Newcastle truck traffic connected to local business

Truck traffic on State Highway 380 is stacking up around Newcastle lately, causing some drivers to wonder what’s going on. An investigation into the increased activity leads back to Olney’s Cemco Inc.

Cemco’s portable concrete batch plants are providing the builders of a wind farm outside of Olney solid ground to stand up nearly 200 windmills over the past four months, company officials said.

Two Cemco batch plants, which mix a “recipe” of cement, sand and water and pour the mixture into Van Eaton concrete mixer trucks, have provided about 85,000 yards of concrete for the bases of 177 windmills. The Young Wind Farm, owned by Apex Clean Energy Holdings, is about 30 miles southwest of Olney and south of Newcastle.

The windmills will supply power to a liquid hydrogen plant west of Graham. Construction on the $281 million plant owned by New York-based Plug Power is expected to begin this summer, Plug Power officials told Young County commissioners earlier this year.

The Cemco batch plants continuously load specially formulated concrete into a parade of 16 concrete mixer trucks, which pour it onto a conveyer belt truck at the windmill site.

The belt dumps the mixture into 20-foot-deep holes and rebar-reinforced pads to secure the gigantic pedestals upon which the turbines and blades sit.

The Cemco batch plants belong to Van Eaton Ready Mix of Shawnee, Oklahoma, which has contracted with Blattner Energy to pour an average of two pads per day for the past four months. The job site was busy on a recent day, with trucks bringing in load after load of rock, sand and cement to feed the Cemco plants.

Steve Waldo, the plant manager for Van Eaton, said the Cemco plant “is always going constantly, until it’s done. “We’ve got five or six crews going right now so we’ve got 10 to 12 of these plants going across the state and in Oklahoma and New Mexico. Some of them we’ve had a long time,” he said.

Crews on the Young Wind Farm job worked up to six days a week, 14 hours per day despite supply chain issues with cement, said truck driver Jack Merrell.

Work on the project is expected to conclude within the next six weeks.

Cemco builds each towering grey metal batch plant to order at its Olney fabricating site, and sells them to construction firms all over the world. Three years ago, Cemco made 19 batch plants – this year, they will build an estimated 28 to 30 plants, despite supply chain problems that have slowed down production all over the country, Cemco Vice President Ronnie Cobb said.