Tallest Wooden Wind Turbine
85 comments
·May 19, 2025sebstefan
belorn
Please note that the study takes the energy that the wind turbine produce and calculate how much green house gases a natural gas-fired power plant would create producing the same amount of energy.
once_inc
Without having checked the study because I can't open the link on this machine: does it also take recycling of the metals into account? There's also cost in placement (which are very significant in places like the North Sea for instance), and digging up the rare earth minerals and such.
belorn
No, no mentioning of recycling. It only look at average energy output, converts it into what a natural gas power plant would do to get the same amount, and compare it to an estimation of green house emissions from producing the turbine. They do mention creating the estimation of production emissions from 28 wind turbine LCA studies of 22 on- and 6 offshore locations, so it sound like they include placement costs, but I can't say for sure. on- and offshore turbines may not be built identically.
The fundamental question that the study ask is if the wind turbine would replace an existing natural gas-fired power plant, how much less green house gases would it produce compared to keeping the natural gas-fired power plant, and how does that compared to the production emissions of the wind turbine.
NooneAtAll3
so... that estimate should be even shorter, since we're replacing primarily coal stations?
mavhc
Turns out gas is just as bad as coal when you account for leaks
Bluestein
> 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.-
internet_points
does that number take into account the area of nature paved to create roads for transporting those huge masts?
os2warpman
Because they require so little, infrequent, maintenance it makes very little sense to pave asphalt roads to wind tower locations.
For the vast majority of wind farms, dirt or gravel roads connect masts to pre-existing infrastructure.
The largest wind farm in the US is the Alta Wind Energy Center: https://maps.app.goo.gl/rPjUGSTN979dfUoDA
The largest wind farm in Europe is the Markbygden Wind Farm: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ETVeMXpf1uPieTct8
Dirt and gravel roads.
I'm not saying that there have never been roads paved to create wind farms.
I am saying that the number of roads that have paved is so small that it is irrelevant.
dylan604
looking at the wind farm from a certain elevation reminds me of west texas where each of the dots is a gas well instead of a turbine. then my brain went hard left and imagined the wind turbines being used to pump gas in some insane reason
bluGill
Why should it? We already have all those roads as they were built for all our other transport needs and have plenty of spare capacity for the few wind turbines (1 every 5 minutes is not much use on a modern road) we are building.
Unless you are talking about the last 100 meters - but as the other reply pointed out, those are not roads. Most of the ones I've seen are grass - the roads are used so little we don't need gravel and they don't even turn into dirt.
jiehong
At least wood is more recyclable, so why not.
Thanks for the study link!
twelvechairs
Is it though? Steel is very easy to recycle. Engineered timber that is full of various glues and fire retardants not so much.
moffkalast
I thought the main problem with recycling them were the fiber composite blades? If they keep those but just swap the metal tower with a wooden one they've achieved exactly nothing in practice.
cinntaile
This is not just wood though. This is wood fibers mixed with some sort of resin.
anticodon
What about more complex and expensive infrastructure required for balancing uneven electricity output?
stephen_g
A bit more complex, but it doesn't have to be more expensive...
I think this is massively overblown, it was actually hard to manage a grid with baseload generation, since you still needed peaker plants for the morning and afternoon peaks and then had massive amounts of excess power overnight.
It's just that that's what people were used to, not that it's actually the best or easiest model for managing grids.
Highly variable sources bring some different challenges than the old status quo, but we also have much more sophisticated technology in the power space now anyway. And that new and sophisticated tech can produce new opportunities that outweigh the challenges if anything.
So I take arguments like yours with a massive grain of salt. How you put it is not really the case.
sebstefan
The same as for the wood turbine.
It also matters before asking the question of batteries how much turbines it's going to take before the problem actually needs to be tackled
The problem doesn't arise immediately in the duck curve. It depends on how much of the energy mix of the place is composed of controllable sources alongside your wind and solar
I recall seeing that the need for batteries is tiny if you accept a 10% share of carbon emitting energy across the year - so all in all, another non-problem, or at least first you should focus on building the turbines to reach the problem, then think of whether or not it's worth getting batteries for the rest.
arghwhat
"Uneven electricity output"?
The variation on output is over a matter of hours (wind powerful enough to spin entire wind farms is not something that comes one second and is gone the next), and large grids with import and export capabilities are largely self-regulating.
Cost fluctuations in the electricity market regulate whether e.g., power storage sites will charge or dump power, whether district heating plants will source more heat from giant electric kettles, when EVs will start to charge, when private smart water heaters will preheat, when people decide to schedule washing machines and dishwasher, whether offline fossil fuel power plants will be fired up to sell as the rate becomes more lucrative or shut down as power becomes too cheap, whether any "idle" plants will throttle up or down, and whether windmills will engage brakes and turn away from the wind or release brakes and turn into it.
