[HN Gopher] Tallest Wooden Wind Turbine
___________________________________________________________________
Tallest Wooden Wind Turbine
Author : Bluestein
Score : 179 points
Date : 2025-05-19 07:58 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (modvion.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (modvion.com)
| svantana wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'd be interested to hear the answer to this, but don't really
| want to see it. Wouldn't it look terrible?
| looofooo0 wrote:
| https://gicon-hoehenwindrad.de/ They test-building a 380m wind
| turbine in such a style now.
| patall wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| potato3732842 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is what I come to HN for, kudos
| adwn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Certainly makes them easier to disassemble and move
| elsewhere.
| dguest wrote:
| 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
| wizardOfScience wrote:
| 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.
| majoe wrote:
| Working for a crane manufacturing company. While raw
| material costs are maybe not that drastic, we consider
| material efficiency the most important metric for cost
| and a lot of brain power was spent to optimise the amount
| of steel used. There are multiple reasons for this. The
| ones I can think of are: * The margins
| for cranes are thin and steel is expensive. *
| Thicker steel is harder to work with, increasing
| manufacturing cost. * Each kg of dead weight may
| decrease the performance of your product, e.g. max. Live
| load. This is especially true for the jib. * More
| weight at the top of the crane may necessitate a sturdier
| structure below, amplifying cost even more. * More
| weight may require more ballast blocks, which are costly
| (especially transport) * More weight means higher
| transport costs * More weight means more wind area,
| which is the critical factor for high constructions.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| My guess: They want the wind to pass through the crane,
| while they want wind turbines to capture the wind.
| majoe wrote:
| This is the answer.
|
| Interestingly, wind/storm loads are oftentimes the
| limiting factor for the configuration height of a crane.
|
| This is because, when adding another tower segment, not
| only the total area increases but also the wind forces.
| The other loads stay roughly the same
|
| This is the reason why bottom-slewing cranes, which are
| commonly used for small buildings, sometimes are built
| with solid walls. Top-slewing cranes, which are used for
| high buildings, always use a steel framework.
| Aldipower wrote:
| 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.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| This is almost a "spherical cows" level gross over
| simplification. If you weren't defending it in other replies
| I'd think you were satirizing people who only have book
| learning and no real world experience.
|
| At the limit the failure of your statement obvious. If
| instead of a thick walled wood tube hundreds of feet tall
| this structure were an orders of magnitude wider cylinder of
| thin plies the same height it wouldn't even be able to hold
| itself up, it would flop over, tear and all fall down under
| its own weight if not from manufacturing variances then from
| the wind and differential expansion/contraction from the sun
| and if by some miracle it survived that it would flop over
|
| The material has to support itself and tolerate undefined
| small (relative to the main load) loads in other directions
| as well as point loads from fastening it to whatever you are
| using it to bear the loads of, going all in on "large and
| thin" fails to optimize for this for more or less the
| opposite reasons that going all in on "solid" does.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| The parent is explaining why it's hollow instead of being a
| truss. They accurately explain that the hollow tube is
| optimal to counter the wind loads. Your criticism is that
| they didn't discuss gravity loads, but that wasn't "in the
| prompt" -- the gravity load doesn't explain why they're a
| hollow cylinder. There are a wealth of other irrelevant
| things that could be discussed, but have been neglected
| because they are irrelevant to the question.
|
| Frankly your comment disappoints me. wizardOfScience gave a
| _great_ answer, that would make any solid mechanics
| professor proud.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| You're strawmanning bot me and the comment I'm replying
| to. Whether you're using a truss design or a solid
| material wall what I'm saying holds true. You can't just
| go all in on "put the material at the perimeter" because
| it'll have other problem. Gravity is just one of those
| problems.
| mkj wrote:
| 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/
| impossiblefork wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Would be great if someone could build wind turbines to look like
| the windmills of old
| robin_reala wrote:
| Why? Presumably we're trying to optimise on generated power?
| frereubu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Maybe they can use cross-laminated wood or the compressed wood
| that was on hacker news the other day.
