’s what I bring to you today: a view of a wind farm in progress, from my own perspective.
So, let’s go over exactly what we’re working with, starting with our cast of characters. The Bekevar Wind Farm itself is jointly owned by Innagreen Investments, an investment platform for utility-scale renewable energy projects, and the Cowessess First Nation of southern Saskatchewan, Canada.1 The Canada division of RES, a global renewable energy company, acted as general contractor and oversaw the organization of the entire project.
Canadian company Energy Wind & Renewables installed the turbines, which were supplied by the Europe-based manufacturer Nordex SE. Finally, Rising Edge Group, which operates in North America and the Caribbean, had its Canada team cover the transmission tasks, including drilling, cables, and the power station. Phew! It definitely took a village.
As for the stars of the show, between 36 of Nordex’s N155/5.X turbines, we’re talking several hundred tons of weight, 184 meters (or over 603 feet) of height, and a power output of up to 200 MW. That’s about enough to cover the electricity usage of roughly 100,000 homes.2
Here’s project manager Chad Serafin breaking down the turbine dimensions.
“Right, so the hub center will be 108 meters in the air. And then your rotor diameter is 155 meters. Right? So from tip to tip, would be 155 if you’re able to draw the circle perfectly around it.” -Chad Serafin
With a project this big, where do you even begin? Well, I can’t share the secret recipe for the wind farm in full, but I can give you a step-by-step breakdown of how the pros brought it all together. To put the timeline into perspective, construction started in May 2023, and the companies involved in its completion celebrated its grand opening in November 2024.
It all started with a base of operations. For this project, that meant building the “Batch Plant Yard” and the “Laydown Yard.” These are centralized logistics hubs where workers and parts go. And as I said myself, it’s…
“A lot of parts.” -Matt
“So all of these studs here go into the hub there. Like, their first month on site, all they’re doing is receiving parts, and trying to go through it, and trying to figure out inventory, everything.” -Chad Serafin
Once RES brought all the workers to the yard, it was time to modify the nearby infrastructure to make their lives a bit easier. That meant intersections to accommodate turbine deliveries and roads to access each turbine location.
“These blades for this site all came on a truck. So they all came from basically Port of Washington down in Washington State. They came, they trucked them across the upper northwest in through Canada and then they get driven up here and then once they hit site. Because if you notice, a lot of the roads are 90 degrees. So we’ve created sweeps and jug handles for that blade to maneuver around the corners.” -Chad Serafin
Once workers excavated the foundations of each turbine, the next order of business was the mat … no, not me … the mud mat. Along with the anchor bolt cage and the rebar mat, these keep the concrete and the base of the turbine upright. Think of them like the boards and dowels that professional bakers use to keep their tiered cakes from turning into edible landslide dioramas.
After these excavations were backfilled, the next layer in the wind farm cake was what’s called a “crane pad.” This is a specific compacted aggregate on top that can handle the weight of the cranes that are used to safely construct the turbines. Without it, the cranes might sink into the ground or tip over.
Here’s where it starts to really get delicate…you can say it’s when construction kicks into high gear.
And high gears they are. Again, these turbines stand at an imposing 184 meters, or over 603 feet. That’s more than double the height of the Taj Mahal. Just look at the size of the equipment required to pull this off.
So, as you can imagine, raising these towers was an incredible act of precision…one that was repeated 36 times. First, drivers delivered turbine parts to the location. Workers began to raise the individual tower sections one by one. Each segment stacked on top of each other looks like a giant tin can, which is exactly what the team called them.
