🪵 Wind Turbines Made From Wood

The key to making wind energy truly carbon negative

Hey there 👋

I hope ‘tings landing in your inbox again put a smile on your face 😁

I don’t think I have to explain just how much better wind power is compared to natural gas or coal-fired power plants. But, I like numbers, so how much worse are natural gas and coal? Natural gas plants produce as much as 87x the CO2e emissions per kWh of energy generated and coal emits as much as 135x more. While it’s clear that wind turbines generate just a fraction of the emissions over their lifetime compared to their fossil counterparts, they do generate emissions during their manufacturing and installation. Wind turbines rely on steel and cement, which are among the dirtiest industries on the planet, contributing 15.5% of our annual CO2 emissions, and on composite materials for their blades, which are difficult to recycle.

To make wind turbines entirely carbon neutral, or even negative, we may have to look back to the 12th century and take inspiration from the wooden windmills of old. Wood unlike steel captures CO2 over the course of its life and if treated correctly won’t release the carbon back into the atmosphere for a long time.

Modvion, a Swedish startup, has just constructed the world’s tallest wooden wind tower, standing at an impressive 150m tall with the blades attached. They claim that a single tower made of wood removes and stores up to 950 tonnes of CO2 compared to the 1,250 tonnes that a steel tower emits. Their towers are not only good for the environment but they also relieve a massive headache of the wind industry, the challenge of transporting pre-assembled sections of steel towers, by taking the proven IKEA approach of flat-packing the wooden segments to be assembled later. And no, you don’t have to sacrifice strength by opting for wood. Thanks to Modvion’s innovative approach of layering 3mm-thick sheets of spruce in a similar fashion to layering carbon fibre, it becomes stronger than steel at the same weight.

That leaves us with the turbine blades, typically made out of composite materials that require complex processes to be recycled, which is why they often end up in landfills or are incinerated at the end of their life. By 2030 the blade waste across the EU will total about 240 times the weight of all wild elephants on earth today. Although innovations in chemical recycling of composite materials will allow more and more of the materials to be recovered, wood has the potential to make blades entirely circular. Voodin Blade Technology from Germany use a similar laminated veneer lumber, made of nordic spruce, like Modvion to create 100% biodegradable blades that can be re-used for construction at the end of their useful life. On top of the carbon that the wood stores, Voodin’s manufacturing process also reduces emissions by 78% compared to composite blades.

It may still take some time before we see fully wooden wind turbines (excl. the technical bits that capture the wind energy) as Voodin are still awaiting regulatory approval, but the future for entirely carbon negative wind power looks bright!

This shouldn’t stop us from continuing to to build conventional steel and composite turbines in the meantime, they are after all far better than coal or oil power plants, but we should still push for better.

Thanks for reading! If you made it this far and enjoyed it, consider sharing it with a friend who might also enjoy it (and if this was shared with you, subscribe to ‘tings for more).

Until next time, much love,

Pascal Vilhelmsson 🖤