Modvion: Modern Wind Towers... Out of Wood?

all right welcome everybody we're here today with uh a very interesting company uh we heard about this company modvion from one of our viewers in sweden who visited one of their towers and so we're lucky today to have with us uh gear soldering who is a development engineer and auto lundman who is the ceo of modvien so thank you guys for joining us today thank you thank you so do you build wooden towers for uh wind turbines um how what is the current technology for building a wind turbine so the current technology for building the towers are tubular steel towers mostly but as wind power becomes more cost effective the taller you make the turbines these cylinders that make up the towers they they need to become larger than what is possible to do really with that technology since it needs to be transportable now wait a minute i mean steel seems like the perfect choice here right it's pretty cheap it's very strong um why can't we just keep going taller and taller with steel yeah so logistically you you need a larger base diameter than the 4.5 meters that is possible to transport on the average road uh so you need a modular technology and modern has such a technology but then you by going away from steel to a wood-based material as we do we lower the weight we lower the production cost we make it a whole lot more carbon neutral instead of a large emission we have carbon sequestration in the material wait a minute so explain to our viewers how wood can be carbon neutral it seems kind of counter productive right because you have to cut down trees and everyone loves trees so why is it carbon neutral in general in sweden and many parts of the developed world and the wood the timber industry is actually they're growing trees to cut them down and then they regrow them again so it's not like they harvest rainforest in general it's more of a developed industry with lots of history and it's a sustainable system and every time the trees grow up again they capture more carbon from the atmosphere so if you keep the the wood in structure as a wind turbine tower it actually has a net negative emission effect so it's actually that the carbon is holding up the wind turbine as opposed to it being either uh burned and going back into the atmosphere or decomposing and going back into the atmosphere that way so whenever you build a structure whether it's a wind turbine or a house or a tree house or a you know even like a table you're sequestering that carbon you're preventing it from going back into the atmosphere and it's only when uh you finally either burn it or it uh decomposes that it would turn back into carbon in the atmosphere and by that point it will actually be sort of back to neutral so until then it's actually a negative effect or like so that's counting on that there's other tower trees growing up at the same time and sequestering carbon again yeah yeah now you brought up an interesting point you said that um current technology means that the base of the tower would have to get bigger than four and a half meters why is four and a half meters such a big deal because that is the the limit for what is uh uh transportable on a normal road whenever you get to a bridge or a tunnel 4.5 meters is what is possible to get through so how does your system work it's it's uh modular but can you explain like what that means uh yeah so the modules are produced in a factory and they have a shape something like this from the factory i don't know if you see this one and they are stacked on a truck either it can be stacked a number on each trailer or it depends on the size and the weight capacity of the trailer and this kind of things but then you transport them like this and then on the site where the tower is supposed to stand you take the modules and you assemble them into sections so circular sections and this can be done sort of beforehand and when the big crane arrives for erecting the actual tower then the sections which are circular them can be lifted on top of each other and then you put the therma but now why do we have to go up so high why don't we just build a lot more of them well by increasing the height you um you get to the stronger and more stable winds and you can put up a larger rotor and a larger generator and since it's the area of a circle the larger rotor means that you have so much more swept area and therefore you can have a much larger generator and the cost per kilowatt hour goes down drastically so it's it's funny because when you think of like going bigger a lot of times you think of finding stronger materials and typically wood isn't considered to be like a very strong material because it just seems kind of common you know we built a chair out of it we built a you know our house might be built out of it and you might be saying but you know the big stuff the skyscrapers they're all made out of steel so is that true is is steel stronger than wood or is wood stronger than steel well so steel is very strong per volume so if you have a lack of space and you need a lot of strength then perhaps a metal perhaps titanium very strong per volume but if you need high specific strength strength per weight than wood might be a good option yeah and thereby when you build really large stuff it can in some circumstances like for wind turbines become more and more important with this specific strength so this kind of gets into the like the square cubed law of when you want to make something really big like uh for example you know there were a lot of articles that came out like when some of the godzilla movies came out and it's like you know godzilla because