“This is the table. So the table will get flipped over, and it’ll go in the center, right, up there. And then what’ll happen is the plates and the brackets will get installed on top of the table — and then the switchgear, which is behind that hoarding right there — it’ll get placed on top of the table. And then when it makes it over here, that first can with the door on the side of it, it’ll come down on top, and the table and the switchgear will already be inside.” -Chad Serafin
“So that’s the first one.” -Matt
“Yeah, that’d be that first can.” -Chad Serafin
“What did you call this? These were just the plates?” -Matt
“So these would be like your hardware, your plates for the actual table.” -Chad Serafin
“Yeah, so they’ve got five cans there. So they would have come around first with a base mid, mid crane, a 1500, and that would have stacked out the first three cans. So then this guy would come around and he would have two more cans to place on top of the first three.” -Chad Serafin
According to Serafin, it took about eight hours just to get to this stage. Once the workers raised the cans, it was the nacelle’s turn, which contains the turbine’s gearbox. I can’t say nacelle without thinking of Star Trek. Anyway, then the drivetrain followed the nacelle. The drivetrain, made up of the gearbox and the generator, is what converts the blades’ rotation into electrical energy.3
“He’ll take the roof off of the nacelle, they’ll prep the nacelle on the ground, and the nacelle will go up, and then we’ll attach the nacelle to the first can. Once the nacelle’s fully attached, the yaw’s fully attached, then we’ll fly the drivetrain in, place the drivetrain in, and we can go and take a look at those stages later on.” -Chad Serafin
“Once they have the drivetrain bolted down, they’ll fly the roof back on to the nacelle, and then the hub will go on. So the hub will go on the front face of the nacelle and the center of that hub is 108 meters. From there, they’ll start flying the blades. So, they’ll rotate the hub, and they’ll fly a blade in, stick it in roughly around the 9 o’clock position, and they’ll rotate it around fully.” -Chad Serafin
“Then they’ll stick another blade in at that 9 o’clock position, and they’ll rotate it around fully. And they’ll do it again for the third time.” -Chad Serafin
But let me tell you…this was all way easier said than done.
“You make it sound way easier than I know it is.” -Matt
“It is.” -Chad Serafin
“It’s a very delicate operation.” -Matt
“It’s a very delicate operation, right?” -Chad Serafin
“Andrew was describing to me, like, when you’re sticking a blade in, there’s a lot of bolts.” -Matt
“There is. And they have to be perfectly aligned when they’re getting it in.” -Chad Serafin
“How difficult is that, to get that?” -Matt
“It is quite difficult, but with experienced crane operators and experienced top out crew installers up there, they make it look like butter. Honestly, they do. Like, they’re just, that’s what these guys are good at. Right? They’re 108 meters in the air.” -Chad Serafin
“Yeah.” -Matt
“Right? The height doesn’t seem to bother them at all. Right? They’re just up there with their radios, calling in the crane, letting the crane operator know where they’re at and how close they actually are. And like, yeah, they just, they do a really good job. You know, we always strive, like, you’re professionals at your job. Right? So, be professionals, and it just comes naturally, and we see that a lot with these guys.” -Chad Serafin
“So that’s the yaw. That’s what spins the whole nacelle when it gets bolted down on top.” -Chad Serafin
“So that adjusts the direction that the turbine is facing? Okay.” -Matt
“Into the wind. And then up here is, this is where the drive train would sit on.” -Chad Serafin
“Oh my god, the drivetrain is huge.” -Matt
After that came the hub, and finally, workers stabbed in the blades. I was actually lucky enough to have the incredible experience of walking around inside a hub myself, led around by Zack, an onsite worker.
“So this is your hub…So these are your rams that turn each of these faces, and then you’ll have all of your, like all the poses and everything that feed the ram. Then they move in and out, which will rotate this.” -Zach
“Okay, so somebody’s job is once those all come in, you have to attach those bolts.” -Matt
“Yeah.” -Zach
“All the way around.” -Matt
“Yeah. So your studs will come through, so there’ll be a guy outside in the shrouds, and then you’ll call it, you’ll call the part up and in, and basically it’s you and the crane operator. Once they come in and your face of the blade is against the face of the hub here, you’ll have guys in here that start throwing nuts on all the way around. Then they’ll do a pre-torque, and then once it’s pre-torqued and they have all that done, then we can [de break(?)] the cranes from it, and then the blade just hangs.” -Zach
“And then usually, we try to get all of them up as soon as possible. So we’ll do our pre-torque, rotate around till the next one — ’cause there’s the certain position that you stab ’em at. So, we’ll rotate around until the next phase is in the staff position. And while they’re rotating, we’ll be bringing up to the next plate to send it. By the time they’re around, we’ll be pretty close, and then that one goes up. Stab, spin again, and rinse and repeat, basically.” -Zach
That all would take about 18 hours…under perfect conditions. But as Serafin explained to me:
“Mother Nature sometimes chooses a different path for us.” -Chad Serafin
We’ll get to the whims of Mother Nature and how they affected the project later. Before we go over that, let’s talk about the business of the electrical connections themselves. After workers put together all the turbine pieces, how did they hook them up to the grid?
