Sweden’s giant wooden wind turbine promises greener future | BBC News 

100% it would. Obviously most components will have to stay steel.or some kind of metal.

Well the wood would have a substantial layer of some kind of protective laceur on it so im not sure if it would notice much of the elements at all... - obviously water should not be allowed to seep into the wood. - in theory there is no reason why a wood structure cant last 100s of years... not sure about the wood glue though and how well that will hold up over the decades.

@@historyZZ Depends on the location. A steel turbine near the sea will degrade very quickly due to the salty sea air. Meanwhile wood does not have that same issue. In addition there are multiple treatments that can be done to wood to improve it's durability and resistance against the weather.

@@giglioflex Wood that is exposed to moisture will rot. Therefore the wood would indeed have that very same issue.

You think it won't be coated with waterproof layers?@@user-ds8rj2vc4v

Yes! The models offered is named “Blås” and ”Snurra”.

Judging by the drone shots in this video, i'd say between 0.01 or 0.02 hectare per 1 turbine.

They think dead wood captures carbon if you stick it up in the air. 🤣🤣.

Trees are renewable resource so long as you replant them, unlike the coal that's currently being used to reduce iron ore into metal. To answer the comment about dead wood capturing carbon- it's not capturing it's storing, wood stops capturing when cut but continues to store and then newly planted trees on the same land can go on to capture carbon.

👀

No rust to worry about.

You better call them up and let them know, in case they didn’t think about any of that at all right? Right?? Send in your resume while you’re at it.

@Freshbott2 Ha! I can only claim seeing a few examples of glue lam beam failures due to delamination and a vague awareness that timber is happiest in tension. They obviously CAN use this material, but is it a good idea, including the reality of trying to join sections reliably with adhesive on site in often wet conditions? Chalmers University study of 2018 is interesting in looking at multiple aspects of alternative tower construction.

@@philhealey4443 really you can make the same claims for any timber structure at all. Yes, these are a larger scale than typical, but the structures are simple, and the mitigations scale with the projects. As for very tall timber structures, it’s nothing new at all. Most of them you’d be right in pointing out guy wires keep them under tension, but that’s nothing they couldn’t do on turbine masts if they needed to. The same conversations were had about timber towers which have started showing up all over the place and have had to exceed regulatory requirements for typical steel and/or brick structures to get approval. Further they’d be doing their homework on glue and lamination patterns and sealing, I’d doubt it’s just standard PVC. These aren’t like shoddy ticky tacky houses - the developer can’t just offload the responsibility and disappear the way they can with unsuspecting suburban families and the buyer needs to make their money off it. They’ll be doing their due diligence.

the f°°°ing swedish pussies were too scared of warpage - the turbine still works if the tower is leaning, but if the rotor blades twist in different directions, that's a problem. :(

Could those be made of wood in the future as well?

@@twistedyogertComposite wood maybe

Thanks, captain obvious, we did hear that at 1:13, because we too watched the entire clip: "These blades are like almost all wind turbines made out of fibre glass. The generator that I'm standing on is primarily made of steel, but the company who's built the wooden tower say that by making the tower out of wood it's storing carbon dioxide."

