Spotted: Sharp cost rises meant that 2023 was a difficult year for offshore wind, with several planned offshore projects needing to be reevaluated or cancelled. But despite these challenges, innovation in the area continues apace. Floating turbines, for example, make things easier, especially in terms of reaching deeper waters and windier environments, but engineering platforms to be durable and efficient enough is tricky. This is where Gazelle Wind Power comes in.
The Irish company has designed and pioneered a modular, lightweight platform that can be deployed in far deeper waters than previously possible for offshore turbines. The three pivoting arms on the outside of the platform are anchored to the seabed, and these cables run over the tripodal arms to connect to a counterweight underneath the platform in the centre.
This innovative counterweight system enables dynamic mooring, meaning the platform can move up and down and side to side with the movement of the waves while minimising tilting. By reducing tilting, it keeps the pitch angle (the angle of the turbine blades) below five degrees, which cuts unnecessary wear and tear on the turbine.
Compared with current catenary mooring designs, whereby a platform is held in place by long lengths of rope anchored to the sea floor, Gazelle’s system achieves a 75 per cent reduction in required mooring length in water that is over 100 metres deep. What’s more, the platform reduces both the turbine’s carbon footprint and infrastructure requirements as it uses less steel and concrete than other conventional designs, making it much lighter, cheaper, and easier to assemble.
As we edge closer to net-zero deadlines, innovators are finding new ways to optimise green energy generation. Springwise has also spotted this company that is revolutionising wind turbine manufacturing with spiral welding as well as these alternative energy solar nanogrids that bring light to disaster-hit areas.
Spotted: To reach net zero by 2050, we need to drastically reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, and that means ramping up green energy generation. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), that involves adding 390 gigawatts of wind power generation capacity every year by 2030. But, rising upfront construction costs, particularly for offshore farms, could compromise that goal, with several offshore projects in the US needing to be cancelled or renegotiated due to issues around financing. Hoping to make wind farm construction more affordable is Colorado-based Keystone Tower Systems.
The company has devised a revolutionary manufacturing process that streamlines and cuts the cost of making turbine columns. In the company’s spiral welding process, which is a well-established technique used to create pipelines, large pieces of steel are fed into a machine, so they curve around into a spiral shape to form a turbine base. The process can be done quickly and continuously by one machine that completes the joining, rolling, fit-up, welding, and severing of a tower section.
With this method, it’s easy to vary the diameters and wall thicknesses, which means that wind towers can be built twice as tall as existing structures, enabling turbines with bigger blades that can also reach greater wind speeds further up in the sky. This means greater wind energy generation.
Keystone’s manufacturing facilities have a relatively small footprint, meaning they can be placed near proposed wind farms for on-site production. Developers therefore don’t need to worry about making long, expensive, and energy-intensive journeys to transport the massive pre-manufactured components required for larger-scale turbines. Instead, steel can be shipped flat, making for much easier transportation. This is particularly helpful for offshore farms, as a temporary manufacturing facility can be easily deployed on the coast, for the creation of tall, structurally optimised towers.
Wind is playing a key role in the green transition, and innovators are working to make it more efficient than ever. Springwise has also spotted small turbines for wind microgrids as well as this novel design that cuts the cost of wind power.
The world’s first full-scale timber wind turbine has started turning in Sweden, with a tower built by wood technology company Modvion.
The 105-metre-tall tower, located in the region of Skara, is Modvion‘s first commercial wind turbine tower, and follows on from a smaller 30-metre-high demonstration project the company completed in 2020.
While its rotor blades and generator hub are made of conventional materials, the tower is made of laminated veneer lumber (LVL), a type of engineered wood made of thin veneer strips glued together and often used for beams and load-bearing building structures.
The tower of a wind turbine in Skara is made of engineered wood
The company says that this type of wood is not only strong enough to withstand the forces of a turning turbine, it is much more environmentally sustainable to build with than the currently used steel.
While wind power plays an important role in providing the world with green renewable energy, there are still ample carbon emissions created during their construction — in part because of the steel towers.
Modvion describes its wood towers as reducing the carbon emissions from wind turbine construction by over 100 per cent, due to the combination of a less emissions-heavy production process and the carbon storage provided by trees.
“Our towers, just in the production of them, they emit 90 per cent less than a steel tower that will do carry the same work,” Modvion chief financial officer Maria-Lina Hedlund told Dezeen. “And then if you add the carbon sequestration, then you actually end up with a minus — so a carbon sink. This is great if we want to reach net zero energy production, and we need to.”
