Working towards their aim to reduce the significant carbon footprint of manufacturing a wind turbine from steel, a 100-meter prototype eco-friendly wood wind turbine is being built in Sweden. The country is known as the "Land of Wooden Innovation," with wood playing a major role in the construction of various building elements.
Laminated Veneer Lumber
The loads imposed by wind and gravity, not to mention the fact that wood can be broken down by a human wielding a machete, are just some of the challenges in wood construction.
An innovative material such as laminated veneer lumber (LVL) is the solution. LVL is a wood construction product made by bonding sheets of peeled spruce under high heat and pressure to create a flexible timber material stronger than steel but lighter and less carbon-intensive than steel. Each sheet is three millimeters thick.
LVL was used to design and create a 30-meter prototype wind turbine tower in 2020 by Stora Enso, one of the world's oldest timber companies. Large curved LVL slabs are manufactured and shipped to the construction site, where they are glued together to form the tall cylinder on which the spinning blades will be rigged up.
Using eco-friendly wood will reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the construction of a tower by 90%. At the same time, this design strategy will store the CO2 that has been absorbed by trees during their growth. The wood used to make LVL comes from mature trees that have already absorbed the maximum amount of CO2.
The eco-friendly wood used in specialty structures like wind turbine towers can be recycled into new wood-based products, providing additional long-term climate benefits by trapping carbon within their fibers.
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By Modivon
Modivon is a Swedish tower-building company that sees three major advantages to using LVL over steel for turbine construction.
Wood has a higher specific strength, which allows for lighter construction, according to Modivon. Steel towers require additional reinforcement to carry their weight, whereas wooden towers do not. Modivon also pointed out that modular steel towers require a large number of bolts that must be inspected on a regular basis, whereas the modular wooden towers are held together by glue.
The mission of Modivon is to build wind turbine towers using LVL as the main building material as this strategy will accelerate the transition to renewable energy and materials. The company sees wood as nature's own carbon fiber.
In Disguise
Due to an applied waterproof paint layer, the towers would still resemble a steel turbine rather than a giant tree trunk.
Currently, capturing carbon, which occurs when trees are converted to LVL, is more important than reducing emissions, because any reduction in emissions today will not be felt in the global carbon cycle for much longer than any current predictions on warming or temperature changes. Humanity can only change Earth's climate by actively removing existing emissions from the cycle. Still, while wind turbines are being built to cut emissions from energy use, emissions from manufacturing might as well be cut, Good News Network reports.
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