@@all_letters_forwarded "RM etc" may have an attention deficit problem. Alternatively, "RM etc" did not watch more than 30 seconds of the video before getting busy with its' digits and then it went looking for another video on which to stick an equally negative, supercilious and/or stupid remark. Once they are no longer strong enough as turbine blades or have begun to feather at the ends, the blades are still super strong and could be used as instant bridges. Bolt them together with the fat end at one side the thin bit the other complimented by the next blade placed the other way round. Bolt as many together as you like to carry paths or roads across spans of 100 ft or more, the longer the blades, the greater the span. Putting an appropriate surface over the top of the blades is very easy. The blades will take the strain for at least a couple of hundred years. A span of 100 ft is more than enough to span a 3 lane motorway. I've got LOTS of good ideas. The wooden tower sounds a nice idea but we know that steel ones can be melted down and turned into washing machines and builder's wheelbarrows. I'm a bit worried about the percentage of the wooden tower which is deadly poisonous glue and about the disposal at the end of the tower's life. Solving one environmental disaster with another is not particularly sensible. I don't know about you but I would like a bit more imformation, not just from Otto who had a product to sell. Remember the environmental disaster "Tetrapacks" are also a development from a Swedish bright spark. Seven layers of plastic and paper which is only suitable for burning giving off God knows what into the atmosphere (the Swedes are keen on waste incinerators), or costs a fortune to separate is also not particularly sensible. As I am in deepest Slovakia for the Winter .... longer winter days (24 minutes longer daylight today than at my home in England), electricity 10 pence per kWh and skiing 20 minutes up the road, I shall finish with Všetko najlepšie (All that is best)

@user-rl7mt4gh3o true, Sweden does have a deforestation problem, hopefully they can start investing in sustainable forestry

Trees are a renewable source of materials, unlike mines or oil wells.

it is recycled...

This report was solely on the materials used for the tower not the actual turbine blades. So I don’t understand why that would be reverent. But, I do know that there are techniques to recycle the blades quite easily. However, even if you don’t recycle the blades the waste is far, far less than the waste from non-renewable types.

Most are buried or simply discarded. They are an increasing landfill problem.

☺️

@@papasquat355No! Everything is planed in advance. They just don’t build stuff and the figure out what happens. Not in Sweden anyway! Where “recycling” is a words constantly heard in every brain. Regulations and regulations have to be followed before licenses are given. The maintenance process is very important when it comes to wind power. Since a wind power tower in total only lasts a few decades before everything (including the concrete foundation) has to be replaced. And the costs and logistics for this are quite well planned. Asking when a wind power plan is finished is really like asking when New York will be finished. A larger power farm will start rebuilding and replacing everything as soon as it’s “completed”. And if there’s a problem with recycling and waste, it is solved. At the worst unrecyclable plastics will be turned into energy by burning it. Another means of cheap energy production in Sweden has actually been importing (well… getting payed for taking care of) landfill waste from other nations to turn it into energy at plants well designed for this purpose. Although burning plastics and other stuff obviously results in carbon emissions.

Not to mention wood only stores carbon until it doesnt

Energy return is just one piece of the puzzle. If going for net zero emissions need to be brought down in all the ways we can.

@SweBeach2023 True. We need good scientific numbers on all levels of the energy infrastructure we are thankfully increasingly installing, replicating, escalating and connecting.

Modern wind turbines will last 3 decades.

Well… I doubt that. I have a wooden summer house close to the location of Sweden’s (Europe’s) largest wind power farm. And have no woodpecker issues. One or two has been hacking on the electrical line posts. And after 50 years there are some marks. Perhaps,they prefer hacking on actual trees where bugs and worms they eat thrives better. And a wind power turbine tower isn’t plan to last 50 years before being replaced. But if the power plants can contribute to the endangered woodpecker population raising, that’s great. And no… wind turbines don’t kill woodpeckers or other birds much. There has however to my knowledge been a problem with (migrating) bats. Some whom are endangered species. But I think it was a solvable one.

Why would a woodpecker love to pick on it?

@@SweBeach2023 You woodn't understand.

Fiberglass is not eco friendly so isnt half the other materials used including the lumber is not eco friendly 😂😂😂😂 just because your using a renewable energy source does not mean its efficient or even green for the fact that it takes over 50 years to even replace the lumber that was taken to rebuild shows more work goes in to producing the lumber than the actual building. So your saying all the removal of wood to produce minimal energy is eco friendly? You have been deceived!

