6 ms·

Tallest Wooden Wind Turbine

186 points by Bluestein 1y ago

svantana 1y ago
I never understood why wind turbine towers are built as hollow, tapered cylinders. Isn't the best mass-to-strength ratio acheived with truss/grid type structures, like in construction cranes?
- lostlogin 1y ago
  I’d be interested to hear the answer to this, but don’t really want to see it. Wouldn’t it look terrible?
- looofooo0 1y ago
  https://gicon-hoehenwindrad.de/ https://gicon-hoehenwindrad.de/ They test-building a 380m wind turbine in such a style now.
  - patall 1y ago
    I know it's a test project and one shouldn't be to stoked about a test project, but for the last year I have again and again searched for updates about it. Unfortunately, they keep it (understandably) low. Let alone the story of the 90+ year old engineer that envisioned such a project (and they are only implementing 20% of it) is so awesome. Looking forward to when it finishes and hopefully changes our view on wind power for good!
- cluckindan 1y ago
  The forces acting on the wind turbine tower are mostly perpendicular, i.e. the wind hitting the blades and the structure. Ideally, the blades have maximum wind resistance (up to a point). The construction crane rarely experiences that kind of wind load, because the truss structure is hollow and allows air to pass through. Ideally, the structure has zero wind resistance (down to a point).
- flir 1y ago
  UK has moved from open grid style to a cylinder style for electricity pylons. Presumably there's an advantage to it, but I don't know what it is: https://www.nationalgrid.com/national-grid-energise-worlds-first-t-pylons https://www.nationalgrid.com/national-grid-energise-worlds-f...
  - scrlk 1y ago
    Ostensibly for aesthetics. However, the new T-pylon design has been discontinued for cost reasons, and there were complaints about noise in high winds: https://eandt.theiet.org/2025/01/06/national-grid-abandons-costly-t-pylon-redesign-report-claims https://eandt.theiet.org/2025/01/06/national-grid-abandons-c...
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    I can't speak to the UK but in the US things like electrical towers and highway signs mostly go to tubular construction for labor cost reasons. Tube gets manufactured in a facility specializing in doing it in a low labor way (rolling or whatever). Flanges get welded on, they get slapped on cribbing and trucked to you and then assembled with minimal labor. Contrast with the lattice. Cheaper material inputs, a whole bunch of cheap channel with holes punched as needed, but all that punching, and then all that bolting, takes way more labor, a lot of it can be done cheaply, but it adds up, and when it does get to site there's more pieces to pick and connect, etc. Basically the more expensive material saves you quite a bit of human labor at each step. Same reason huge rolled steel and welded tubes displaced riveted construction.
- wizardOfScience 1y ago
  A wind turbine tower is essentially a cantilevered beam resisting the bending moment from lateral wind loads. The loads can come from any direction. Bending induces stresses in any beam that increase with distance from the centre. A thin walled hollow tube is the most material efficient design theoretically as it concentrates the load bearing materials along the perimeter of the beam. Any deviation from this incurs material that is not fully utilised.
  - Onavo 1y ago
    This is what I come to HN for, kudos
  - adwn 1y ago
    Your explanation raises the follow-up question, which svantana already hinted at: Why don't construction cranes use hollow tubes instead of their typical truss structures?
    - IsTom 1y ago
      Certainly makes them easier to disassemble and move elsewhere.
      - dguest 1y ago
        Yeah it's pretty essential that construction equipment be pretty easy to construct and deconstruct. There are some videos [1] which are worth checking out. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx5Qt7_ECEE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx5Qt7_ECEE
    - wizardOfScience 1y ago
      The crane manufacturing business case is not driven by material efficiency to the same degree. It is a tool that needs to be reliable and have performance in operations. Limit the need for man hours through ease of use etc. It should also be able to take many assembly/disassembly cycles. Thus does the amount of material not matter as much in a crane. For wind turbine towers the material cost can be >>50% of the installed cost.
- mkj 1y ago
  Nabrawind have something like that. It's still a column at the top for blade clearance, but the rest is a grid structure so it doesn't need huge external cranes. https://www.nabrawind.com/our-solutions/nabralift/ https://www.nabrawind.com/our-solutions/nabralift/
