On the coast of Somerset in England, a machine towers over the horizon.<\/p>\n
It is a crane, but not like any crane you have ever seen.<\/p>\n
Its frame climbs higher than almost any building nearby.<\/p>\n
Bright steelwork rises in a lattice against the clouds.<\/p>\n
From miles away, you can spot it against the sky.<\/p>\n
Up close, it feels less like a crane than a small factory.<\/p>\n
People here have given it a friendly name, Big Carl<\/strong>.<\/p>\n And it is doing something historic<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Big Carl is officially the largest crane on Earth.<\/p>\n Its real name is the Sarens SGC 250.<\/p>\n It was designed and built by a Belgian firm called Sarens.<\/p>\n At full height, it can stand around 250 meters tall.<\/p>\n That is taller than almost any skyscraper in Britain.<\/p>\n And it can lift a staggering 5,000 tons in one go.<\/p>\n That is the weight of hundreds of loaded trucks at once.<\/p>\n Picture lifting a small ship clean into the air.<\/p>\n No other land based crane comes close to its power.<\/p>\n It was the first of a bold new family of ring cranes.<\/p>\n It was made for jobs nothing else on Earth can handle.<\/p>\n Everything about it is built to an impossible scale<\/strong>.<\/p>\n And it moves in a very strange way<\/strong>.<\/p>\n A normal crane sits on a fixed base or crawls on tracks.<\/p>\n Big Carl does neither of those things.<\/p>\n Instead, it rides on a huge circular rail laid on the ground.<\/p>\n The whole machine rolls around this ring as it works.<\/p>\n That ring is what keeps it balanced under vast loads.<\/p>\n A massive counterweight swings around to hold it steady.<\/p>\n The counterweight alone weighs thousands of tons.<\/p>\n It shifts position to match each load the crane picks up.<\/p>\n Without that trick, a lift this heavy would tip any crane over.<\/p>\n Getting Big Carl to a site is a colossal job in itself.<\/p>\n It arrives in hundreds of separate truckloads of parts.<\/p>\n Crews then spend weeks bolting the giant back together<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Only then can the real lifting begin<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Big Carl was brought to a site called Hinkley Point C in England.<\/p>\n It is one of the biggest building sites in all of Europe.<\/p>\n There, crews are building Britain’s newest nuclear power station.<\/p>\n The plant is being built from enormous prefabricated pieces.<\/p>\n Whole chunks are made on the ground, then lifted into place.<\/p>\n This way of building is faster and safer than the old method.<\/p>\n But those pieces are far too heavy for an ordinary crane.<\/p>\n Some weigh hundreds of tons on their own.<\/p>\n They are the size of buildings before they even go up.<\/p>\n Only a machine like Big Carl can raise them at all.<\/p>\n So the giant crane became the heart of the site<\/strong>.<\/p>\n And its lifts are truly enormous<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Here is the scale of what Big Carl actually raises.<\/p>\n According to one report<\/a>, it lifted a 575 ton steel ring in a single hoist.<\/p>\n That ring was 17 meters tall and 47 meters across.<\/p>\n These heavy rings stack up to form the thick wall around a reactor.<\/p>\n It also set a 245 ton dome on top of a reactor building.<\/p>\n That dome sealed the 44 meter tall structure from the weather.<\/p>\n In all, more than 600 giant sections will be lifted into place.<\/p>\n Each one slots together like part of a huge kit.<\/p>\n Piece by piece, the crane is building whole reactors.<\/p>\n Each lift is planned in advance to the last careful centimeter.<\/p>\n A single machine is raising a power plant skyward<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Nothing on land can match the feat<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Big Carl points to a new way of building huge things.<\/p>\n More and more, giant structures are made in big modules.<\/p>\n Cranes like this one lift them into place like blocks.<\/p>\n It cuts years off some of the largest projects on Earth.<\/p>\n Factories can turn out the parts while the site is prepared.<\/p>\n Then the crane simply lifts them into their final place.<\/p>\n When its work is done, the crane can be taken apart again.<\/p>\n Then it travels on to the next impossible job somewhere else.<\/p>\n According to one account<\/a>, it has already broken its own lifting records.<\/p>\n The same drive to build clean power at scale shows up elsewhere, from a solar farm<\/a> fox to the seals near an offshore wind farm<\/a>.<\/p>\n For the moment, though, Big Carl still remains the undisputed king of the cranes.<\/p>\n And on the Somerset coast, it keeps reaching for the sky<\/strong>, one giant lift at a time<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On the coast of Somerset in England, a machine towers over the horizon. It is a crane, but not like any crane you have ever seen. Its frame climbs higher than almost any building nearby. Bright steelwork rises in a lattice against the clouds. From miles away, you can spot it against the sky. Up … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1984,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-heavy-machinery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1983"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1985,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1983\/revisions\/1985"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The biggest crane on the planet<\/h2>\n
A crane that runs on a ring<\/h2>\n
A job only a giant could do<\/h2>\n
What it lifts into the sky<\/h2>\n
The future of building big<\/h2>\n