| elric wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Any? Solar and nuclear would like a word :P
| elric wrote:
| 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.
| Tade0 wrote:
| 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.
| 7952 wrote:
| I agree on solar and that is hypothetically true of
| nuclear. But in reality nuclear industry has had far less
| ecological benefit than the wind industry.
| lkmill wrote:
| i partly agree, but the fact that those blades cant even be
| recycled [0] but are instead dug down in the ground after use
| will probably be an ecological issue relatively soon.
|
| edit: [0]
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-
| turb...
|
| felt like i read that article yesterday. 5 years ago, wow.
| has any progress been made there?
| snarf21 wrote:
| There has been some but everything isn't fully scaled up
| yet.
|
| https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/articles/carbon-rivers-
| make...
| natmaka wrote:
| Many are now burnt in cement kilns.
|
| A fair part of new blade models are recyclable (check
| RecyclableBlade, ZEBRA, PECAN...).
|
| Research may even enable to somewhat recycle old ones:
| https://www.offshorewind.biz/2023/02/08/newly-discovered-
| che...
| EasyMark wrote:
| there are a couple of catastrophic failure modes of those
| blades and it's some pretty insane footage. The one I saw I
| believe failed because the brake failed in a big wind storm
| wizardOfScience wrote:
| Check out these guys! https://voodin-blades.com/
| moffkalast wrote:
| We're officially back to classic wooden windmills.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| 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...
| goda90 wrote:
| 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...
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| 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.
| aqme28 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| peterpost2 wrote:
| Would the epoxy not have degraded over time? Making it
| quite a bit weaker?
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Probably doesn't matter all that much, especially for
| interior material that wasn't exposed to the elements.
| Worst case you're probably talking strength on th order
| of chip board which is still useful.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I would still assume it could be sawed up and turned into
| building material, highly unlikely anything but the
| outside has any appreciable deterioration
| Moldoteck wrote:
| "what happens to that carbon?" - biomass))
| EasyMark wrote:
| wood is carbon neutral by it's very nature, however obviously
| this isn't because energy is needed to process it into a
| useable form
| boxed wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| EasyMark wrote:
| It's marketing terminology since wood obviously takes a lot of
| energy to process, but I assume they mean it's still a fraction
| of what metal version uses.
| calmbonsai wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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)
| Bluestein wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| What about more complex and expensive infrastructure required
| for balancing uneven electricity output?
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| yes - RE Spain a month ago ..
| coolcase wrote:
| Was a root cause done on that? Was it due to wind power?
| passwordoops wrote:
| No, the study is still ongoing. I can't find the link
| (and Google is functionally useless for finding original
| links) but Spain's power authority held an update last
| week where they gave a summary of events (where the
| failure first happened, where it spread to, etc) and if I
| understood correctly will have non-
| Spanish/French/Portuguese experts do the full
| investigation.
|
| Still a ways away from understanding what happened
| arghwhat wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blac
| kou...
|
| The root cause is not known, but Spain was producing
| excess power (primarily solar) at the time around the
| disconnect. Some fluctations were seen, then supply
| started to disconnect from the grid in Spain, leading to
| sudden loss of 2.2GW of power. In Spain, automatic load
| shedding then happened to try to recover, but it was too
| little too late as neighboring countries detached from
| Spain to protect their own grids.
|
| Nothing about this sounds like an issue with renewables.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| Trigger suspected to be one substation
| https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/power-generation-
| los... The blackout itself is suspected to be amplified
| by ren https://montelnews.com/de/news/96607ac1-dd73-4c23-
| bb47-a7c2a... "Die Experten betonen, dass erneuerbare
| Anlagen das Problem nicht nur nicht abfedern konnten,
| sondern moglicherweise verstarkt haben."
| Moldoteck wrote:
| And RE is running the grid in "strengthened mode". There
| were no comments about what this means, but looking at
| the data, gas+nuclear are modulated less vs usual,
| regardless of ren generation
| https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/ES/72h/hourly
| Moldoteck wrote:
| and here's the link about more gas firming
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-19/spain-
| boo...