The type of wood used is laminated veneer lumber
Hedlund, who is also an engineer, describes LVL as having a construction “similar to carbon fibre”, with strips of veneer just three millimetres thick sandwiched and glued together, giving it a high strength-to-weight ratio.
This lightness is a benefit, reducing the amount of material needed overall. With a heavy material, there is a “bad design spiral”, says Hedlund, as the weight of the tower itself adds to the load that it needs to carry.
And while some LVL has all their veneer strips facing in the same direction, Modvion uses its “own recipe” specifying the directions of the fibres, improving the material’s performance even more.
The turbine tower is the tallest so far built by Swedish company Modvion. Photo by Paul Wennerholm
The production process involves timber boards being made to order in a standard LVL plant and then delivered to Modvion’s factory. There, they are glued together into larger modules and bent into a rounded form in a step called lamination, and then very precisely machined to fine-tune the shape.
“In the wood industry, you usually see centimetre tolerances, while we are in the sub-millimetre scale,” said Hedlund.
The modular nature of LVL construction addresses another problem Modvion has observed with steel: that with turbines getting ever bigger to give more power, it’s becoming impossible to transport steel towers to site.
They are built as essentially large cylinders and transported by truck, but the base diameter desired for the tallest towers is getting to be taller than some bridges and roads can allow.
The timber is laminated into modules at Modvion’s factory
“We’re now reaching a point where they will not get through anymore,” said Hedlund. “So we will see a transition in the wind power industry to modular construction, because this is the way to get them there. And one of the big advantages of building in the material we do is that it’s naturally built modular.”
While steel could also be built modular, it would require bolts rather than glue to join it together on site, which Hedlund says is a disadvantage.
“Bolts are not very nice when you have so much dynamic loading, because it will loosen over time,” she said. “So first of all, you have to have to put them in place which is a lot of work, and then you have to also service them over the lifetime.”
The modules were assembled and glued together on site
On the outside, the tower has a thick white coating that makes it look similar to steel, and it’s rotor blades and generator hub, which are not supplied by Modvion, are made of conventional materials like fibreglass. This may change in the future, however, with another company, Voodin Blades, working on the technology for wooden blades.
Modvion was founded in 2016 by university peers David Olivegren and Otto Lundman. While its current focus is wind turbines, it is dedicated to wooden technology more broadly, and Hedlund told Dezeen that the team believes it has “the world’s strongest joint for timber construction”, which could also be put to other uses.
Another recent milestone for wind power came in the form of a wind-powered cargo ship, which had been retrofitted with two 37.5-metre-tall sails.
Spotted: The cost of onshore wind energy has fallen steadily over the last decade. However, wind installations have also steadily increased in size, and while bigger turbines generate more energy, they also make it more difficult to secure public approval and find financing, appropriate sites, and materials. Wind company AirLoom is taking a new approach to address these challenges.
Instead of huge blades on tall towers, AirLoom’s design consists of vertically oriented, 10-metre-long wings attached to a lightweight track. The blades intercept the wind, which propels them down the track, generating power. Supported by 25-metre-tall poles arranged in an oval, the track can range in length from metres to miles, depending on the desired scale.
A key advantage of the design is that it is quieter and lower profile than skyline-dominating turbines, which could help to reduce complaints about local disruption and ruined views. The system is also low-cost and modular, which means it can be deployed at different scales using a standard set of components.
AirLoom recently announced that it has secured $4 million (around €3.7 million) in seed funding. The round was led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, which supports new clean technologies, with participation from Lowercarbon Capital and energy fund MCJ Collective. The money will help AirLoom scale up to the megawatt scale and full deployment.
Despite the difficult market for new wind energy projects, a number of innovations seek to make wind power more affordable. These include a low-cost, single-bladed floating turbine and small turbines for powering microgrids.
Spotted: The scarcity of rare earth elements (REE) is a challenge for the wind and tidal renewable energy sector. These minerals are lanthanides (Lanthanum-Lutetium in the periodic table plus Yttrium and Scandium) and are vital in the conventional production of wind and tidal turbines, specifically in the magnetic cores of these generators. Contrary to their name, they are not rare in the Earth’s crust, but they are rarely found in high concentrations, which makes mining them difficult. And even after being mined, it is necessary to refine them. China currently has a near monopoly in the global trade of these materials, with 90 per cent of all the REE entering the market produced in the country. The EU, meanwhile, has to import almost all of its REE.
