It is impossible anything popped itself into existence.

I'm fairly certain trees grow tall because they were self conscious about how they were shorter than the tall wind mills.

@@BloodSprite-tan all the pieces fit!

@@senatorjosephmccarthy2720 no I faver the magic sky daddy came and made trees in his image ......

@@mistaowickkuh6249 You just described roughly half of all pre-Christian creation myths.

Yes, they can. Bamboo is often used for structural purposes in areas where it grows. Hemp can be turned into a sort of fake wood that is quite tough.

I looked into growing bamboo for a small-scale construction/crafting operation (both because I like the aesthetics and properties of bamboo and because I could grow my own from scratch on a reasonable time scale) and it became readily apparent why we don't use it a lot more. The manufacturing process to turn bamboo from plant into usable raw material is manageable (albeit requiring more infrastructure and energy than typical wood milling and curing, even when drying wood with a kiln which can be traded for patience). And there are varieties of bamboo that grow well enough in environments that endure harsh winters. But any varieties that make suitable structural material will _only_ grow in tropical environments. Considering that, it becomes obvious why trees are the natural-fiber structural material of choice for any operation at globally-relevant scale. Taking 10 times longer to grow is a worthy tradeoff when you can grow and harvest 10,000 times as many trees, and do it virtually anywhere in the vicinity of human populations.

Heeheeheehee

@The Southern Cross Yep. Use nuclear to heat desert sand into bricks for houses that glow in the dark! A Win-Win situation! :D

they are WAY bigger than you think arent they?

@Anthony R Where is the wind farm being built?

Is that wind from the politicians?

@@acmefixer1 it's being built on South Vandenberg Space Force Base.

Are you in Lompoc Strauss Wind Farm

I don't know how you could get the siding to reliably interlock in an easy to install way, but there definitely are plenty of uses if anyone bothered to repurpose them.

I have seen a gazebo type structure roofed with GRP tiles cut from old Reliant Robin car bodies... It was very successful!

I'd love to have some cut up and buried, forming a wall. But after seeing the bicycle shade, holy crap are they big.

In Denmark they have actually recently been used to make bicycle shelters. But in truth they could be used for many other similar uses: Covered walkways, bus stop, children's playground etc.

Quite. I think it will end up chopped up and used in some sort of fibre board. In contrast, aluminium and steel are very easily separated and can be used to make brand new, pristine material with a fraction of the original energy input.

You're making a mountain out of a molehill. The towers are going to stay in service for 3 decades or more, most likely will have the turbines replaced with newer ones over their long lives. And they can be taken down, and a lengthening base section added to raise the turbine height. But a section of the wooden tower might be used for a dwelling or a silo. If they're in sections that are bolted together as shown in the diagrams, they can be broken down and moved easily to a new location for reuse.

@@acmefixer1 Yeah, "reusable" or "repurposable" might be more accurate that "recyclable" for there - they can be used for some other structure, not turned into something completely different like paper products.

Nothing a planer couldn't handle. There are many biodegradable glues on the market. Even after eventual decommisioning,the structure can be taken down and any rot would be localised due to the capilliary nature of the material. It is simplicity itself to cut up what is left and re-use it. It is even possible to repair such a structure. The biggest problem by a long long way is the total ignorance of the general public and the vast majority of engineers regarding timber and its properties. Hats off to the Scandinavians for not being sucked into modern western ignorance perpetuated by unscrupulous steel magnates and clueless officials.

Natural materials like linseed oil can be used.

As my neighbour always says: Great minds think alike ........... OR Fools seldom differ !!

Just dumb luck on my part I'm afraid :-)

Just have a think about the MASSIVE energy-intensive, carbon-hemorrhaging concrete and rebar footing that is required by every wind turbine that is temporarily erected. They will outlast the short-lived turbines by thousands of years, becoming grave-markers for a civilization that destroyed itself thru crooked scams and backroom deals foisted as "settled science".

@@paulslevinsky580 Its a lot less concrete than a dam, nuclear power station need. Even a coal or gas powered plant needs concrete. It is better but not perfect. You can also use micro-piles (dywidags) that minimize or eliminate the use of concrete in the towers. We are already seeing significant consequences from green house gases with 99% of climate change scientists agreeing with peer reviewed research. The other 1% are paid from the oil and gas industries to cast doubt. You can't embrace science where is benefits you and then reject it when it is inconvenient. Model after model and data backing up those models suggest it is pretty much settled.