@JasonPutschker-xw9uf did I say fibreglass? I can't engage with someone who can't put a sentence together. Didn't you know it only takes 5 days to grow a full tree? Moron. Of course, it takes a while grow and imagine the life it supports in the process. The end. Go back to school

It depends on what the energy source is used for the production of both the resources (the wood, glue, etc.) and the finished product. Sweden’s electricity production has since long been quite carbon free. With major hydropower infrastructure in the industry rich northern areas (where also the forest grows) and nuclear power to complement it. The large investments being made into wind power is to turn all of Sweden’s industries carbon neutral or completely carbon free. Even the carbon used in stainless steel is being replaced. I would believe this plywood is rather carbon neutral if you calculate on the full use of the plywood: First as plywood. Then, when discarded (decades or longer) later, likely made into some other material. And finally the wood fibers someday will end their “life” likely ends its life by fire (possibly for energy production). Where some (but not all) of the carbon the trees “breathed” from the air is “exhaled”. For now I would believe the major issue is the harvesting and the transportation of the trees that is being done with mainly fossil fuel consuming machines. Although some of the fossil fuels is slowly being replaced with fuels produced from wood. And even diesel harvest machinery and trucks are replaced with gear that runs on electricity (that wind turbines will produce).

It can if it uses wood, it already being a carbon sink. But yes, long term even the wood will create a surplus of carbon dioxide. But this may be a 100 years down the road.

This guy gets it!

A little hard to store carbon without photosynthesis. This is a Benny Hill skit and making plywood out of it will release 100% of the already stored carbon in the wood.

No its not wef 🤡

Landfill? What on earth do you mean? In Sweden we burn our waste to create heating.

@@starvictory7079 you burn fibreglass wind turbine blades?

There's plenty of work in progress to handle recycling of the fibreglass blades. Seems like a totally solvable problem to me. It just requires time and regulations. Upgrading the grid is more or less a necessity to transition to a zero carbon energy infrastructure. What material the wind turbines is made of has no impact on that. It's kinda irrelevant if it doesn't work at sea. If all the ones on land start using wood, that's already a nice improvement, and saves whatever steel we can make to build more off-shore wind turbines. It's an interesting question though. I'd think it's possible to make it work at sea. Wood has been used on ships for thousands of years after all. The base would probably be steel. The tower would not be directly exposed to sea water. Surface coating would keep it dry. Wood would probably handle salty humid air better than steel. I'd guess it'd be easier to develop a coating that stays for longer without maintenance since the material under the coating won't start rusting which can break up the coating.

@@auspiciouslywild This is actually hilarious, thanks for the laugh! You think a plywood tower will work at sea? How many large ships do you see which are made of plywood?Just make it out of steel. If you want to get all Greta Thunburg you can even smelt it with wind powered electrical energy and pay far more for it. It just makes no sense to do impractical things, which are not particularly good for the environment and claim they are green. The icing on the cake is that you will tell me it's great value for money. Meanwhile in China they are building coal fired power stations every week and laughing at all this. Anyway, I just wanted to point out a few things the BBC seem to have forgotten to report in their quest to indoctrinate the world about green energy. I have no problem with green energy BTW, (when it works and does what they say) but cannot stand the obvious lies, omissions and partial truths being sold to the population.

@@smile768 Ooookay grandpa. I can see that you're pretty deep in the conspiracy hole so I guess there's not much point trying to debate facts with you.. Who cares if China is using coal fired power stations? They're not really laughing at all, they're pretty damn desperate to be honest. They're critically dependent on Australia for coal, and that's become a serious geopolitical issue for them. Why do you think they're building so much renewable energy? They know that if USA cuts of their oil, gas and coal supply, which mostly comes to them by sea, they're going to be starving and freezing to death within a year. Yeah, for now they still need coal. Their energy demands are growing too fast. But like all other countries, they know that staying dependent on fossil fuels that are rapidly running out, is a recipe for total disaster. Being utterly dependent on a resource we KNOW is running out is completely brain-dead. Forget about the environment for a second, just from the perspective of avoiding life-threatening future energy crisis, the transition to renewable (and nuclear) energy is simple the only sane thing to do. Considering how your opinions make you look like a boomer, you'd think you'd remember the energy crisis of the 70s.

