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Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

Windmill technology is fairly low tech. there are a few things around the wings but besides that it's not really a "tech" business IMO.

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No offense, but besides the advanced materials and mechanical design required to keep these things from tearing themselves apart, there is a lot more in the control and optimization software for these that goes into adjusting for changing weather conditions and power demand. I think your suffering from the classic engineer's disease of thinking something is a whole lot more simple than it is when looking at it from the outside.

Example article of some work going on in this space: https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2014-10-optimizin...

I grew up in Denmark the frontrunner on windmills. Vesta is the largest windmill manufactorer in the world. It's literally cultural heritage.

If there is anything which have been debated in Denmark it's the pros and cons of windmills, what the technology is, where the money are, what markets are interesting.

My point wasn't that you can't optimize just that it's not a field where that's a competitive advantage.

So it's the opposite in my case. I know the industry from the inside and know what matters in it and it's not technological advances.

But hey each to their own. I certainly wasn't implying he shouldn't get into the field just that there is a lot less going on than what it looks like on the surface.

How did you reach that conclusion? Those things scream "advanced material tech" to me. Almost as much as space rockets.

The towers are just lots and lots of steel.

A lot of them are made in facilities that were built to make railcars (including big tank cars).

> The towers are just lots and lots of steel.

And a lot of engineering is involved to optimize that design, to build the towers as strong as is necessary to survive high wind loads while using as little material as possible so as to minimize cost. You're trivializing something that has a lot of thought put into it just because you don't really understand it well. I can guarantee you that more thought, simulation, and calculation goes into the design of windmill towers than goes into the average software project.

I don't think anyone is trivializing anything, but those things you mention are mostly solved problems. There isn't that much innovation going on in the field as you might believe.

And from a material standpoint they are still just lots and lots of steel.

If it helps, I'm not a software engineer and have an unused degree in mechanical engineering.

From a reductive material standpoint, everything is just a collection of ingredients. Processors are "just" silicon. That doesn't make them trivial to engineer. What is your point?

It's thick, rolled plate steel. The manufacturing process isn't amenable to the exquisite engineering you are imagining and steel is cheap.

They are pretty damn sure it is strong enough. It isn't the minimum material necessary to ensure that.

Aren't they actually mostly concrete? At least here in Germany they are.

Are you sure? I just Googled a bunch of German wind turbines and I'm not seeing any poles made out of concrete. Do you have photos you can share?

Concrete doesn't seem like the right material for this job.

While steel seems to be the most common material to built the towers, taller ones seem to use a hybrid construction where the lower part is built of reinforced concrete and the upper one out of steel. The problem seems to be to transport large steel segments as German streets mostly don't fit anything with more than 4m diameter. Towers made out of only concrete seem to be pretty rare.

The brochure of one company: https://www.max-boegl.de/en/downloads-en/116-max-boegl-hybri...

(Disclaimer: I know nothing about this and just report back what I read on industry associations' and manufacturers' websites)

Sure, the towers may not be that advanced, though I bet they're optimized extensively for cost. It is the blades that I'm thinking of. They have to be light and strong, which aren't particularly new requirements, but I bet the scale adds challenges of its own relative to aircraft wings. Also, I hear wear on the gearboxes for these things are a major pain, so I bet they are pretty advanced as well.

I'm an industrial engineer who deals with manufacturing. There's a ton that goes into the blades. Going higher up yields more energy, but the width of the blades are at the limit for transportation under highway bridges. With every rotation, the blade flexes know force at the bottom, high at the top. The materials are really advancing and the efficiency is improving.

Cost is the killer of so many renewable energy sources. There is tons of optimization going on for cost.

As I said there is a few things around the wings. But besides that it's not that advanced an industry.

We did some work a while ago which involved using high spatial and temporal resolution wind datasets to build optimization tools which figured out the best place to build wind farms given constraints like geographic restrictions, number of turbines, nameplate capacity, etc.

Nah, it's where all of the cutting edge tech research is, from wind lidars steering turbines, before the wind has reached it, to new materials for 10MW+ turbines and new grid and storage tech to support it.

Any energy company is a technology company.

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