Weird, and a little bit of the trashcan. My two guesses are: they thought it looked sloppy, and don't have photoshop foo; or the designer was asked to hide something sensitive but didn't hide the right thing, and also doesn't have photoshop foo.
Hmmm, my best guess is they're violating terms of use for the strap. Maybe the strap is a component of a system related to a competitor's product, and part of the licensing of that system stipulates no use for development of competing products.
Wood lasts longer in saltwater than on land. This is why all those old stories about wooden ships have them “swabbing the decks” with seawater; when it rains the freshwater can cause the boat to rot so they wash it again with salt.
AIUI there are essentially no new on-shore wind farms being built. So while there is existing capacity, the focus is now on deploying new farms off-shore.
Where the climate is cold, like "over here", and many other places, building in the sea is expensive, because of the moving ice. Hence offshore wind is not really even a thing here - but wind is still being massively built - inland - because of new technology like higher towers and larger unit sizes make it profitable.
Land locked countries or countries with not a lot of sea also can benefit from this newer wind technology that can be built inland profitably. They then don't need to build onshore but can build inland. Some US states for example have great inland wind resources.
And there timber towers could be very relevant - it doesn't need to be saltwater proof.
The context of this subthread was wind power in the UK…it was super confusing to me that you apparently are referring to some mysterious other place with ice.
I interpreted the context differently. Somebody was extrapolating from the UK to the whole world, assuming that everybody has switched to almost fully offshore wind.
This is for political reasons rather than economic or technical ones. Further reducing the cost of on-shore wind relative to off-shore could swing the political argument in favour of on-shore wind.
Well, no, I didn’t make the claim that it was the cheapest. It is competitively priced, however, which is important, and both technically and politically achievable. Anyway the other person claimed that if onshore became even cheaper that onshore would gain favor over offshore. Yet, it’s already apparently significantly cheaper. So why isn’t it more favorable already?
There are motivations beyond purely cost…it’s a lot easier to have larger-scale offshore wind than onshore (are there 15MW+ turbines in the onshore pipeline?) with less nuisance and better wind resource. It’s not really feasible to transport the components for such massive wind turbines onshore. Multi-gigawatt scale onshore wind farms don’t exist (the largest I noticed after a quick search is only 350MW). Offshore can be so much bigger…Dogger Bank, when it’s fully realized, will be almost 14 times larger than the current largest onshore wind farm in the UK.
The one thing that I don't see mentioned on Modvion's page is the glue/resin that's used to laminate the timber. Resins are usually made from hydrocarbon feedstock, as far as I can tell, and that must take a bunch of energy - although presumably not as much as smelting steel? I'm guessing that is built into the calculation of 'The corresponding tower in wood emits 90% less emissions [than steel]'.
I've wondered before if the reason the resin is never mentioned in these sort of laminated/engineered timber projects is that 'we built this structure entirely from wood!' sounds a lot better than 'we built this structure mostly using wood, but also using hydrocarbons'.
Nothing, if they're made from organic sources, if they're made from fossil fuels they're part of the problem. The carbon in organic hydrocarbons comes almost entirely from the atmosphere, rather than being pulled up from underground.
I think credit_guy's right, if the carbon isn't going into the air it's not causing the Greenhouse Effect, eh?
Petroleum is way too useful to stop using, even if we completely phase it out as an energy source. E.g. plastics, lots of pharmaceuticals, etc., there are too many useful products made from petrol.
Probably not cost effective once you remove the massive subsidies and scale of fossil burning uses.
There's alternatives and the sooner we start making them at scale the sooner they'll be cheaper and better than the fossil equivalent, just like renewables and EVs and heat pumps etc.
Note that fossil extraction also has a climate impact, methane leaks etc. even when not burned, though the bribes going to politicians are probably the bigger threat.
I agree with all of that, but it's still the case that carbon in glue isn't in the sky, eh? I don't think we should rule out a role for fossil hydrocarbons as part of the transition to a totally renewable/regenerative (aka "circular") economy.
Not a huge deal for direct emissions, but if they cut costs even more, that's pretty great.
As I understand it, as a no expert, the US is way behind when it comes to laminated timber. We need to update our building codes before it can be a major building material, and the regulatory bodies and the builders are all super slow to adopt new tech.
That's why thorough testing needs to be done once and the results shared.
Research and testing doesn't fit the startup model. It's instead close to open source or academic research. And that involves then institutions and cooperation...
i was interested in how the tower looks, seemingly its white from the outside but looks more or less untreated from the inside. this is the company making them, with images:
I assume that windmills were called that because they were exclusively used for milling grain? (With the 'drive shaft' directly connected to a circular grindstone)
Medieval windmills were used for a variety of purposes, only some of them were milling grain. Many of them were related to grinding (ie grinding pigments and such), but there were also wind-powered sawmills and wind-powered water pumps for irrigation and water management. Many wind mills also had "power take off" equipment so they could for example use wind power to hoist heavy stuff to the first or second floors of the structure.
How would a steel or concrete wind turbine fare if it was in the middle of a forest fire? I don't know but I would imagine that they would be fairly damaged or weakened as a result.
For what it is worth though, they are building low/mid-rise buildings out of wood now and supposedly they can be better at handling fires than steel (since steel will fail catastrophically at a certain temp but wood chars as it burns, insulating the unburnt parts which retain structural strength for longer)
If a wind turbine is in the middle of a forest fire, something seriously wrong happened with site planning. A brush fire could happen though. Not sure how hot those get, especially if you regularly clear around the base of the turbines.
Wind turbine towers are large enough these days that they can absolutely be built in a forest, and this is often happening. It's also crucial, because you simply need that space if you want to build wind energy everywhere - which obviously includes forest-rich areas.
Wouldn't a major difference be that a burning building spreads the fire, while a melting building does not? One thing I noticed while fiddling around in the fireplace is that if you have two logs neither of which burns very well - everytime you try to light one it goes out soon after - if you put them close together, they can support and warm each other enough to sustain an intense burn.
From what I’ve read, laminated timber is quite resistant to fire. In a fire, a layer of charcoal is generated on the outside which insulates the structural core, and it’s therefore more likely than reinforced concrete to maintain structural integrity.
Original: https://modvion.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2022/03/The-m...