This is where UK company GreenSpur comes in. Its generator replaces the need for REE in the magnets of wind and tidal turbines. The company uses far more abundant and easily available ferrite (Iron derived) magnets, and surrounds these with aluminium coils rather than conventional copper ones. The company is able to make these sustainable material substitutions due to a design innovation in the generator itself.
Conventional generators use moving magnets placed around static coils of wire arranged in concentric circles. The movement of the magnets (in this case via wind or tidal energy) produces an electric charge or energy in these wire coils.
The GreenSpur design, by contrast, relies on ‘axial architecture,’ in which disks of aluminium coil are stacked on top of disks of ferrite magnets. This means that the magnetic field flows parallel to the axis of the generator, which results in a higher ‘magnetic flux’ (essentially magnetic strength) and allows for the alternative materials to be used.
The benefits of using these REE alternatives are clear: lower cost of materials, cheaper cooling than conventional REE generators, and greater strength in supply chains for materials. The new design is also more environmentally friendly as harmful REE byproducts are no longer mass produced and low-risk alternatives are used in their place.
Springwise has also spotted hi-tech anodes for the next generation of batteries as well as one company that uses shades screens as a renewable source of energy.
Spotted: The global commercial seaweed market was valued at almost $17.9 billion (around €16.9 billion) in 2021 and projected to keep growing. This growth is driven by increased use of seaweed in food and cosmetics, and its use as a fertiliser. However, seaweed is disappearing from many places where it used to thrive because of global warming.
At the same time seaweed farming is becoming more difficult, the number of offshore wind farms is growing. Now, non-profit North Sea Farmers hopes to put the two together by locating seaweed farms between offshore wind turbines. North Sea Farmers plans to install its first seaweed farm, located off the coast of the Netherlands, this year and begin harvesting in Spring 2024. The 10-hectare farm is expected to produce at least 6,000 kilogrammes of fresh seaweed in its first year.
The demonstration project will be the world’s first commercial-scale seaweed farm located between offshore wind turbines. The aim is to kickstart more innovation in seaweed agriculture.
Eef Brouwers, Manager of Farming and Technology at North Sea Farmers, said: “Potentially, up to 85,000 full-time jobs could be created in the European seaweed sector by replicating North Sea Farm 1 across the North Sea.”
The project has received €1.5 million in funding from Amazon’s Right Now Climate Fund, which will be spent on constructing the farm.
Seaweed is not only used in food and cosmetics. Springwise has also spotted a seaweed extract that could reduce the methane emitted by cattle, a seaweed-based packaging, and the use of seaweed-derived materials to prevent dendrite growth in batteries.
Spotted: It is estimated that global capacity for wind power will be over 955 gigawatts by the end of 2022, with China leading the way with 359,770 turbines as of June this year. However, the large number of wind turbines across the globe also means there is a rapidly growing need for innovative wind turbine maintenance systems – especially for offshore turbines. Company Aerones has designed a system that uses drones to conduct such maintenance work.
Aerones offers inspection, cleaning, and repair services using a variety of different drones and tools. For example, its robotic cleaning system uses a powerful brush to clean dust and oil, reusing water during cleaning to reduce waste. Other drones in the company’s repertoire can repair blades using a modular tool base that can sand, fill eroded surfaces, apply protective coatings, and more.
In addition to the utility of its system, Aerones offers reassurance that the system does not take jobs away from technicians. Instead, the company says that the drones are each controlled by certified technicians “from the comfort of a warm vehicle”. In addition, it claims that the robotic tools are more precise and efficient than technicians acting alone, resulting in four to six times less downtime.
The company adds that its “unique proprietary system brings high-quality robotic services enabling our wind turbine technicians to perform inspections, cleaning, maintenance and repairs (…) Robots will allow the wind industry to turn towards fast and efficient preventive maintenance.”
Wind power is big business and is increasingly being seen as a vital tool in reaching net zero. Springwise has also spotted a floating vertical axis wind turbine and recyclable onshore turbines.
Spotted: Just like sunshine, wind is a fairly constant aspect of the weather, yet as an energy source, it still suffers from variability. Now, a small, sleek wind turbine that generates power from winds as low as five miles per hour could tackle this issue and be one of the swiftest ways for buildings to become carbon neutral. Created by Aeromine Technologies, the bladeless turbines take up a fraction of the footprint of traditional wind farms and produce the same amount of power as that of 16 solar panels.