I became a global warming heretic when the emails were released in Climate Gate. Everything since then has been a stinking pile of manure...manipulated data, erased cache's of information, wildly inaccurate predictions, absence wealth-transfer. It's all sleaze. Why do financially successful climate alarmists always buy beachfront properties? That should tell you something. The Pacific is facing eminent food-chain collapse because of toxic plastics and overfishing. Most of Earth's 8 billion inhabitants will be gravely affected by that event. Ignoring that threat and focusing on carbon commerce is pathological behavior.

Airships aren't viable though that's why we aren't already using them

Lucky you :-)

Looking at the thickness of the structure it could be ripped up into planks for use in construction, boatboulding and even furniture with the dust produced going into partcle board.

@@thamesmud And that is a lot like what you can do with fiberglass construction like the blades. I am shore that you could use the materials for a lot of things, but not for boats and really not for furniture. strength of playwood it is also a weakness when cut. Then the material can break along a laminated sheet a lot easier then whole wood will do.

I notice this sort of dishonesty often. New construction of "wooden" houses across Europe, touted as renewable and recyclable, when in fact the main structure is between 20 and 40 % epoxy resin, which is absolutely unrecyclable, and any wood particles trapped in it are as well.

Destructive distillation (pyrolysis) reduces wood to its elements, hydrogen, methane, methanol etc with around 50% of the carbon left as elemental carbon that is a good soil additive that improves many soils. Thus, hydrogen for the hydrogen economy and the other gases for power production and other uses to keep oil and other fossil fuels in the ground. Not sure about the binders.

@@robertcircleone The binder is the problem. Pyrolysis is interesting but it creates a lot of nasty chemicals. Not really a clean process.

Entirely down to the utterly absurd war on drugs nonsense like many other ills in our society, its the prohibition that is causing the problem not the drugs

Hemp fiber composites are being actively researched and show a lot of promise, but wind turbine blades have some ridiculous weight and strength requirements. It’s highly unlikely that they can be made mainly from hemp. Maybe some of the components could benefit, but I doubt we’ll ever see a whole blade made of hemp fiber.

@@luke_fabis In theory based on the specific stiffness, hemp and glass should have similar flutter performances (vibration due to vortex shedding) for the blades. The tensile strength is close to 690MPa which is substantially higher than most mild steels. It is weaker than glass (especially E-glass) but I don't think the strength is the major issue. It is more related to the stiffness and mass. Any added strength is at the base of the blade which contributes much less to the moment of inertia for the rotation of the blades and the aerodynamic performance. I would really like to see a study on this. My gut tells me it is promising but you don't know until you dive into the design.

@@quadq6598 you are probably right. It is incredible such a versatile and sustainable material is sacrificed for political reasons.

@@yodaiam1000 That’s the thing, though. The bulk of these blades are carbon fiber composite, not fiberglass.

Brilliant idea 😊

@@royharkins7066 true especially since they can add ads and stuff

Swedes are naturally mechanical minded; both boys and girls love to fiddle with everything!

They probably do, but it's still more important to have them be buildable with no knowledge/access to internet

i don't really feel like that's a big deal. if you have access to an ikea you should likely be able to find a library or other place which provides internet. or at the very least a mobile phone that can connect to celluar, they could have qr codes on the furniture boxes which link to videos for assembly. or at least detailed instructions regardless of how well the instruct pictures are if you aren't familiar with ikea furniture it's tricky to assemble.

Well they did up to a point. They had issues when they went to the far east with delamination until they understood the bonding in high humidity environments. But to be fair these WTs have better protection from the environment than aircraft do!

@@tcroft2165 yes they were buil with cascamite which is not waterproof. Resorcinol came into use later and has proved very durable in boatboulding. Epoxy is the best but not very green.

In Calgary on the Sarcee Trail, there were some.

Those were the ones I thinking about - at the 17th Ave overpass if I recall.

@Jorn Paul Winkler Generally, timber is too valuable to cut down and burn -- it is used for lumber. If the forest that has been logged has stumps and other debris then it makes sense to chip the remaining wood and use it rather than have it burned when lightning strikes.

You want to give China more power over the market? Kidding. :) It would be a great solution as well.

I havent seen this sort of sheet product produced from bamboo, is it a thing now? Good news if it is. I've only seed the thousands-of-narrow-slices-lamination in tables, chopping boards etc

@@artboymoy Other southeast Asian countries are sources of bamboo. So, China wouldn't have a monopoly.

@@artsnow8872 Right; bamboos grow (some strains) 6" /day and can be very promising. If you can modify them genetically (it is a kind of grass like rice, wheat etc).

