Wind Turbines Made of Wood
A reader sent me this article on wind turbines made of wood.
I’m aware that the footprint of wind turbines is a significant factor in determining their value to the promise of eco-friendly energy generation. In fact, as shown in this article from Inside Climate News, wind has the lowest eco-footprint of any mode of generating electricity. Personally, I doubt that this approach using wood represents an important improvement.
Having said that, one of the clean energy business plans I happen to like contemplates a wind turbine design that greatly reduces the materials required for a given nameplate rating. Materials usage is a huge factor in the cost of the devices as well; at least two-thirds of onshore wind is contained in the cost of the materials themselves. Therefore it makes sense to rethink the massive three-blade approach in which a turbine can weigh as much as 300+ tons. The company’s breakthrough enables them to cut material usage in half, reducing the turbine cost by 35-40%, with no sacrifice of reliability or performance and no increase in operating costs.
Considering that wind turbines, for the same name-plate rating, use about 10 times as much steel and 30 times as much concrete as coal or nuclear plants, surely it would be desirable to reduce material usage if that can be done without adversely impacting performance, reliability, or durability. Whether using wooden blades is reasonable can eventually be determined from experience. Wood worked fine for the much smaller wind generators used on farms in earlier times, but whether it can be scaled upward to such a large extent has yet to be determined.
Here is the history of the Jacobs Brothers wind generator; it used wood blades and had an excellent reputation:
http://www.windcharger.org/Wind_Charger/Jacobs_Wind_Electric_Co..html
What about durability? Are they as durable? Could it also possible to recycle scrap metal like cars to limit there ecological footprint? If you make durable product besides general maintenance they should last forever or a very long time?