To move the cutting head of the ‘Monica’ tunnel boring machine, a 152-wheel truck was needed. It’s the key to Australia’s ‘water battery’
Transporting a gigantic tunnel boring machine to the work point is no small feat, and Madrid has a few things to say about this. However, in Cooma, a small town in the Australian state of New South Wales, they seem to have gotten the hang of it. And the colossal piece of steel crossed its streets at a snail’s pace on a 152 wheel truck. The cargo was part of Snowy 2.0one of the largest energy storage projects in the world. What is it about?. The piece was the central block of the cutting head of the tunnel boring machine named Monica. According to Snowy Hydro, the public company behind the project, this component weighs more than 137 tons and measures seven meters wide. The head is the part that really matters in a tunnel boring machine, since it is the rotating disc that faces the rock and crushes it as it moves. Media deployment. Monica’s head is too big to transport in one piece, so it had to be divided into five parts. Still, just moving the center block required months of preparation. The entire transport reached 73 meters in length, and was moved at night facing the last stretch along the Snowy Mountains Highway, heading to the Marica site, north of Kiandra, where the machine would be assembled. A colossal engineering project. This move was just one piece of a much larger puzzle. The company indicates that in the previous weeks more than 140 large loads were delivered to Marica from the port of Port Kembla, south of Sydney. The tunnel boring machines do not arrive assembled, as they are transported in sections (head, drive system, shields, support platforms) and are assembled on site. In fact, last October, the transport of Monica’s motor system (a component about 207 tons and eight meters wide) brought more than 1,500 people to Cooma, in what Snowy Hydro called one of the largest loads ever transported by road in New South Wales. What is all this for? Snowy 2.0 is, in essence, a gigantic water battery. The project will connect the Tantangara and Talbingo reservoirs through some 27 kilometers of tunnels and an underground power station. The idea is to generate electricity by turbineing water when demand is high and, in times of surplus solar and wind energy, pump it back uphill for reuse. The company assures that it will have a capacity of 2,200 megawatts and enough stored energy to supply about three million homes for a week. Start-up. Last February, Snowy Hydro announced that Monica had been commissioned and would be responsible for excavating the section of the tunnel that crosses the Long Plain fault zone, a geologically complicated area. Designed by the German firm Herrenknecht, the machine advances at one end of the tunnel while another tunnel boring machine, Florence, does so at the opposite. The idea is that both are underground before being dismantled. For those dates the project exceeded 70% execution. Snowy 2.0 has not been without controversy with news of cost overruns and delays, and completion is now scheduled for December 2028. Images | Snowy Hydro In Xataka | Canada is going to debut the residential skyscraper with the most floors in all of North America: it has 12 sides and 351 meters high