- impossiblefork 1y ago
  No, the optimal shape is a thin dense shell with a stiff low-density interior. Optimization only leads to trusses if you constrain the design to have no low-density elements. In practice this leads to things like a thing CFRP surface wrapped around balsa or stiff foam.
- metalman 1y ago
  It is likely that ,while a truss would be lighter and stronger, to counteract the forces encountered by a turbine it would also require a cross section so large, as to interfere with the blade travel, rendering the proposal, impossible. There are small wind turbines useing truss style towers, but they all have a "stub" tower on top, and they are under 10kw......10-15'blades. the wooden tower under discussion, is also "small" by todays standards, and unlike steel towers that can be made by any half respecting medium sized fabricator, will require a specialised industrial facility that cant make anything else usefull, and so the one that is doing this, is funded at great expense from government grant funding. kinda cool,kinda cringe
norome 1y ago
Would be great if someone could build wind turbines to look like the windmills of old
- robin_reala 1y ago
  Why? Presumably we’re trying to optimise on generated power?
  - frereubu 1y ago
    It's not a viable proposition, I agree, but one thing it would get around is NIMBYs in the UK who seem to love vintage windmills, but not wind turbines!
- aqme28 1y ago
  Those are really short and therefore much less efficient. Wind power scales as a cube with speed, and speed scales as a power with height. A little more height can make a big difference.
- bluGill 1y ago
  What type of windmill of old? They look like a scaled up Jacobs wind system from the 1920s. No surprise, Jacob's wind got a lot of things right back then. If you mean the old water pumps used in the American west (they are still made today!), those are good for water pumping because they produce high torque in low winds, but they make less horsepower and that is what we care about. If you mean the Dutch style windmills/houses, we could do that, but the big house blocks a lot of wind and so it is not efficient. I can't think of any other style of old windmill. However if you can the answer to your question is likely because that style is much less efficient.
Bric3d 1y ago
From what I understood the main ecological issue with wind turbine are more due to the blades than the tower, I wonder if they're doing something on that side.
- Onavo 1y ago
  Maybe they can use cross-laminated wood or the compressed wood that was on hacker news the other day.
- elric 1y ago
  Those blades are a major engineering challenge. Have a friend who's a materials scientist who works on those blades. Those things experience crazy stresses because they're so huge. Failures can be pretty catastrophic. I don't think the ecological issue with those blades is all that relevant given the huge ecological benefits of wind power over any other form of electricity generation.
  - boxed 1y ago
    Any? Solar and nuclear would like a word :P
    - elric 1y ago
      That feels like a disingenuous take. If the composites in wind turbine blades are an environmental problem, then so is nuclear waste and so are the semiconductors in solar panels.
      - boxed 1y ago
        Wind turbines spread microplastics always. Coal spread radioactivity and CO2 always. Nuclear spreads radioactivity very rarely. The semiconductors are just rocks basically so not a problem (there are other components that might be, but the semiconductors certainly isn't the issue).
    - Tade0 1y ago
      Solar actually has over twice the footprint of onshore wind, considering the energy needed to produce the panels, but it's irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, as all those mentioned sources, if they were to form the majority of the mix, would make electricity a much smaller chunk of the overall footprint than, say, food. In 2024 France electricity was responsible for an equivalent of 16.1Mt of CO2 - largely due to gas peaker plants, which together contributed to a single digit percentage of overall electricity consumption. That's 235kg of CO2 per person, or 2.5-7.5kg of beef in terms of environmental impact.
aqme28 1y ago
What does "net-zero" mean in this context? I would have assumed of course that wind turbines are net negative emissions, even factoring in the construction and materials. Do they mean net-zero in materials and construction alone? Because that sounds impossible.
- mistercow 1y ago
