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Sweden welcomes its first wooden wind turbine tower:
The wheels have begun to turn on an interesting new form of wind turbine in Sweden, with the country's first wooden power-generation tower now complete. Built from sustainably sourced materials and said to offer comparable performance to traditional wind turbines, it's hoped the wooden power tower will be a harbinger of cheaper and greener solutions for renewable energy in the Nordic country, with commercial versions planned for a couple of years down the track.
Following in the footsteps of a similar creation in Germany, the new wooden wind tower is the brainchild of Swedish engineering firm Modvion, which is out to improve on what it sees as significant drawbacks when it comes to typical wind towers. These tall, steel towers demand thick bases to support their upper sections, which not only makes them very expensive to produce, but very expensive to transport to site, with rules around load size on public roads often proving problematic.
Modvion is instead working on a modular version that can be made out of cheaper and greener materials than steel, which requires huge amounts of energy to produce. The company's wooden wind towers are designed to reach heights of more than 120 m (393 ft), at significantly lower cost than those made out of steel, with the modular approach allowing for stackable sections to be transported on public roads without issue. They are also claimed to be carbon neutral from the day construction begins.
The 30-meter (100-ft) proof-of-concept tower was built together with wood construction company Moelven at its facility in Töreboda. The wooden sections of the turbine were then transported to Björkö, an island outside Gothenburg around 200 km (124 mi) away, with the final piece put into place in late April.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday June 09 2020, @06:24PM (1 child)
You forgot the magic incantation that makes anything old become patent eligible again. Simply add one of the following items as a suffix to the title of your patent application:
* ...on a computer
* ...on an iPhone
And why is it called a windmill?
Big oil is (sometimes up to three times removed from apparent author) able to publish information about how EVs are less green than ICE vehicles.
And, in case you didn't know, Tobacco does not cause lung or throat cancer.
Hopefully they don't get termites.
What wood that do to the ability to recycle the tower?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2020, @12:46AM
The traditional use cases were wind powered gristmills and irrigation pumps. And by 'traditional' I mean in common use over a thousand years ago, and possibly dating to the 17th century BC. That we know about.