A single tower section weighing 826,733 pounds was the heaviest piece a Liebherr LR 11350 crawler crane had to place while erecting a wind turbine that reaches 365 meters, or roughly 1,198 feet, in eastern Germany. Another 1,873,910 pounds of ballast was added to the machine so it would not tip during that lift, according to The Drive’s account of the build.
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The turbine stands in Lusatia, in the state of Brandenburg, between Berlin and Dresden, and it now ranks as Germany’s second-tallest structure behind the Berlin TV tower. The crane that made it possible sat on the site for about 18 months, working through tower assembly, the lifting of the inner tower, and a tightly timed blade installation.
The 826,733-pound tower section and its ballast
The Drive reported on Nov. 6 that the heaviest single lift was a tower section weighing 826,733 pounds, roughly 131 feet on each side, hoisted onto a base structure about 164 feet high. Liebherr’s own press release, dated Oct. 19, gives the same load as 375 tonnes and describes a section of about 40 by 40 by 40 meters set down about 44 meters out from the crane onto a 50-meter base.
Holding a block that large at that reach demanded a counterweight that ran to up to 850 tonnes of ballast across the crane and the platform on its derrick jib. The Drive converted that mass of steel plates to 1,873,910 pounds. Without it, a load of this size swung out on a long boom would have pulled the crawler forward.
The ground mattered as much as the iron. Liebherr said the crane traveled on a custom track built from steel plates and bongossi timber, a dense tropical hardwood, so that the weight of crane, ballast and load spread across the Lusatian sand rather than sinking into it.
The Drive framed the result against landmarks: at 365 meters the structure falls about 50 feet short of the Empire State Building, and its rotor hub sits at 558 feet by the outlet’s count. According to Liebherr, the crane arrived on the project in spring 2025, so the build ran from the first tower segments through the final blade lift on a single machine rather than a rotating cast of cranes.
Liebherr LR 11350 configuration for a 365-meter build
The LR 11350 is a crawler crane, and Liebherr set it up in what it calls a PowerBoom parallel boom system for most of the job, with a luffing jib of up to 84 meters. The crane’s roller head sat at 200 meters, high enough to place the upper tower segments on a structure that began as a provisional tower of about 160 meters before it was telescoped skyward.
Blades required a different layout. Converting from the PowerBoom arrangement to a 114-meter lattice boom took six days, and the three rotor blades went up within a 12-hour window that ran partly through the night, after several days of waiting for low-wind conditions. The rotor measures about 413 feet in diameter, and the blades were mounted at about 170 meters, which The Drive gave as 558 feet.
Fabian Ueck, the operator of the LR 11350, said in Liebherr’s release that across roughly 18 months of operation the crane performed with absolute reliability and without any faults. The machine is owned by Schmidbauer GmbH & Co. KG, and other Liebherr mobile cranes handled setup, ballasting, base structure work and pre-assembly of tower segments.
GICON’s telescoping tower and the case for height
The turbine is a prototype developed and built by GICON-Grossmann Ingenieur Consult of Dresden, with a 3.8-megawatt machine on a tower that extends like a telescope. Germany’s trade and investment agency, GTAI, described the project in November 2024 as a flagship effort financed by the federal disruptive-technologies agency Sprind at EUR 20 million to 30 million, using conventional 65-meter blades.
Martin Chaumet, who leads Sprind’s Beventum subsidiary, said at that stage that at such heights there are practically no areas left lacking wind. Renewable Energy World reported that GICON chief executive Jochen Grossmann expects winds at 300 meters to be constant and strong, with output potentially more than double that of the same plant at today’s heights, and that inauguration was planned for Nov. 19 once internal wiring is finished.
The final height was announced around Sept. 28 after strong winds paused work, and bluewin reported that the German Wind Energy Association counts the machine as the world’s tallest, ahead of a 285-meter mass-produced turbine in Bavaria. Grossmann also floated “two-story” wind farms that pair shorter and taller turbines to ease the shortage of suitable land, and GICON plans to use measurements from this prototype to design a farm of three to five extra-tall machines. Those results do not exist yet: the turbine was only brought to full height at the end of September, so its real-world yield remains unmeasured.
That leaves the open question for Liebherr’s heavy-lift fleet and for GICON alike. If the measured gains justify towers in this class, every future site will need a crane able to set 375-tonne sections at 44 meters of reach, and a transport route and ground plan built for it.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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