  What they seem to be claiming is that because the wood itself contains more carbon that is used to produce the turbine, they have net negative carbon emissions before accounting for actual energy production. That seems pretty dubious to me. After the turbine’s thirty year life, what happens to that carbon? At any rate, if it’s true that it takes 90% less carbon to produce in the first place, setting aside the whole “wood contains carbon” thing, that’s pretty cool.
  - boxed 1y ago
    If you build enough of these sustained, the total amount of CO2 bound it them could be significant. Similar to growing forests or restoring peat bogs. But yea, growing forests is equally suspicious as a lot of carbon sink forests have turned out to be cut down...
  - aziaziazi 1y ago
    That’s a great project and kudos to the team, meanwhile : > After the turbine’s thirty year life, what happens to that carbon? Those curved boards are probably mixed with epoxy or another polymer, making it a bad candidate for recycling in other wood application (paper, osb boards…), compared to first hand row trees. We’ll probably "valorize" it in incinerators.
    - wizardOfScience 1y ago
      I think they plan to cut down the tower and saw it into joists basically. The tower wall should be thick enough to allow for that. You will loose some material ofcourse but most of it should be possible to use in construction.
calmbonsai 1y ago
Huh?! I don't see this as a viable challenge to the extant business model and they never reveal the numbers, let alone a basic model, behind their "net-zero" marketing claim. They also still haven't solved the main issue of non-modular turbine blade transport and assembly. Modular and stepped blades are the next frontier. Not tower construction. Quite frankly, the tower is trivial. The cost of the tower construction and materials is a small percentage of the initial blade, transmission, and generator assembly costs and on-going maintenance. Even the lubrication flow sensors and lubricants are highly specialized for the unusual duty-cycles and variable loading of a wind turbine.
aaron695 1y ago
[dead]
lupusreal 1y ago
I feel very strongly that if a wind turbine is made of wood, you have to call it a windmill even if it's not powering a mill.
sebstefan 1y ago
"Making net-zero wind power possible"? Is that trying to tackle the non-problem that was spun up a while ago by oil companies in propaganda pieces like the Landman show on TV? It's a non-problem. The lifecycle assessment of wind turbines today, which is the accounting for the actual emissions of the lifetime of a wind turbine, factoring in: creation, installation, maintenance, even the disposing of it, was clocked to be offset after 5.3 months of running the turbine (according to this study: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.est.9b01030 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.est.9b01030 ; and every other one I could find finds the same ballpark)
- Scarblac 1y ago
  But are there any iron mines, steel plants etc that actually work on electricity? Otherwise you can calculate any offset you want, but it'll be a paper exercise.
  - like_any_other 1y ago
    It won't be paper as long as there's coal & oil electricity generation, that won't have to be burned thanks to a wind turbine.
- Bluestein 1y ago
  > The lifecycle assessment of wind turbines today, which is the accounting for the actual emissions of the lifetime of a wind turbine, factoring in: creation, installation, maintenance, even the disposing of it, was clocked to be offset after 5.3 months of running the turbine Very informative. Thank you.-
- anticodon 1y ago
  What about more complex and expensive infrastructure required for balancing uneven electricity output?
  - WinstonSmith84 1y ago
    yes - RE Spain a month ago ..
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
carlosjobim 1y ago
I think this is modern Nordic engineering in a nutshell: Some of the smartest people you can find working on some of the dumbest projects you can think of. For any of you wondering why would anybody do this, the full explanation is in the site footer: "This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant Agreement No. 959151."
jbms 1y ago
"Steel is very strong per volume, so steel is a good choice when strength per volume is one of the main constraints. However, wind turbine towers are essentially empty inside so there is room to increase the volume by making the walls thicker. The Laminated Veneer Lumber (LVL) material in a Modvion tower has higher strength per weight and higher strength per cost than steel alternatives." Strength per volume versus strength per weight is an interesting trade-off. They're arguing this could let towers get taller.
bjourne 1y ago
There has been lots and lots and lots of attempts to replace steel with wood in construction. These attempts have gone nowhere. So what is to say that this time it will be different? If wood is so good for tall construction why isn't it already used in skyscrapers?