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blac
| kou...
|
| not strictly because of wind power but few denies that
| wind power hasn't been a contributing factors -
| politically it's too sensitive so it's going to be "under
| investigation" for a long time. Alledgedly too little
| inertia / rotating power ... there is a parallel to the
| Australian blackout 10 years ago, where the solution was
| to build large batteries
| sebstefan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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.
| stephen_g wrote:
| 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.
| belorn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| cyberax wrote:
| Why not a nuclear power plant? And how about the battery
| backup that the wind power needs to be reliable?
| bluGill wrote:
| Nuclear is so expensive the only reason anyone builds
| them is governments wants a source of nuclear trained
| people around for military purposes (either bombs or navy
| ships).
|
| Battery backup isn't a needed as much as many thing in
| the real world. Those gas power plants we already have
| are not going anywhere, so we still use them when there
| isn't much wind. Though battery is something we should be
| building instead (and are).
| xattt wrote:
| Wait, what? There are also a number of countries that
| operate nuclear plants purely for civilian electricity
| production. Military applications are not the primary
| motivator.
|
| Instead, civilian energy demands and energy independence
| are the motivating factors. Look at how Ontario leveraged
| its electricity supply in the early days of the trade
| war.
| bluGill wrote:
| I said build not operate. The world situation has
| changed, 50 years ago nuclear power was a good idea to
| build. If you have a working nuclear power plant I'd
| generally keep operating it, and do small upgrades over
| time. However building a new one is something you should
| only do if you have military needs. (note that showing
| off is sometimes a military need)
| xattt wrote:
| CANDU 9 and Advanced CANDU reactors were developed and
| built during a time when Canada had no active military
| nuclear program.
| bluGill wrote:
| both cancled actording to wikipedia thus proving my
| point. both were started near the end of when of when
| making a civial nuke might make sense
| xattt wrote:
| There are 12 CANDU 9 units: Bruce A & B, and Darlington.
| Both either undergone recent refurbishment or
| refurbishment underway.
| cyberax wrote:
| In most of Europe, nuclear is cheaper than anything else
| but coal, natgas, and classic hydro.
|
| When you also add the cost of battery backup.
|
| Spain and Portugal have just experienced the first taste
| of that fact.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| Most of the cost of nuclear is in construction so
| extending the life of existing nuclear power stations as
| long as possible makes sense. However new nuclear in
| Europe has been much more expensive and even France has
| lost the ability to build new nuclear capacity cheaply.
| mndgs wrote:
| Nonsense, by that logic Lithuania should have been a #2
| military power long time ago (having built nukes from a
| civil nuclear reactor) (it used to operate #2 largest
| nuclear reactor in the world, now it would be #4).
| laurencerowe wrote:
| I mean Lithuania's nuclear reactors were built while it
| was part of the #2 military power in the world and have
| since been shut down.
|
| https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-
| profil...
| natmaka wrote:
| We even know how to feed gas turbine with hydrogen, and
| how to make hydrogen thanks to renewables' overproduction
| ("green hydrogen").
| delusional wrote:
| Because nobody is lobbying to build nuclear power plants
| instead of windmills because of the lifecycle emissions
| of the windmill production.
| motorest wrote:
| It would be laughable to compare nuclear with any
| alternative based on the cost of externalities.
| belorn wrote:
| You can do the same with a nuclear power plant and
| calculate how much power it generate and how much green
| house gases that represent if it was produced by a
| natural gas-fired power plant. Fuel cost is a thing, but
| to my knowledge they are fairly minor in terms of
| greenhouse emissions when compared to burning fossil
| fuels.
|
| Batteries/storage do not produce energy so they don't
| displace any energy in this kind of calculations. They
| can be viewed as a small efficiency increase of existing
| wind turbines, in which case they do have a form of
| greenhouse gas payback time, although the energy must not
| be counted twice for both the turbine and battery, and
| the increased wear and tear on the wind turbine may
| impact the result.