Definitely something to look into, I myself know little about it except that it is durable and is used in flooring...

How many trees do you think it takes to make just one of these towers? This sounds like the dumbest idea ever. Wind power itself is dumb IMO. Can we make it work, sure, but at what cost? The world's energy requirements are set to triple in the next century as people stop buying gas cars and go EVs. If the people of the world wants to make us use solar and wind primarily, you're lookin' at having to build literally millions of these things... Tis a joke. Nuclear is hte only power source capable of supplanting fossil fuels.

Thank you :-)

They could use hemp base products...

Glue can be made from potatoes. So it's actually carbon negative

@@seasong7655 Potatoes carbon neutral? Not unless you source your seed potatoes ethically and grow them in your own permaculture garden. You should take a deeper look at the commercial potato industry. But I agree, it has the potential to be a better solution.

He provided the lifetime emissions for the tower, is there a valid reason to assume the figure was missing critical components of the wood lamination process?

@@bakedbeings If the quantity of resins and energy required was included in that statement, why not draw attention to it if it is somehow been offset in a positive way? Call me cynical but I have been around long enough to not overlook detail when it is missing. Sadly the desire get on a bandwagon more often than not overshadows reality. Just my opinion, I look forward to the component breakdown. 🙂

There are several companies that tried this. Sheerwind and Windrail are two examples. You're correct that this should be exploited, and smaller wind turbines could meet this especially if there is adequate storage.

@@lawrencetaylor4101 Thanks for the reply. Just being on the ground makes maintenance cheaper also.

@@lawrencetaylor4101 There are turbines being fitted to the poles of street lights to make use of wind from passing traffic.

iv also heard that the vertical wind turbines are gunna be used along motorways to make use of the wind that comes off the traffic

@@kimwarburton8490 as seen here on just have a think!

Cheers Robert :-)

i remmeber the same. i DO see both on roofs around here, but i guess it depends if the company educates n offers the customer the advantage of direct solar heated water

I work as a rooftop solar installer in the UK - I do both PV and thermal collectors. Your thinking is sound - especially the benefit to PV generation of cooling the panels, which a lot of people miss. There have been a number of hybrid PV+heat panel products developed, but as far as I'm aware, none have yet been commercially successful. Part of the issue is complexity, reliability and maintainability. Mixing water and electricity in a single unit can be done safely, but it brings requirements that add cost and weight. Installing a set of PV panels is pretty quick when you know how, but if they were any heavier it would be much more difficult. Most customers simply want some panels that can be fitted and forgotten for the next 25 years, and be assured of payback of the installation cost. We can confidently offer that for PV, but for hybrid panels, which would be more difficult to fit and might require maintenance, I don't think we could be so sure (yet). Solar thermal is less popular here and in our climate you need the more expensive evacuated tube type collectors for an really effective installation, but where we do them, they are often on a more accessible piece of roof for ease of install and maintenance. They go well on an A-frame on a bit of flat roof - the wind blows between the tubes so they are quite stable, while a PV panel would act like a sail - therefore we can utilise roof space that can't be used otherwise. Customers that want both types are generally quite wealthy and have large roofs, so we simply fit as many panels as their grid collection allows, and then we fit the thermal collector somewhere else - we don't run out of roof space - so the benefit of combining the types of collector, or of seeking greater efficiency, isn't really there. So I think the answer is that there isn't really a strong demand for a hybrid panel because most of the market for solar is satisfied by the existing offerings. However, this might change if the market grows sufficiently that the fraction of customers that would benefit from hybrid panels becomes big enough that they can be profitably mass-produced.

@@bimblinghill Thank you very very much for your excellent information!

They already exist this kind of Hybrid Solar PV-thermal module. But it´s not worth the investment. And the thermal efficiency is poor and the temperature is not very high like a standard solar panel.

There already exist hybrid panels, it is just not really interesting due to reduced thermal efficiency, higher cost and lower flexibility (if you solar panel is damaged, you replace just that. If a hybrid panel is damaged, it is more expensive to replace and because it isn't easily disconnected, a lot more bothersome). And at this moment it is actually cheaper to get pv panels and heat your water with the electricity produced then using solar boiler panels. However solar boiler panels are more effective, you need possibly almost double the space with pv. So essentially if you don't have much roof space: use solar boilers. If you do have the roofspace, use PV since it is cheaper and more versatile.

It's brilliant. I've purchased some larger used turbine blades to advertise myself on dating sites.