- jbms 1y ago
  The best thing in their favour is how standardized and simple a wind turbine tower is. They know the requirements and their customers. It's much easier than a skyscraper, and it might let them start to scale production of the materials so they become more attractive to other applications. However there is growth in mass timber construction generally. People are competing to build taller and taller timber skyscrapers.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- aziaziazi 1y ago
  Most traditional constructions in Asia (and to be frank anywhere else in the world) has been with wood, stone and dirt. Steel is only possible since we extract enough iron and burn in with coal, something we're not sure to be able to do at the same price (=rate =quantity) as we did for the last 100years. Still, here's some contemporary "skyscraper": 105m - Thailand - 1981 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_of_Truth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_of_Truth 85m - Norway - 2019 | https://www.moelven.com/mjostarnet/ https://www.moelven.com/mjostarnet/ 87m - US - 2020 | https://www.ascentmke.com https://www.ascentmke.com 350m - Japan - 2041 | https://www.nikken.co.jp/en/projects/highrise/w350.html https://www.nikken.co.jp/en/projects/highrise/w350.html
- 7952 1y ago
  Skyscrapers seem like the worst possible case study. Because surely they are dominated by other factors beyond just basic materials.
kieranmaine 1y ago
I listened to a podcast titled "Taming the hydrogen hype" [1] that suggests things like nuclear power plants and wind turbines don't follow the same cost reductions as solar and batteries because they can't be fitted in a shipping container: > So, most industrial things have big economies of scale, right? There's this imaginary world where, "Oh, I'm going to shrink down the cost, but the cost per unit is also going to go down." That requires magical thinking. It requires making it so small that you can make it in a factory and ship it in a shipping container. Based on what I read on the site the turbine components can be transported using normal lorries. However, it would be interested to know: 1. If they can be shrunk even further and be transported in a container. 2. Would this help reduce costs. 1. https://open.substack.com/pub/davidroberts/p/taming-the-hydrogen-hype?selection=a7f15321-ee8a-4447-9736-8ad2006239e8&utm_campaign=post-share-selection&utm_medium=web https://open.substack.com/pub/davidroberts/p/taming-the-hydr...
- laurencerowe 1y ago
  Wind turbine power output scales by the square of rotor length so like nuclear power tend to be cheaper per unit power produced the larger they are.
rcpt 1y ago
Love wind turbines they look great and feel like the future. Don't understand the hate for them
- frainfreeze 1y ago
  Have you actually looked into the arguments?
somat 1y ago
I like to call it "carboniferous foam" It makes it appear like you are working with something exotic. And actually, when you compare it to other materials, carboniferous foam is pretty amazing stuff, it's combination of highly workable, low density, high strength, is tricky to replicate in more engineered stuff.
jurschreuder 1y ago
Only 10% of the energy used to make windmills is in the steel part. 90% is in the concrete foot. I love the wooden windmills please keep building them, but they look very expensive and labor intensive to make and reducing the energy it takes to make them is actually pretty easy. Although I don't know why you'd want to reduce it on windmills specifically and not focus on low hanging fruit first. Seems a bit randomly linked on the "energy transition" node, even though windmill production is not really high on the "energy wasters" list.
exabrial 1y ago
One of my most downvoted comments in HN was simply asking if the construction of a wind turbine ever offsets the CO2 to produce it... tons of diesel to mine raw materials, coal to smelt steel, manufacture, transport, installation, and then theres the question: what do you do with giant used carbon fiber blades (besides burying them, generating tons of waste: https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/companies-recycle-wind-turbine-blades/100/i27 https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/companies-recycle-...) Alas, even bringing this very valid science question generates sneers online and in previous comments there's already comments stating consipiracy theories about oil companies. What we would probably discover is nothing is actually carbon negative, some are just less worse than others. I'd like to know the actual answers so we can affect real change, rather than just clinging to our crystals.