Designed specifically for use on top of large buildings with flat roofs, the turbines are easy to install and maintain, particularly because they do not have rotor blades. The turbines connect directly to a building’s electrical system and work much like a racecar does, using aerodymanic designs to amplify the flow of air away from the structure. Despite working constantly, the turbines are completely silent.
Aeromine generally installs 20 to 40 of the turbines on the side of a building’s roof that receives the most consistent wind. That is usually enough to provide all of the power required by a large commercial or residential building. When combined with solar, a building could run completely on renewable energy.
Making better use of ignored spaces is a particularly effective means of reducing reliance on petrol power. Springwise has spotted small turbines harnessing hydroelectric power from slow flowing streams and rivers, as well as nanotechnology being used to generate energy from locations where rivers meet the sea.
Spotted: According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), wind energy generation hit a record 273 terawatt-hours in 2021. And the IEA further forecasts that, in order to meet the agency’s net zero by 2050 scenario, the world will need to install 7,900 terrawatt-hours of wind electricity generation by 2030.
As wind power grows in importance, the need to consider the whole lifecycle of a wind turbine is more important than ever. While wind power is a clean and renewable form of energy, the turbines themselves are not without an environmental cost. And one of the most intractable issues to date has been the fact that turbines are made using composite materials that are difficult to recycle. Against this backdrop, the Siemens Gamesa RecyclableBlade, launched in September 2021 and first installed at a project in Germany in July, is a step in the right direction.
The blade is made of a composite material that can be recycled and reused, reducing the need for new materials. In addition, the blade is designed to be dismantled and transported back to the factory for recycling, making it easier to recycle than traditional blades. With its innovative recyclable solutions, Siemens Gamesa is helping to propel the activities that make wind energy even more sustainable, creating a fully circular sector.
Turbine blades are made from composite materials, including resin, glass and carbon fibers. The recycling process for these materials is complex and costly. However, Siemens’ new RecyclableBlade process uses a mild acidic solution to separate the materials at the end of the turbine’s lifetime. Those materials can then be recycled for use in other industrial applications. This could help to reduce the environmental impact of wind energy production and make the turbines more economically viable in the long run.
The innovation is part of Siemens’ larger sustainability vision, which includes a core target to produce fully recyclable wind turbines by 2040. After the run at RWE’s Kaskasi project in Germany last July 2022, the new RecyclableBlade is now available for customers to use at their onshore wind sites.
As wind turbines become more prevalent and their disposal becomes more pressing, Springwise is seeing a rise in methods for recycling wind turbine blades. These include wind turbine bioplastic that can be recycled into gummy bears, a recyclable composite innovation turning turbine blades into snowsports equipment, and the UK’s first turbine blade recycling project.
Spotted: Rotating electrical contactors are integral components of many devices, including utility-scale direct-drive wind turbines. These magnets help to transmit electrical current along an ultra-low-resistance path, but they can be expensive to produce. In order to reduce the cost of these magnets, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed a new type of rotary electrical contactor called Twistact.
Twistact uses a pure-rolling-contact device to transmit electrical current, which eliminates the need for rare-earth magnets. The technology has been proven to be beneficial in lowering costs, improving sustainability, and reducing maintenance. With the help of this new technology, wind turbines can become more affordable and more efficient.
Twistact is also designed to address two physical degradation processes that are common in certain types of wind turbine component. These processes, known as sliding contact and electrical arcing, can reduce performance and lead to short operating lifetimes. The Twistact system, by contrast, has been proven capable of operating over the full 30-year service time of a multi-megawatt turbine without maintenance.
Twistact is still in the early stages of development, but Sandia is already exploring opportunities to partner with generator manufacturers and others in the renewable energy industry to assist with the development of next-generation direct-drive wind turbines. The potential applications for Twistact are not limited to wind turbines, however. Sandia is also open to partnering for applications such as electric vehicles or doubly-fed induction generators. With its unique capabilities, Twistact has the potential to make a significant impact in a number of industries.
As the world continues to transition to more sustainable forms of energy, Springwise has spotted numerous innovations in wind generation. For example, one company has developed floating vertical axis wind turbines while researchers are looking at how wind turbine bioplastic can be recycled into gummy bears.
