EERE Success Story—How Spiral Welding Is Revolutionizing Wind Turbine ManufacturingManufacturing costs and logistics are two challenges to rapidly integrating more renewable energy into the U.S. power system. This is especially true for tall land-based wind turbines, but Colorado-based Keystone Tower Systems is changing how wind turbines can be manufactured, transported, and installed. Taller land-based wind turbines harness and generate more power than shorter ones, because they can access faster wind speeds at greater heights. But larger wind turbines are harder to construct and require more steel to build. They’re also difficult and costly to transport from the manufacturing plant to the wind farm, because the tower is often too large to fit under highway overpasses or across bridges. With more than $7 million from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Keystone Tower Systems has developed a solution: a spiral-welding technique, borrowed from the steel-pipeline industry, to build some of the largest turbine towers on the market. Spiral welding is when the steel used to make the tower is curled into a cylinder; essentially, these towers are built from meters-wide steel plates. Read more | 
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