186 points by Bluestein 1y ago

I never understood why wind turbine towers are built as hollow, tapered cylinders. Isn't the best mass-to-strength ratio acheived with truss/grid type structures, like in construction cranes?

lostlogin 1y ago
I’d be interested to hear the answer to this, but don’t really want to see it. Wouldn’t it look terrible?
looofooo0 1y ago
https://gicon-hoehenwindrad.de/ https://gicon-hoehenwindrad.de/ They test-building a 380m wind turbine in such a style now.
- patall 1y ago
  I know it's a test project and one shouldn't be to stoked about a test project, but for the last year I have again and again searched for updates about it. Unfortunately, they keep it (understandably) low. Let alone the story of the 90+ year old engineer that envisioned such a project (and they are only implementing 20% of it) is so awesome. Looking forward to when it finishes and hopefully changes our view on wind power for good!
cluckindan 1y ago
The forces acting on the wind turbine tower are mostly perpendicular, i.e. the wind hitting the blades and the structure. Ideally, the blades have maximum wind resistance (up to a point). The construction crane rarely experiences that kind of wind load, because the truss structure is hollow and allows air to pass through. Ideally, the structure has zero wind resistance (down to a point).
flir 1y ago
UK has moved from open grid style to a cylinder style for electricity pylons. Presumably there's an advantage to it, but I don't know what it is: https://www.nationalgrid.com/national-grid-energise-worlds-first-t-pylons https://www.nationalgrid.com/national-grid-energise-worlds-f...
- scrlk 1y ago
  Ostensibly for aesthetics. However, the new T-pylon design has been discontinued for cost reasons, and there were complaints about noise in high winds: https://eandt.theiet.org/2025/01/06/national-grid-abandons-costly-t-pylon-redesign-report-claims https://eandt.theiet.org/2025/01/06/national-grid-abandons-c...
- potato3732842 1y ago
  I can't speak to the UK but in the US things like electrical towers and highway signs mostly go to tubular construction for labor cost reasons. Tube gets manufactured in a facility specializing in doing it in a low labor way (rolling or whatever). Flanges get welded on, they get slapped on cribbing and trucked to you and then assembled with minimal labor. Contrast with the lattice. Cheaper material inputs, a whole bunch of cheap channel with holes punched as needed, but all that punching, and then all that bolting, takes way more labor, a lot of it can be done cheaply, but it adds up, and when it does get to site there's more pieces to pick and connect, etc. Basically the more expensive material saves you quite a bit of human labor at each step. Same reason huge rolled steel and welded tubes displaced riveted construction.
wizardOfScience 1y ago
A wind turbine tower is essentially a cantilevered beam resisting the bending moment from lateral wind loads. The loads can come from any direction. Bending induces stresses in any beam that increase with distance from the centre. A thin walled hollow tube is the most material efficient design theoretically as it concentrates the load bearing materials along the perimeter of the beam. Any deviation from this incurs material that is not fully utilised.
- Onavo 1y ago
  This is what I come to HN for, kudos
- adwn 1y ago
  Your explanation raises the follow-up question, which svantana already hinted at: Why don't construction cranes use hollow tubes instead of their typical truss structures?
  - IsTom 1y ago
    Certainly makes them easier to disassemble and move elsewhere.
    - dguest 1y ago
      Yeah it's pretty essential that construction equipment be pretty easy to construct and deconstruct. There are some videos [1] which are worth checking out. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx5Qt7_ECEE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx5Qt7_ECEE
  - wizardOfScience 1y ago
    The crane manufacturing business case is not driven by material efficiency to the same degree. It is a tool that needs to be reliable and have performance in operations. Limit the need for man hours through ease of use etc. It should also be able to take many assembly/disassembly cycles. Thus does the amount of material not matter as much in a crane. For wind turbine towers the material cost can be >>50% of the installed cost.
mkj 1y ago
Nabrawind have something like that. It's still a column at the top for blade clearance, but the rest is a grid structure so it doesn't need huge external cranes. https://www.nabrawind.com/our-solutions/nabralift/ https://www.nabrawind.com/our-solutions/nabralift/
impossiblefork 1y ago
No, the optimal shape is a thin dense shell with a stiff low-density interior. Optimization only leads to trusses if you constrain the design to have no low-density elements. In practice this leads to things like a thing CFRP surface wrapped around balsa or stiff foam.
metalman 1y ago
It is likely that ,while a truss would be lighter and stronger, to counteract the forces encountered by a turbine it would also require a cross section so large, as to interfere with the blade travel, rendering the proposal, impossible. There are small wind turbines useing truss style towers, but they all have a "stub" tower on top, and they are under 10kw......10-15'blades. the wooden tower under discussion, is also "small" by todays standards, and unlike steel towers that can be made by any half respecting medium sized fabricator, will require a specialised industrial facility that cant make anything else usefull, and so the one that is doing this, is funded at great expense from government grant funding. kinda cool,kinda cringe

