Kevin McAlonan, Head of Wind Operations at Global Wind, walks through exactly what it takes to deliver and install a modern wind turbine. The components are enormous, the routes are constrained and the window to act is frequently dictated by weather, not by a planner's spreadsheet.
Every project involves a chain of dependencies that would stress any logistics operation: port handling, specialist heavy-transport providers, route surveys, police escorts and crane mobilisation all have to converge on the same site at the same time. A slip in any one of those links doesn't just cause delay, it can push the entire installation back by weeks.
What McAlonan's account makes clear is that wind operations sit at the sharpest end of multi-party logistics coordination. Technology is beginning to close some of the gaps, with drones accelerating site surveys and digital planning tools replacing paper-based permit processes, but the coordination burden remains high.
For logistics providers operating in infrastructure or project freight, the episode is a useful reminder that complexity at this scale demands more than capacity. It demands visibility across every party in the chain, well before the first component moves.