Because you don't need to use fossil fuels to grow wood. It absorbs carbon from the air and stores it. Steelmaking (currently) uses coal to reduce iron ore into metal.

@@SocialDownclimber thanks 🙏

@@Critical-Thinker895 Can you show me the paper that compares the carbon emitted in making the plywood to the carbon stored in the plywood? Real interested in that as long as it isn't based on feelings.

@@Critical-Thinker895Most industrial manufacturing in Sweden is already carbon emission free due to the fact that electricity is since long produced by hydropower plants in the industry rich areas. What creates carbon emissions in the production of wood is the machinery used for harvesting and transportation. Although trains are electrified and the fossil diesel is slowly being replaced with diesel also made from wood, besides the heavy machinery also being replaced with electric vehicles. Although I don’t have the data I believe that this plywood will be even better than carbon neutral. Calculating for its full life, being recycled into some other fibrous material after its life as “windwood”. And then decades (or centuries) later ending up as being burned to produce energy, when only some of the carbon that the wood “breathed” from the air will be “exhaled”. Most of the wind power plants in Sweden is being built to be able for the industries to go fully carbon free. Both the forestal and the steel industry. And the steel industry is to my knowledge way more energy consuming. The problem with steel is however that the process itself needs carbon. So it won’t be enough to just build large wind power plants to accomplish this. But inventions have been made that replaces the carbon in steel with hydrogen. So the steel industry can go fully carbon neutral.

@@user-fx3rq3cm2owork only for Scandic Countries not elsewhere, since they will end up allowing those guys to chop Brazilian Amazon forests for their feedstock, only Scandinavian Countries did have the political/governmental integrity to make sure that never happened.

Except that you can grow trees as much as you want. They are a renewable resource. No irony, just green.

@@SocialDownclimber man you don't get it don't you ?

Sustainable forestry practices means in basic words "get wood, with no damage to the environment". Sustainable forestry practices is just a complex way of saying replanting the trees you chop down. So long as you replant the trees you chop down you don't damage the environment. Mining for metal, then using fossil fuels to refine it is massively environmentally damaging. Chopping down trees you planted doesn't harm the environment.

@@zhaar8799 I showed that you produce wood sustainably. You don't seem to get that.

​@@SocialDownclimbergood luck in 50 years

If people would get themselves informed about the indirect gains for the communities (maintenance jobs) I also believe there would be less resistance. And if the gains from the energy production were to be taxed (or even shared) locally, people would also become more positive. Major wind farms on land can however not be much of a thing close to the major cities. Although in the industry rich areas in the northern regions, where some of the largest wind farms in Europe are also being built. Wind farms at sea is what will happen. I can understand the worries fishermen can have. And sometimes I wonder (not really) why the maps for planned farms at sea show the farms being way more non-existent, and distant from the shores, in major cities compared to smaller towns. The power plants could as well be more distant from the shorelines in the latter locations too: E.g. the Bay of Bothnia is shallower than the sea outside of Stockholm and Gothenburg. So it can only be because the people and politicians in Stockholm have more of a say than people and local politicians in minor counties and towns. And hence the former can mandate the entrepreneurs to invest in longer electricity transmission infrastructure, and longer supply and maintenance routes to the turbines. While the latter simply can’t.

Sweden is by far the biggest wind power country in Northern Europe.

@@andrease3394 To my understanding the wind power plant close to Piteå in the north is/will be the largest in Europe when completed (“best” winds in the nation can be a good thing I suppose 😄). Although it will end up having less wind turbines than planned since their output has increased since the project was initiated. Also building less, but way larger, turbines is more efficient. And soon relatively large areas outside of the archipelago in Norrbotten will be filled with wind turbines. But unfortunately there seems to not be any serious ambitions to invest in the electric grid that currently can’t transfer the needed power to Stockholm and other major cities. Making for way higher electricity prices in the south, while the prices in the north even have been negative! But the electricity produced by those power farms will anyway be needed for the industries close by. So Stockholm and the major cities will need to go against the will of their population who rater pay high prices than having windmills out at sea on the horizon. Since Sweden is fortunate to have much hydropower, the output can be somewhat balanced to produce electricity when the wind doesn’t blow anywhere (if that ever happens).