norome 1y ago

Would be great if someone could build wind turbines to look like the windmills of old

robin_reala 1y ago
Why? Presumably we’re trying to optimise on generated power?
- frereubu 1y ago
  It's not a viable proposition, I agree, but one thing it would get around is NIMBYs in the UK who seem to love vintage windmills, but not wind turbines!
aqme28 1y ago
Those are really short and therefore much less efficient. Wind power scales as a cube with speed, and speed scales as a power with height. A little more height can make a big difference.
bluGill 1y ago
What type of windmill of old? They look like a scaled up Jacobs wind system from the 1920s. No surprise, Jacob's wind got a lot of things right back then. If you mean the old water pumps used in the American west (they are still made today!), those are good for water pumping because they produce high torque in low winds, but they make less horsepower and that is what we care about. If you mean the Dutch style windmills/houses, we could do that, but the big house blocks a lot of wind and so it is not efficient. I can't think of any other style of old windmill. However if you can the answer to your question is likely because that style is much less efficient.

Bric3d 1y ago

From what I understood the main ecological issue with wind turbine are more due to the blades than the tower, I wonder if they're doing something on that side.

Onavo 1y ago
Maybe they can use cross-laminated wood or the compressed wood that was on hacker news the other day.
elric 1y ago
Those blades are a major engineering challenge. Have a friend who's a materials scientist who works on those blades. Those things experience crazy stresses because they're so huge. Failures can be pretty catastrophic. I don't think the ecological issue with those blades is all that relevant given the huge ecological benefits of wind power over any other form of electricity generation.
- boxed 1y ago
  Any? Solar and nuclear would like a word :P
  - elric 1y ago
    That feels like a disingenuous take. If the composites in wind turbine blades are an environmental problem, then so is nuclear waste and so are the semiconductors in solar panels.
    - boxed 1y ago
      Wind turbines spread microplastics always. Coal spread radioactivity and CO2 always. Nuclear spreads radioactivity very rarely. The semiconductors are just rocks basically so not a problem (there are other components that might be, but the semiconductors certainly isn't the issue).
  - Tade0 1y ago
    Solar actually has over twice the footprint of onshore wind, considering the energy needed to produce the panels, but it's irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, as all those mentioned sources, if they were to form the majority of the mix, would make electricity a much smaller chunk of the overall footprint than, say, food. In 2024 France electricity was responsible for an equivalent of 16.1Mt of CO2 - largely due to gas peaker plants, which together contributed to a single digit percentage of overall electricity consumption. That's 235kg of CO2 per person, or 2.5-7.5kg of beef in terms of environmental impact.

aqme28 1y ago

What does "net-zero" mean in this context? I would have assumed of course that wind turbines are net negative emissions, even factoring in the construction and materials. Do they mean net-zero in materials and construction alone? Because that sounds impossible.