Power grids have also always had the ability to load shed by dropping customers off the grid, starting with factories that have special agreements, in case the combined local production and import is insufficient, and can detatch from neighboring grids and countries if there are import/export issues that could destabilize the grid.
The grid needs to change when supply or load conditions change significantly (e.g., every house in a city suddenly having an EV or heat pump, every house in a city suddenly having solar cells and supplying a ton of power, a power plant or wind farm being built somewhere power has not previously been routed), and can be optimized (e.g., power storage, smart load scheduling), but that is entirely orthogonal to windmills.
WinstonSmith84
yes - RE Spain a month ago ..
coolcase
Was a root cause done on that? Was it due to wind power?
jbms
"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.
aqme28
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
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.
aziaziazi
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
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.
boxed
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...
Moldoteck
"what happens to that carbon?" - biomass))
boxed
> I would have assumed of course that wind turbines are net negative emissions, even factoring in the construction and materials.
It's net much-less-than-coal and much-less-than-oil, but it's not zero and certainly not negative.
I think you're confusing "if we add this to the grid we subtract the carbon emissions compared to the current system" with "this pulls carbon from the atmosphere". Those are very different things.
mppm
Presumably they mean that the CO2 captured in the wood of the tower can offset the manufacture of blades and other components at some point in the future. Not that reaching net zero in wind power is an important milestone or anything. From their technology page:
> The life-cycle emissions from modern wind power plants made of steel are about 4–7 grammes carbon dioxide per kWh. Building the tower in wood lowers the emissions from the wind power plant by approximately 30 percent per kWh.
That would put wind power some 50-100x below fossil fuels already. Additional improvements are always nice to have, but not really a big selling point.
bjourne
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
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.
Bric3d
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.
elric
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
Any? Solar and nuclear would like a word :P
Tade0
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.
elric
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.
jillesvangurp
It's a relatively very minor challenge compared to burning massive amounts of gas, coal or oil for the same energy of the blades over the lifetime. The big picture is that wind turbines are a massive improvement over that.
There's a very minor challenge (compared to decades of coal/gas related emissions) of what happens to the blades after their useful life ends. Mostly you are just putting something that doesn't naturally degrade very well in a landfill where it sits and doesn't degrade very well. It might be leaking some toxic stuff slowly over a very long time. Compared to all absolutely massive amounts of other stuff we dump in landfills, what happens to the blades is probably not the most urgent thing to tackle from an ecological point of view.
Of course, windmill construction at scale involves a lot of steel, concrete, and blades. So if would can do the same job and perform well, that's still interesting to do. We take something that's already amazingly good and make it even better.
goda90
If you go smaller you can use wood for the blades too. Smaller doesn't scale as well, but if you design and build them right you can still get more energy than it takes to produce them: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/reinventing-the-sm...
wizardOfScience
Check out these guys! https://voodin-blades.com/
moffkalast
We're officially back to classic wooden windmills.
Onavo
Maybe they can use cross-laminated wood or the compressed wood that was on hacker news the other day.
DocTomoe
It's that, and the tower's concrete base (which is huge, and virtually indestructible, which means no-one is going to remove it. It'll stay in the ground forever, essentially sealing it (even if there is a meter of dirt covering it). See [1] for a picture to understand the dimensions:
[1] https://www.sserenewables.com/news-and-views/2021/09/concret...
svantana
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?
wizardOfScience
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.
adwn
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?
wizardOfScience
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.
Aldipower
Because at cranes the force is not the wind that comes from any direction, but the directed payload hanging at the crane arm. Almost all cranes I now moving also the pole around.
IsTom
Certainly makes them easier to disassemble and move elsewhere.
carlosjobim
My guess: They want the wind to pass through the crane, while they want wind turbines to capture the wind.
Onavo
This is what I come to HN for, kudos
cluckindan
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).
looofooo0
https://gicon-hoehenwindrad.de/ They test-building a 380m wind turbine in such a style now.
patall
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!
flir
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-f...
scrlk
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-c...
lostlogin
I’d be interested to hear the answer to this, but don’t really want to see it. Wouldn’t it look terrible?
mkj
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.
impossiblefork
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
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
null
norome
Would be great if someone could build wind turbines to look like the windmills of old
bluGill
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.
aqme28
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.
robin_reala
Why? Presumably we’re trying to optimise on generated power?
frereubu
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!
calmbonsai
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.
lupusreal
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.
aaron695
[dead]
carlosjobim
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."
"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 ; and every other one I could find finds the same ballpark)