Wooden towers to help cut cost of wind turbines
cleantechnica.com
cleantechnica.com
Original: https://modvion.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2022/03/The-m...
At least in the UK, off-shore wind is utterly dominant.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/05/boris-johns... and https://www.ukri.org/news-and-events/responding-to-climate-c... have some more context.
Over here it started onshore but is now happening inland. Offshore is very expensive because of moving ice.
Huh? Ice? There isn’t any sea ice to contend with in the UK.
Land locked countries or countries with not a lot of sea also can benefit from this newer wind technology that can be built inland profitably. They then don't need to build onshore but can build inland. Some US states for example have great inland wind resources.
And there timber towers could be very relevant - it doesn't need to be saltwater proof.
This is for political reasons rather than economic or technical ones. Further reducing the cost of on-shore wind relative to off-shore could swing the political argument in favour of on-shore wind.
One widely cited source is the 'Lazard' report:
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
it puts onshore wind at between $26 and $50 per MW and the cost of offshore wind at an average of $83 per MW. I.e. the opposite of what you think.
Lazard could be wrong, and it would be interesting to hear why, backed by some numbers.
Well, no, I didn’t make the claim that it was the cheapest. It is competitively priced, however, which is important, and both technically and politically achievable. Anyway the other person claimed that if onshore became even cheaper that onshore would gain favor over offshore. Yet, it’s already apparently significantly cheaper. So why isn’t it more favorable already?
There are motivations beyond purely cost…it’s a lot easier to have larger-scale offshore wind than onshore (are there 15MW+ turbines in the onshore pipeline?) with less nuisance and better wind resource. It’s not really feasible to transport the components for such massive wind turbines onshore. Multi-gigawatt scale onshore wind farms don’t exist (the largest I noticed after a quick search is only 350MW). Offshore can be so much bigger…Dogger Bank, when it’s fully realized, will be almost 14 times larger than the current largest onshore wind farm in the UK.
I've wondered before if the reason the resin is never mentioned in these sort of laminated/engineered timber projects is that 'we built this structure entirely from wood!' sounds a lot better than 'we built this structure mostly using wood, but also using hydrocarbons'.
Why does that matter? It is trapped carbon, it doesn't contribute to CO2 emissions.
Petroleum is way too useful to stop using, even if we completely phase it out as an energy source. E.g. plastics, lots of pharmaceuticals, etc., there are too many useful products made from petrol.
There's alternatives and the sooner we start making them at scale the sooner they'll be cheaper and better than the fossil equivalent, just like renewables and EVs and heat pumps etc.
Note that fossil extraction also has a climate impact, methane leaks etc. even when not burned, though the bribes going to politicians are probably the bigger threat.
(Eventually the towers would reach end-of-life but I would hope we have sorted things out climate-wise by then, eh?)
I could imagine that wood+"fossil glue" could be better for the climate than steel or fiberglass (or whatever.)
You'd be surprised. Steel is 20MJ/kg[1], epoxy resin is 80MJ/kg[2]. FWIW, aluminium is 150MJ/kg.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_energy#In_common_mate... [2] https://compositesuk.co.uk/composite-materials/faqs/embodied...
As I understand it, as a no expert, the US is way behind when it comes to laminated timber. We need to update our building codes before it can be a major building material, and the regulatory bodies and the builders are all super slow to adopt new tech.
1. they have to mount a major campaign to get a permit for from the building code people
2. would result in them getting sued because they did something different
Research and testing doesn't fit the startup model. It's instead close to open source or academic research. And that involves then institutions and cooperation...
They already are. They're balsa and fiberglass.
Well, wood epoxy composite.
https://www.dandelionstonetroughs.co.uk/millstones-for-sale/
For what it is worth though, they are building low/mid-rise buildings out of wood now and supposedly they can be better at handling fires than steel (since steel will fail catastrophically at a certain temp but wood chars as it burns, insulating the unburnt parts which retain structural strength for longer)
Wind turbine towers are large enough these days that they can absolutely be built in a forest, and this is often happening. It's also crucial, because you simply need that space if you want to build wind energy everywhere - which obviously includes forest-rich areas.