mistercow 1y ago
What they seem to be claiming is that because the wood itself contains more carbon that is used to produce the turbine, they have net negative carbon emissions before accounting for actual energy production. That seems pretty dubious to me. After the turbine’s thirty year life, what happens to that carbon? At any rate, if it’s true that it takes 90% less carbon to produce in the first place, setting aside the whole “wood contains carbon” thing, that’s pretty cool.
- boxed 1y ago
  If you build enough of these sustained, the total amount of CO2 bound it them could be significant. Similar to growing forests or restoring peat bogs. But yea, growing forests is equally suspicious as a lot of carbon sink forests have turned out to be cut down...
- aziaziazi 1y ago
  That’s a great project and kudos to the team, meanwhile : > After the turbine’s thirty year life, what happens to that carbon? Those curved boards are probably mixed with epoxy or another polymer, making it a bad candidate for recycling in other wood application (paper, osb boards…), compared to first hand row trees. We’ll probably "valorize" it in incinerators.
  - wizardOfScience 1y ago
    I think they plan to cut down the tower and saw it into joists basically. The tower wall should be thick enough to allow for that. You will loose some material ofcourse but most of it should be possible to use in construction.

calmbonsai 1y ago

Huh?! I don't see this as a viable challenge to the extant business model and they never reveal the numbers, let alone a basic model, behind their "net-zero" marketing claim. They also still haven't solved the main issue of non-modular turbine blade transport and assembly. Modular and stepped blades are the next frontier. Not tower construction. Quite frankly, the tower is trivial. The cost of the tower construction and materials is a small percentage of the initial blade, transmission, and generator assembly costs and on-going maintenance. Even the lubrication flow sensors and lubricants are highly specialized for the unusual duty-cycles and variable loading of a wind turbine.

aaron695 1y ago

[dead]

lupusreal 1y ago

I feel very strongly that if a wind turbine is made of wood, you have to call it a windmill even if it's not powering a mill.

sebstefan 1y ago

"Making net-zero wind power possible"? Is that trying to tackle the non-problem that was spun up a while ago by oil companies in propaganda pieces like the Landman show on TV? It's a non-problem. The lifecycle assessment of wind turbines today, which is the accounting for the actual emissions of the lifetime of a wind turbine, factoring in: creation, installation, maintenance, even the disposing of it, was clocked to be offset after 5.3 months of running the turbine (according to this study: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.est.9b01030 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.est.9b01030 ; and every other one I could find finds the same ballpark)

Scarblac 1y ago
But are there any iron mines, steel plants etc that actually work on electricity? Otherwise you can calculate any offset you want, but it'll be a paper exercise.
- like_any_other 1y ago
  It won't be paper as long as there's coal & oil electricity generation, that won't have to be burned thanks to a wind turbine.
Bluestein 1y ago
> The lifecycle assessment of wind turbines today, which is the accounting for the actual emissions of the lifetime of a wind turbine, factoring in: creation, installation, maintenance, even the disposing of it, was clocked to be offset after 5.3 months of running the turbine Very informative. Thank you.-
anticodon 1y ago
What about more complex and expensive infrastructure required for balancing uneven electricity output?
- WinstonSmith84 1y ago
  yes - RE Spain a month ago ..

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

carlosjobim 1y ago

I think this is modern Nordic engineering in a nutshell: Some of the smartest people you can find working on some of the dumbest projects you can think of. For any of you wondering why would anybody do this, the full explanation is in the site footer: "This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant Agreement No. 959151."

jbms 1y ago

"Steel is very strong per volume, so steel is a good choice when strength per volume is one of the main constraints. However, wind turbine towers are essentially empty inside so there is room to increase the volume by making the walls thicker. The Laminated Veneer Lumber (LVL) material in a Modvion tower has higher strength per weight and higher strength per cost than steel alternatives." Strength per volume versus strength per weight is an interesting trade-off. They're arguing this could let towers get taller.