Most unreliable!

Not cheapest by far worldwide. Not cheapest anywhere without major subsidy which creates a false sense of value.

@@pgw1977False!

@@tannerweinheimer7839False!

​@@tannerweinheimer7839 check the data's, wind and solar are way cheaper than the other source of energy, even without subsidies

Wood wood to be precise

No one's saying it's 100% green. Though it's much cheaper and cleaner than extracting, processing and burning fossil fuels.

Right. They'll probably be using something like epoxy, phenol formaldehyde or even a polyurethane adhesive. All of which require petrochemicals

Dead cow feet, so what, their farts are adding to the greenhouse effect. Farts are bad mmmmkay! LOL (sarcasm)

the glue is a lesser issue than the waterproofing, that requires a much larger quantity of synthetic material. I would guess something polyurethane-based as is used for car paint, and a different polyurethane composition for the wood glue, since polyurethane wood glues are the most wateeproof common wood glues. though you still want to protect the wood from water intrusion very well anyways and possibly even install a drying system inside the hollow parts, because wood warps when exposed to moisture changes (and if it gets and stays properly wet, it gets heavy and soft, and eventually very soft as it rots). but if the moisture problem can be avoided, wood can probably replace the bulk of the fiberglass composit, and is more manageable as waste at the end of its lifespan even with glue and highly weather-proof coatings (because all that sh°° burns just fine, which fiberglass does not). edit: nevermind, I commented before watching... I can't believe they're using plywood for a tower structure when they're supposedly trying to be environmental, and the tower only needs strong load bearing in one direction - just like trees. they should use long beams, not imitate the structure of the metal tower just with incredibly thick plywood. that does use a ridiculous amount of glue. and look how compact the sections are (veneer cutting process can only produce a limited length along the grain depending on the width of the blade), those joints between them are going to be weak points requiring heavy reinforcements. a structure made mostly of tall beams could be built much lighter, not just with less glue but with less wood. and cheaper, because good quality plywood like that costs as much as relatively highly prized hardwoods, whereas for structural stability from beams, spruce would be a very suitable wood and is the cheapest. I bet the internal structure of the tower in a beam construction could be built for a tenth of the price, plus another tenth of the price for a skin. these people don't know sh°° about working with wood, they are imitating a metal design with wood.

​@@Ass_of_Amalek Could they use a wooden frame but use a metal "skin"? It wouldn't be free of metal but would use less of it. Perhaps they might not even need to use metal, they could use fiberglass or carbon fiber.

Nicely put. There's good reason to believe we want more co2 and shrink the deserts

I hope not until Nuclear is accepted!

There is nothing green about wp

Hahahahahahahahahahahahaa 😂😂😂😂 nothing at all eh? ​@@goranrask7458

Oil is not scarce. A certain family I'm not allowed to mention on here or their company name invented that myth to dominate the market. It remains to this day.

Extreme Climate Change: The 1933-1938 Period Was One of Very Severe Weather Events, Including Global Heat Waves

Wood holds carbon. Trees store carbon. Rotting trees release carbon. If we plant trees and use it for our structures. 1. We maintain more living trees for a constant supply. 2. We delay the carbon release, because for our uses we want the wood to last, not rot.

Sweden’s forestal agriculture is internationally regarded as being quite sustainable. And although not perfect, I believe the politics is two steps forward, one step back in the pursuit of even better sustainability. This is more of an experiment that also will evaluate all kinds of issues. Not only technological, but environmental and economic ones too. Perhaps a good idea might be to use different materials concurrently so not to “deplete” one source. Both for sustainability and for geopolitical (national defense/independence) strategies.

Howard Hughes made the Spruce Goose out of?