Latvian company SIA Heavy Cranes has made targeted use of Citadele Leasing financing to purchase mobile heavy cranes, successfully developing and expanding its service export in Scandinavia. It is currently building one of the largest wind farms in Norway, installing 72 wind turbines over 35 kilometers.
The Latvian business will be working on what will be one of Norway’s largest wind farms — installed on a 30 km-wide strip of mountains near Mosjøen in central Norway — until the end of the year. Although the wind farm is not yet operational, the volume of electricity it will produce in the next 15 years has already been sold. “We will be working in complicated and specific conditions: the turbines will be installed on mountain terrain where neither bushes nor grass can grow. The electric energy generated by the park has been purchased in advance by a local aluminium manufacturer, and will provide one third of the electricity required by the factory. We are transporting and erecting the heavy structures and turbine parts. The turbine parts weight around 100 tons and need to be lifted 104 metres into the air; for comparison, that is almost one third of the height of the Latvian Television Tower in Riga. There are few companies in the world right now who are able to do this kind of job,” explains Heavy Cranes Chairman of the Board Aleksandrs Lukašuks.
“Heavy Cranes works in a specific sector, and demand for mobile heavy cranes is very high. Clients often have to wait for their order for several years, and the price of the cranes is in the millions. The logistics of getting the cranes to building sites is complicated and expensive, with delivery alone costing hundreds of thousands of Euro. The work process is complicated and full of world-class technical solutions, so we are pleased that a Latvian business is one of the leading players in this region, having already installed 1,000 wind turbines. Sustainability as a parameter for long-term business planning is at a very high level in countries like Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, meaning that the participation of Latvian businesses in Scandinavian renewable energy projects sets an excellent precedent for passing on expertise to Latvia,” adds Ģirts Glāzers, Chairman of the Board for Citadele Leasing.
“Our main advantage is mobility. Our base is located in Ādaži, which is around 300 kilometers from our main Baltic export bases near the harbour. Logistics tend to be the most complicated part of our process: in order to deliver our equipment to its destination, we need more than forty HGVs including non-standard goods vehicles, adaptations for the ferry, and equipment for assembly. It is a challenging process, so we plan our work and delivery chains well in advance. As the building sites are in herd-to-reach locations, and our clients are large businesses with a broad procedural protocol, our speed and flexibility is what the Scandinavians really appreciate,” reveals Lukašuks.
The business has nine cranes, a freight helicopter, and other pieces of equipment, and a team of around 30 people helps service the highly complex lifting projects. “Our staff is accustomed to working under pressure. Our team’s knowledge and technical foundations are the conditions which allowed us to successfully install the Irbene radio telescope antennas and move an Estonian traffic bridge. In Estonia, the bridge had to be lifted and moved within 36 hours to ensure that rail traffic was not interrupted in this part of the country, a unique project and achievement which even made it into the Guinness Book of World Records. We have also worked on less positive projects, such as clearing the ruins of the 2013 Zolitūde tragedy, and some of our team members have previously worked in the emergency services. Sometimes clients ask about using not just our equipment, but also our staff for their projects, but we rarely give our people away!” adds the Heavy Cranes representative.
SIA Heavy Cranes was founded in 2018 when it split from SIA Arsava to focus on the export market, mainly in Scandinavia, Lithuania and Estonia.
About Citadele Leasing
Citadele Leasing is the subsidiary of the Citadele Group with branches in Estonia and Lithuania, offering a full range of leasing services to individuals and companies in the Baltics. The company unites longstanding industry knowledge, top professionals, excellent customer service and the most up-to-date digital tools of SIA UniCredit Leasing and Citadele.