Elegant Wind Turbine Blades Made of Wood Can Outperform Composites | Hacker News Reader

Elegant Wind Turbine Blades Made of Wood Can Outperform Composites

cleantechnica.com

43 pointsthelastgallon28 comments

I think the sorbitol based "pecan" resin is worthy of its own article. https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2023/a-recyclable-plant-ba...

I feel like the wind-turbine industry is ripe with possible innovation opportunities. It has now grown to the scale where serious r&d can expect meaningful returns.

Especially in the area of residential-scale turbines. We've seen, with the roll-out of rooftop solar that people with good solar conditions are prepared to generate supplemental electricity. There's an untapped market for those in poor solar, but good wind, areas, or with a desire for both.

I'm not saying it's a silver bullet, but so far the economics of wind at residential level are behind solar.

Yeah, nah. Engineering says no, unfortunately. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRREJZdRA8g

I thought residential wind was basically a non-starter due to wind availability at low heights + power scaling exponentially with blade length?

Might there be a size at which it would make sense for multiple houses to group together and pay for a turbine that's big enough to supply all their electricity, rather than one per house like solar panels? (If enough of the local residents feel YIMBY about it, that is.)

There is certainly a market for smaller turbines in remote locations where it’s harder to maintain grid access, or any other scenario where pure $/W is not the only factor.

In locations where wind regimes correlation to nearby other ones are among the lowest.

Plus, I'm not bothered by a poorly maintained, stationary solar panel on my neighbour's house, but I very much mind a poorly maintained, rotating turbine in the same place!

Both excellent points.

Yes, economically, at the moment, it's hard to justify. But some solar system inverters support wind inputs, which means the "overhead" costs (inverter, battery, etc) drop away.

Yes, in terms of kw/$ adding more solar makes more sense. Except that solar is obviously dependent on sun. Mixing inputs means more "spread" in generation. (Obviously night time, rainy days, and so on.)

So its not just about kw/$ but also smoothing generation to reduce overall storage (which is -very- expensive.)

They do need more maintainence. And they contain more kinetic energy, so failure could be more serious.

These are all excellent, well accepted, points. And just when things are absolutly-positivly a bad idea... well, that's why it's ripe for disruption.

Just to reiterate what other people have said, no! There are extremely few cases residential wind makes sense. Maybe in some cases where geometry of buildings allows for an effective wind sweep much greater. But otherwise, winds aren't windy enough at building level.

I was looking and home wind options last weekend, and came across Harmony Wind Turbines, which look interesting given as a vertical solution they take less room, their models apparently can gather wind at lower wind speeds, and they have a feature to allow they to function at higher wind speeds, increasing the total operational speeds.

Unfortunately, all the interesting details are pending testing which they've partnered with universities for, but I'm not sure how far along they are.

Its unfortunately very hard to yell whether it's actually interesting or just appears to be so because key details aren't known, but hopefully we'll know one way or another within a year or two.

The other energy source that's drawn my interest recently is microhydro solutions, but that necessarily requires specific geographic features (a water source and elevation).

Depends on the situation; for most people, it's a non-starter, but remote cabins in the right place may make for a good residential wind source. There are fishing camps in northern Canada that are only used for a couple of months a year, but they have winter caretakers. The one I know isn't above the treeline, but the trees are all pretty short (30-40 feet max, 10-12 meters, usually less), so getting above the trees isn't hard. Given that solar is going to be pitiful even if there's no snow, wind would be my first choice to keep a handful of things charged. Satellite phone, e-Ink reader, indoor lighting. His heat is all firewood chopped during the first couple of months after arrival, before it gets really cold.

Where did you get that feeling from?

Wind turbine manufacturers are engineering heavy organizations. The competition is fierce. Only those manufacturers with the best R&D have survived.

From time to time you see radically new designs that never get anywhere because they are just so much worse than the 3-blade design that won out.

The main development area right now is probably floating foundations for off-shore turbines.

Residential-scale wind turbines are difficult - they need good height, require maintenance, are noisy. They are a niche product. Yet, there are several manufacturers, and again competition is fierce.

Solar scales linearly with size of installation. Is this remotely true for wind energy?

What is the potential ROI for a wind installation in a resident area? To be honest, I suspect it is extremely low.

This page is unreadable... 80% ads intermixed with a little bit of content.

Adblocker!

You can try ublock origin, its the best of the bunch.

If youre on iOS, Brave is a good(ish) option as it even blocks youtube ads. Enjoy.

DuckDuckGo has browsers for android and windows that block ads by default.

Huh. It was fine for me. Firefox on Android.

I do have both ublock origin and privacy badger installed, and I guess they did their jobs.

I went looking in the addons settings while the page was up, and the privacy badger icon had a 13, and the ublock origin had a 24.

dns.adguard.com on Android works across browsers and other apps.

Agreed. I think we should shun pages that are completely unreadable without adblocker.

The wood in this case is itself a "composite" though it may well be better in some ways than carbon fibre based composites, it feels a bit like promoting a natural cleaning product because it doesn't have "chemicals".

I know what they mean by the headline, but isn't laminated veneer lumber itself a composite? I guess they mean it outperforms fiberglass.

Pretty sure Nuclear outperforms wind Turbines as well.

Less habitat loss aka lower footprint. Higher MW per acre.

Vastly more expensive. Leaves 95% of the fuel unburned & extremely dangerous for thousands of years.

Expensive yes; unburned is a choice (and less important given the energy density); the long term danger is both true and misleading because while it's a long time the actual volume of material is tiny.

For me, the problem with nuclear is the safety profile: although the mean deaths per TWh is really really low, the observed upper bound on damage that can happen when it does go wrong is sufficient to bankrupt a superpower.

Low mean/high variance is exactly the kind of scenario where I expect people to cut corners because they think it will never affect them.

Technically we don't know the mean deaths per TWh, only the mean death per produced TWh so far, giving that the waste is such a long term problem.

Not when you factor in everything that has to go into making something like wind power work. The problem is that it’s very unreliable, its output is wildly variable, from nothing to a lot.

Then there’s the efficiency that diminishes over time, and a much shorter life span.

Compared to stable output and 40-50 years of power generation. And much lower environment impact overall (especially compared to the power generation over its lifetime)

... exposes to major accidents, creates a dependency towards uranium, may induce nuclear weapons proliferation, sometimes daunting decommission process (check the ongoing U.-K. programme)...

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