The wind turbines are being designed for long lifetimes, as long as the blades are repaired and maintained.

If they can manage to genetically change all our grains and fruits as they now do maybe they could grow giant bamboo

Doesn't grow well in Sweden

@@seamuscharles9028 giant bamboo grows in the tropics

@@julianshepherd2038 I was kinda thinking 100 + meters😁

Well, fossil fuels are not recyclable if you burn them, unless you capture the CO2 and make something out of it. That would be thermodynamically pointless, though, since you can make stuff directly out of hydrocarbons for a lot less money.

@@incognitotorpedo42 That's where I think the fossil fuel Industries going to try to say that they are environmentally friendly. By saying they are capture, when they are a producer. But it's a fear, so only something to watch for.

I love the idea of airships, especially solar powered ones. The ideal might be to "fill" them with vacuum. That is: pump the air out of them instead of using a lifting gas. They'd need to be braced with extremely strong and lightweight material to withstand atmospheric pressure across a large area, but the problem of keeping air out of a large bag should be simpler than the one of trying to keep helium or hydrogen in.

@@Kevin_Street I think most people [ myself included ] love airships, so every few decades or so there seems to be a resurgence of interest in their revival. Unfortunately they have some disadvantages which are next to impossible to overcome. Basically there are two types - rigid structures and non-rigid [ also known as a blimp, which is basically a keel supported by a pressurized ballon ]. Both types suffer from leakage of the lifting gas. The near-insurmountable problem with rigids is that wind sheer when encountered can rip the structure apart. One thing that a lighter than air [ LTA ] body does NOT do well is act like a high lift helicopter because when the load is released there is a need to deal with the excess lift. Rather than vent most of the lifting gas, the classic way this is dealt with is to take on ballast [ typically water ] as the load is released, which introduces another set of problem in practical terms. Finally I think I'm on safe ground when I say that a ' solar powered ' LTA will never be successful. But that is another story !

@@crustyoldfart Thanks for the reply! There are certainly a lot of interesting problems that need to be overcome in regard to airships.

Je pense que tu as raison Benjamin :-)

Trees have incredible complex genetics - many more chromosomes than humans, so this is not a trivial task. Also, from standard genetic selection tree improvement programs so far, there are always tradeoffs. You can select for trees that grow faster OR stronger, but not both (fast-growing wood does not have enough of the internal layers that give hardwoods their strength). It's also incredibly important to include genetic diversity in your tree improvement program (and if possible a mix of tree species in any plantation), as the long lifecycle of trees (compared to food crops) means that they are highly vulnerable to pest invasions (insects, fungi, etc.) if you try to grow cloned monocultures. Tldr; nice idea, but impractical at the moment.

@@davidbarry6900 what about bamboo? i know asian contries use it for scaffolding

@@kimwarburton8490 Bamboo is amazing stuff, but not useful in the same ways as traditional soft and hardwoods - and is difficult to turn into laminated structural wood products like the wood turbine towers mentioned in the video above. Bamboo definitely has scope to be used in creative ways in the construction industry. It's not that easy to ship the raw bamboo around the world though, so it's better to find innovative ways to use bamboo in the regions where it actually grows well.

I was thinking the same thing. It's a bit trickier to make veneer from bamboo but doable. It's generally stronger than wood and more fire resistant. If the wooden towers take off I'm sure they'll explore bamooo as an option.

The blades need to be lightweight and strong but also really, really stiff. Wood isn't good enough. They can barely get away with a fiberglass construction while making the blades over a hundred meters long. Carbon fiber would be way better mechanically but very expensive and has more CO2 emissions.

I don't see it replacing metal turbines only as alternative in a needed area if called for...

I expect blades will all be formed from synthetic resin, one that can be dissolved from old blades and reused in making new ones. For fiber content, graphene comes to mind, but hemp or other natural fibers may be strong enough, may use multiple types of fiber, research and test, repeat till it's perfect.

@@w0ttheh3ll sandwich construction increases stiffness enormously while decreasing weight, at least for boat construction purposes. From the image of the repurposed blade, the grp is solid for blades. Perhaps the strength to weight calculation changes at these scales? Side note: in composite work, balsa wood is a relatively cost effective core material, but not the lightest or strongest.

My understanding is that some blades are made from balsa wood with fiber glass finish. I also understand that the price of balsa has increased because of its use in wind turbines.

Bless you Ron. Much appreciated :-)

I was thinking that too. Still, the massive weight and CO2 savings are important factors of the wood construction which steel cannot achieve.