he's so big and massive his bones would need to be so big to support himself that he it just wouldn't look like godzilla anymore just be this big two legs with a little you know dinky thing on top and so it it that's where the specific weight comes in because when you're building really really tall you're adding stuff on top of itself and so the heavier that stuff is the more uh it needs to support itself and therefore you need to add more and then it's more and more and more until you have a really really strong you know big beefy a ton of material structure whereas if you just went for a lighter weight design a lighter weight material you might not need to do that necessarily and that's the first time i've heard the godzilla reference but i'll keep it in mind but yeah pretty much like that you get a bad design spiral if you keep using a heavy material but if you instead use what we use a what we would like to refer to as nature's carbon fiber a stack of thin veneers out of a common european spur you have a very strong but very light material so the taller we go the more advantageous this material is compared to steel and so people generally aren't at the height that we're talking about for wind turbines like we're either in a building or we're in a plane and so it's somewhere between building and plane that the wind turbines exist and and it's very windy there and i think i've had experience where i will take the drone i have a drone and i'll i'll start flying it up and at a certain altitude my drone is going to just start to drift away from me and there's no way that i can tell it to come back to me it doesn't have the speed in order to fight the wind to come back and so i actually have to bring it down to a lower altitude where there's less wind and that's the only way i can bring it back to me and i've noticed that time and time again no matter where i am it seems that if i bring it up too far it just starts to drift away and that's the wind that would be powering everything and talking about the cubes and skating and stuff i don't know if we mentioned that the power that you get out of the wind scales as the cube of the wind speed so if you double the wind speed you eight times the the power oh wow so that's a great effect so when you see these smaller wind turbines i've seen a couple in cities like boston there's a there's a fairly small one it's not much taller than many of the buildings and it's a pretty small diameter as well so the difference between a small wind turbine like that and a really truly massive one like the ones that you'd be building the the difference in power generation what what would you estimate that to be it's it's massive um hundreds of times like i would say yeah the small ones you talk in kilowatts and the big ones you count in megawatts yeah so the megawatts wow the largest ones on the market now mainly used for offshore they're they're more than 10 megawatts so if we uh can build tall enough onshore we can use them there as well while they're currently used offshore is because offshore you have less of a wind gradient so there's less of a difference between the wind springs at different altitude but onshore you have a wind gradient so the taller you go the stronger the winds as your drone example so that's what we want to do now i saw some footage of you installing your first test uh tower and i think that's where our viewer actually went and visited it's a small island off the coast of sweden right and what are you hoping to do with that test that has been a a project now for for more than two years and during this time lots of things have been tested mostly for the tall towers the 150 meter tall tower design for for turbines more than 200 meters tall but then we downsized the whole thing to a one to five scale so you get the 30 meter tower and we put that together using basically hand tools this will not be the way it's done in the future everything will will be optimized of course but the first one quite spectacularly was able to make that way and then manufacturing it putting it together putting it on site and then of course that tower is stacked with sensors that will be a not so dramatic test the uh the important tests are already done the certification is ongoing and so forth we've got a design basis assessment done by a notified body and so forth so we know that it works already this is to follow up now a lot of uh manufacturers seem to be uh slow to pick up on new technologies they want to go with just proven you know we use steel bases and that's what we're going to use um are you guys finding it difficult to convince people in the industry that this might be a better way to go before yeah especially when you when you're when you haven't built anything you stand anywhere you're trying to pitch this and then it might be uh difficult and you haven't learned how to pedagogically say that wood is stronger than steel you have to learn how to do that and but now when it's we've done the first installation we find it a lot more a lot easier and what's the timeline look like so i mean you you're doing your testing now and you're in the middle of testing when do you think you'll have your first commercial installation in two years oh wow yeah we already have assigned a letter of intent for that and it's going to transfer into purchase agreement quite soon hopefully with a local utility that would like to be the pioneer once the first company has signed a deal and you put up the first tower do you think that that's going to kind of be the tipping point where other companies are more likely to start knocking on your door yeah that that was what we thought