|
| Wind generally has an production rate of around 50%,
| which mean that countries like Denmark that has already
| reached over 100% wind production still only have energy
| for half of their consumption. This mean the storage need
| is fairly massive, which they currently solve by
| importing energy from fossil fueled thermal power
| stations, nuclear and hydropower from nearby countries.
| Constructing more wind power at this point does not seem
| economical for power companies, and any storage solution
| like lithium, reverse hydro, and so on are also not
| economical (as in, there is basically zero investment
| into it outside of government subsidized initiatives). As
| such, wind has in that location seem to have reached its
| ability to displace any more fossil fuel.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| so... that estimate should be even shorter, since we're
| replacing primarily coal stations?
| mavhc wrote:
| Turns out gas is just as bad as coal when you account for
| leaks
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| if you believe the carbon equivalency metrics for methane
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| Why would you not believe that?
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| there's a lot of unmeasured assumptions and if you read
| what is described to the public its usually
| scientifically wrong. usually it's one of:
|
| - methane has a higher absorption than CO2
|
| incorrect. CO2 has a dipole moment amd c-infinity-v
| symmetry so it absorbs way more
|
| - methane has higher absorption in open windows of IR
| frequencies
|
| also incorrect. the water band don't overlap with CO2
|
| - methane has a longer atmospheric half-life
|
| incorrect. you can look up the numbers on this. i believe
| it was believed to have a longer half life a few decades
| ago but detailed isotopic studies have disproved it?
|
| you have to dig really deep to figure out that there is I
| think? an estimated self-shading effect of CO2 that
| changes the marginal absorbance of a single molecule. but
| this assumes a uniform distribution of CO2 in the
| atmosphere and no scattering. anyways i think this is not
| spoken of because it also reminds that the effect of Co2
| is logarthmic (A = log(T))
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| example incorrect explanation (from MIT, of all places
| they should know better):
|
| https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/what-makes-methane-more-
| pote...
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| Do you have an example of a correct explanation according
| to you? Why should we believe you are correct and
| everyone else isn't?
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| Do you have any sources that reinforce your assertions?
|
| I'm not aware of anyone asserting that methane has a
| longer half life than CO2, just the opposite. It has a
| shorter half life, is more powerful a GHG, and then
| decomposes into CO2 and H2O to add insult to injury.
| jiehong wrote:
| At least wood is more recyclable, so why not.
|
| Thanks for the study link!
| twelvechairs wrote:
| Is it though? Steel is very easy to recycle. Engineered
| timber that is full of various glues and fire retardants not
| so much.
| moffkalast wrote:
| 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.
| stephen_g wrote:
| Well replacing the tower reduces embodied emissions from
| the steel. Sure that's not as big as an issue if the
| steel was already recycled (and would be recycled again)
| using an electric arc furnace powered by renewables, but
| the wood is actually negative since it's storing carbon
| while it's not decomposing.
|
| The blades themselves isn't really much of an issue if
| you actually compare it to fossil fuels - for example,
| coal fly ash was 18% of _all_ waste generated in
| Australia around 2019 (this is likely a bit less now as
| one or two major coal plants have since been
| decommissioned).
|
| I think it's astronomically unlikely that wind turbine
| blades would ever be that kind of proportion of a
| country's waste, but it was just a normal thing for coal.
| And gas and oil have a similar problem, it's just harder
| to see since it's fine particulate matter belched into
| the air instead of heavier ash that you have to deal
| with!
|
| 1. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-10/coal-ash-has-
| become-o...
| nabla9 wrote:
| "The research indicates that there will be 43 million
| tonnes of blade waste worldwide by 2050" https://www.scie
| ncedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09560...
| laurencerowe wrote:
| Which just isn't very much. The US currently produced 120
| million tonnes of coal ash per year.
| zitsarethecure wrote:
| If you read the marketing content on their site, the
| intended method of recycling these structures is to cut up
| the wood sections and re-use them as structural beams in
| regular building construction. They aren't grinding them up
| or melting them down or anything like that. So between the
| lifespan of the tower and the buildings built (or
| maintained) with the recycled beams, the useful lifespan of
| the materials used are long enough to grow new wood to
| replace them. At least that's my understanding.