bjourne 1y ago

There has been lots and lots and lots of attempts to replace steel with wood in construction. These attempts have gone nowhere. So what is to say that this time it will be different? If wood is so good for tall construction why isn't it already used in skyscrapers?

jbms 1y ago
The best thing in their favour is how standardized and simple a wind turbine tower is. They know the requirements and their customers. It's much easier than a skyscraper, and it might let them start to scale production of the materials so they become more attractive to other applications. However there is growth in mass timber construction generally. People are competing to build taller and taller timber skyscrapers.
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aziaziazi 1y ago
Most traditional constructions in Asia (and to be frank anywhere else in the world) has been with wood, stone and dirt. Steel is only possible since we extract enough iron and burn in with coal, something we're not sure to be able to do at the same price (=rate =quantity) as we did for the last 100years. Still, here's some contemporary "skyscraper": 105m - Thailand - 1981 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_of_Truth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_of_Truth 85m - Norway - 2019 | https://www.moelven.com/mjostarnet/ https://www.moelven.com/mjostarnet/ 87m - US - 2020 | https://www.ascentmke.com https://www.ascentmke.com 350m - Japan - 2041 | https://www.nikken.co.jp/en/projects/highrise/w350.html https://www.nikken.co.jp/en/projects/highrise/w350.html
7952 1y ago
Skyscrapers seem like the worst possible case study. Because surely they are dominated by other factors beyond just basic materials.

kieranmaine 1y ago

I listened to a podcast titled "Taming the hydrogen hype" [1] that suggests things like nuclear power plants and wind turbines don't follow the same cost reductions as solar and batteries because they can't be fitted in a shipping container: > So, most industrial things have big economies of scale, right? There's this imaginary world where, "Oh, I'm going to shrink down the cost, but the cost per unit is also going to go down." That requires magical thinking. It requires making it so small that you can make it in a factory and ship it in a shipping container. Based on what I read on the site the turbine components can be transported using normal lorries. However, it would be interested to know: 1. If they can be shrunk even further and be transported in a container. 2. Would this help reduce costs. 1. https://open.substack.com/pub/davidroberts/p/taming-the-hydrogen-hype?selection=a7f15321-ee8a-4447-9736-8ad2006239e8&utm_campaign=post-share-selection&utm_medium=web https://open.substack.com/pub/davidroberts/p/taming-the-hydr...

laurencerowe 1y ago
Wind turbine power output scales by the square of rotor length so like nuclear power tend to be cheaper per unit power produced the larger they are.

rcpt 1y ago

Love wind turbines they look great and feel like the future. Don't understand the hate for them

frainfreeze 1y ago
Have you actually looked into the arguments?

somat 1y ago

I like to call it "carboniferous foam" It makes it appear like you are working with something exotic. And actually, when you compare it to other materials, carboniferous foam is pretty amazing stuff, it's combination of highly workable, low density, high strength, is tricky to replicate in more engineered stuff.

jurschreuder 1y ago

Only 10% of the energy used to make windmills is in the steel part. 90% is in the concrete foot. I love the wooden windmills please keep building them, but they look very expensive and labor intensive to make and reducing the energy it takes to make them is actually pretty easy. Although I don't know why you'd want to reduce it on windmills specifically and not focus on low hanging fruit first. Seems a bit randomly linked on the "energy transition" node, even though windmill production is not really high on the "energy wasters" list.

exabrial 1y ago

One of my most downvoted comments in HN was simply asking if the construction of a wind turbine ever offsets the CO2 to produce it... tons of diesel to mine raw materials, coal to smelt steel, manufacture, transport, installation, and then theres the question: what do you do with giant used carbon fiber blades (besides burying them, generating tons of waste: https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/companies-recycle-wind-turbine-blades/100/i27 https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/companies-recycle-...) Alas, even bringing this very valid science question generates sneers online and in previous comments there's already comments stating consipiracy theories about oil companies. What we would probably discover is nothing is actually carbon negative, some are just less worse than others. I'd like to know the actual answers so we can affect real change, rather than just clinging to our crystals.