Well, that’s what kept another set of workers busy down in the trenches as they laid the cables that connect the turbines to the power station. While I didn’t get to see this, the machine that the team uses sounds fascinating. In one step it digs the trench, lays the cable, and folds the earth back into place. As soon as that was done, local farmers could come back in and replant their crops. As Environmental Supervisor Cole Siddons told me:
“That is part and parcel thanks to Rising Edge, the contractor that we used for that. They specialize in doing things like that. And from day one, they always had environmental at the forefront of what they were doing. And that was one thing that was a big selling point for them, too, is not only can they get the line in the ground in a timely manner, they also reclaim, remediate, behind them while they’re doing it.” -Cole Siddons
Once the electrical lines were laid, workers connected to the wind farm’s substation so that the turbines’ power could flow into the grid. Here’s Electrical Manager Duane Leicht giving me a tour of the electricity’s domain.
“This is what is commonly referred to as a substation. It is designed to control the flow of electricity .” -Duane Leicht
“On this side is the high voltage side, so we see current transformers, we see voltage transformers, and we see surge arresters here.” -Duane Leicht
“What are those?” -Matt
“Those are current transformers. So what those do is they’ll take the amperage that’s flowing through the line and reduce it by a known ratio, and then through secondary wiring it goes through inside the building for both metering and protection. So like, there’s going to be, say, probably in the neighborhood, potentially up to 500 to 600 amps flowing through the line. So you don’t want that in the building because of safety. So, they drop it down by a known ratio so that it’s a safer value to be used in the building. And then any equipment knows that ratio so that it can mathematically step it up, so you get an assumed value.” -Duane Leicht
“So you’re constantly stepping it up and stepping it down.” -Matt
“Yes, yeah. The devices on the right hand side of us here, those are voltage transformers, or more technically, capacitive voltage transformers. They do the same thing with voltage as the current transformers are doing with amperage.” -Duane Leicht
“And what about over there? What are each one of those individual boxes?” -Matt
“The gray boxes are all circuit breakers. There’s five of them. So we have eight circuits feeding from the turbines into the substation. There’s two circuits going through four, one of each of the four breakers. The fifth circuit breaker is for the capacitor bank, which helps filter the power.” -Duane Leicht
“This is gonna be oversimplifying it, but it’s kind of like what’s in your home circuit breaker system, isn’t it?” -Matt
“Exactly. Exactly. That’s much like the breaker panel in your house that trips if you plug in the toaster and the coffeemaker at the same time. That helps protect the equipment, so if there’s a high current usage, like in the case of like, say, a short circuit — so if a cable faults underground and creates a high short circuit value, the breaker will trip off. It will automatically shut down to protect the system. Because those you don’t replace off the shelf from Amazon.” -Duane Leicht
That said, there were plenty of obstacles and no shortage of wrenches that could be thrown into turbine-raising plans. For starters: safety first. I was very impressed by the POD meeting that I sat in on, which is the team’s daily standup. During the meeting, each group reported what they’d done, what needed to get done, and any ongoing challenges. There was a storm coming in later that night, and the number of people bringing up safety and making sure to talk to your crews was really awesome to hear. I talked to the Health and Safety Supervisor, Logan Trick, more about that.