| cinntaile wrote:
| This is not just wood though. This is wood fibers mixed with
| some sort of resin.
| sebstefan wrote:
| I hope price
|
| I'd rather have municipalities put 1.5 affordable wind
| turbines rather than 1 wood one
| internet_points wrote:
| does that number take into account the area of nature paved to
| create roads for transporting those huge masts?
| os2warpman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| internet_points wrote:
| Can't speak for the US, but that is not the case in Norway.
|
| There have been massive protests due to the amount of
| nature destroyed. There are some before-after sliders on
|
| https://www-nrk-no.translate.goog/dokumentar/her-er-
| norges-s...
|
| (scroll around for "wind") that give an indication,
| although the most striking difference is experience by the
| people who used to go for hikes in remote places where
| there are now immense wind parks. The wind companies love
| building them up in the previously-untouched mountain
| regions since I guess height = more power, also less NIMBY
| neighbours.
|
| https://www.google.no/maps/place/Buheii/@58.6554134,6.88706
| 1... had zero roads a decade ago, now it's all roads. And
| with roads come traffic and people and cabins and tourism
| and more roads.
|
| Now they're saying we need more wind parks for AI data
| centers (a few years ago it was for crypto). We're tearing
| down nature so we can keep growing our energy use while
| staying "green".
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| 7952 wrote:
| In Europe roads can be very narrow and windy. You need to
| transport very large blades, towers, cranes which can
| require modification to the roads and large tracks. And
| large schemes can have massive transformers which are heavy
| and require long vehicles to transport. You might have to
| drive a thirty mile circuitous route avoiding weak bridges
| from a barge moored at a river or harbour. And whilst you
| could scrub out the tracks once built developers probably
| don't want to. It makes it easier to bring in equipment and
| parts if necessary. And provides easy access to the cables
| that will probably be run under the tracks.
|
| There was some plan to build an airplane that could deliver
| parts. Probably useless in Europe but could work in less
| dense places.
| cbmuser wrote:
| They still need conventional power plants for backup which will
| make the life-cycle electricity emissions of the whole system
| much dirtier.
| Scarblac wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| thrance wrote:
| But building and installing the wind turbine still requires
| some emissions.
|
| The wind turbine doesn't remove carbon from the air, so the
| offset you are talking about is not a real offset, it's only
| relative to how much CO2 wasn't released in the atmosphere by a
| more polluting source of power that would have been used
| instead.
|
| Wooden wind turbines would allow sequestrating carbon (in the
| cut trees that make their structures) and potentially
| compensate the carbon necessary to assemble and install the
| wind turbine, if the trees are replanted.
| EasyMark wrote:
| My partner was so wound up after that speech on landman. I was
| like "darling I love the show for braindead entertainment but
| that is a exceedingly bad take on wind power from a show that
| obviously is meant to appeal to rural folks who don't want to
| feel guilty or do anything about fossil fuels".
|
| Here's the quote from the show for those who haven't seen it
|
| _"Do you have any idea how much diesel they have to burn to
| mix the concrete or make that steel? Or haul this sh-t out
| here, and put it together with a 450 foot crane? You want to
| guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that f-ing thing, or
| winterize it? In its 20-year lifespan, it won't offset the
| carbon footprint of making it. And don't get me started on
| solar panels and the lithium in your Tesla battery..."_
| carlosjobim wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| 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
|
| 85m - Norway - 2019 | https://www.moelven.com/mjostarnet/
|
| 87m - US - 2020 | https://www.ascentmke.com
|
| 350m - Japan - 2041 |
| https://www.nikken.co.jp/en/projects/highrise/w350.html
| 7952 wrote:
| Skyscrapers seem like the worst possible case study. Because
| surely they are dominated by other factors beyond just basic
| materials.
| kieranmaine wrote:
| 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-
| hydr...
| laurencerowe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Love wind turbines they look great and feel like the future.
| Don't understand the hate for them
| frainfreeze wrote:
| Have you actually looked into the arguments?
| somat wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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