“So everyone during those pod meetings has a chance to say something, which is fantastic. And it’s nice that they start off with safety because it’s a good reminder to everyone that safety takes precedence over everything else.” -Logan Trick
During my time at Bekevar, multiple workers remarked that it was the windiest site they had ever built on. Wind speeds above 11.2 meters per second (or 25 miles per hour) meant halting work until things died down. While I was there, the wind hit speeds over 12 meters per second at times, so even I had to deal with a few work stoppages.
“So, from your perspective, what’s the most challenging thing that you have to deal with?” -Matt
“Site conditions. The weather. The weather. The site conditions and the weather are a constant. You know, we figure out what cranes we need. Booking in for rental, getting all that, all that moving along. It’s just what Mother Nature throws at you. And then how you’re dealing with it and how it’s how you’re keeping the job on schedule. Like this wind. That we’re currently in right now. Which is a good thing because that’s what it’s here for.” -Chad Serafin
The powerful winds also meant that as the towers shook, noises from even the slightest movements were magnified as they echoed from the inside. For example, without retaining clips to hold them in place, the workers’ fall protection system, or “lifeline” cables, would smack against the metal walls and create this eerie droning…
Now, you might be thinking: if it was that loud under construction, how do the turbines sound when they’re actually in use? Well, Serafin showed me that there were mitigations put in place to reduce that noise.
“Oh man. It’s a walk just to get to the tip. So what are the little spikes here at the end?” -Matt
“So those are the serrations. Helps with sound. Right, you can imagine a 77-meter blade spinning and the sound that it would have coming off of it, so it just helps reduce that sound.” -Chad Serafin
“To make them quieter for the surrounding community.” -Matt
“Exactly.” -Chad Serafin
Speaking of the surrounding community, how did this project impact the land and the people who live on it? When it comes to the environment, the project had a dedicated supervisor role through RES:
“I am responsible for ensuring that the environment in this area is protected and is put back when we finish this project — that it is not impacted in a substantial way that alters the way of life around here or alters habitats and wildlife in the area. So that goes all the way from preventing spills, ensuring prevention of erosion and sediment control, prevention of pollution. So controlling waste, controlling erosion and sediment, and ultimately controlling spill response, and wildlife response.” -Cole Siddons
To minimize disturbing the land, RES worked with local farmers to both preserve the area and to promote worker safety. According to Cole, his role is actually not all that common in the industry, so RES stands out in its environmentalist approach. And honestly, prior to meeting him, I didn’t know these kinds of jobs existed.
“Well, I will say this to a lot of the viewers out there. If you ever go to any of these renewable energy projects, and you go to the prime contractor, there’s a very good chance they will not have a person like me there: a dedicated environmental supervisor. You will have a lot of people who juggle multiple roles, or juggle multiple responsibilities, but a defined person will be rare to see. So RES definitely does take in an extra step and an extra care in ensuring environmentalism and preventing things from happening.” -Cole Siddons
Now that the project is complete, the power the turbines are generating — which is up to 200 MW at full capacity — is being sold to the Saskatchewan Power Corporation, or SaskPower. And in a press release announcing Bekevar coming online, Chief Erica Beaudin of Cowessess First Nation, which has joint ownership of the farm, had this to say:
“We are excited to be a part of this important initiative and to see it come to completion. As Indigenous people, we feel it is our duty to not only invest in clean energy, but to place ourselves front and centre as leaders in clean energy. Yotin (‘wind’ in Cree) plays an important role in our cultural ways of being and [we] firmly believe this mighty spirit has many more teachings and blessings to bestow upon us all.” 1
So, what did I take away from my experience there? I’d say my most consistent thought as I moved through the site was that I was amazed at just how much skill and care was required at every step of the way. From the tools needed for keeping farmland as intact as possible to the weeks needed for the assembly of a transformer, I think Serafin was onto something when he called the coordination of all these operations “an orchestra.” As I told him:
“It’s like, there’s so many, like, little things to keep track of…And so many people trying to do each little job. It’s just, there is no little job. They’re all big jobs.” -Matt
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