uh we actually thought that we would need to put up the first 30 meter tower in order to be able to uh sell the first large uh size one but we we got letters of intent for for commercial sized towers well before that and uh now we've got several of those so um customers are quite eager to uh to get in on this as it looks right now not good no pun intended now i'm a carpenter myself i love working with wood um and i know how strong plywood can be especially when you're lapping the grain in opposite directions and gluing it together but i've got to say this sounds like a daunting task to make these huge sections and you just said that your first ones you made by hand can you kind of walk us through the process of how these are built yeah so basically we get sheets of lvl which is sort of plywood where not all the fibers are are sort of every other there is a overweight of in one direction the the direction that needs to be a bit stronger and they are then machined into the right shapes and then they are pressed into the curved shape that this and then they need to be sort of machined into tolerances tolerances yeah so we have quite quite tough criteria for the tolerances to make the assembly on the site and to go smoothly and so are each of those panels the same like are they just like legos and you can build as tall a tower as you want or is it a specific each each one is kind of its own special little piece so first of all the the tower is uh conical in its shape so the the shape and the curvature changes over height but in theory you could possibly reuse the same parts for a different tower design but also we have a manufacturing and design process that makes it easy to change for a different tower so we try to to make both ways possible actually but basically on the same cylindrical section you have all the modules are the same yeah so do you need a giant crane to put this together well not um so we put the modules together into the sections close to the ground but then of course to put the entire wind power plant together then you need a giant crane exactly because on top of our tower you install the turbine and the nacelle and the generator for this weighs hundreds of times now i have a question about the longevity of the of the tower so i'm imagining with the steel tower that they're like pre-painted um and that they have a certain lifespan what's the lifespan of a wooden tower because i've got to imagine that um it's got to be protected from the weather so our towers will last as long as a steel alternative because the wind power industry works such that the customer expect a specific lifetime and that is the lifetime that the tower is going to be specified towards no matter the material so if you want 25 years warranty and guarantees you get that if you want 35 years you get that it's mostly a matter of the thickness of the wall and we fix that easily by just adding on additional layers of veneer so it's not really a problem and the coating of the towers is done way before assembly in the factory already it's a polymer polyurea coating on top oh cool because i was picturing like a guy had to go up there with a paintbrush and like paint the whole thing but no it's all it's all done on the ground yeah gary didn't want that job so we had to do it already in the factory it can be added for that and like any system that has to to stay outside has to have a weatherproofing system and they are made to protect what is inside of that so we have a system that works for us and the steel towers need to protect from from rust i suppose so they have a system that works for that i guess the question is has this ever been done before like have we ever made uh tubular wooden structures like this or has it always sort of been your typical timber construction if you wanted to make something like that not that i can think of well at the moment in in old hydro plants there are yes tubes wooden tubes to lead water through perhaps but i haven't seen tubular structures like this anywhere and for example we had one of the executives from one of the largest wood manufacturer groups visit and he said whoa this is unlike anything i've ever seen made out of wood before and it's their material that we're using so i guess not so i mean we've been inside of a an old windmill before i think it was built in like the 1800s or something and yeah it was not built in any way like how you've structured your wind turbine tower so where did you come up with this idea like what gave you the idea to build this out of wood as opposed to any other material and then how did you figure out how to do it well a couple years back one of our co-founders david he had been thinking about how about the wind industry for quite some time and he has background within wood boat building so he's familiar with the strength of this of this material and the wood manufacturing industry has also been developing quite a bit you have these very very strong laminate materials now and also uh about 10 years ago there was actually a german company that brought forward a wooden tower for for wind power and they built a 100 meter tall tower that is still standing in in germany so it's a great example but um maudion has the advantage of being a second mover here so we could see some things that they had done that we thought could be done differently and with improvement so we use a material that is two and a half times uh stronger than what they used um and we have a much more efficient assembly process much due to or we have a self-bearing conical shaped wall whilst they had a lattice structure that they put that they clad on with these uh flat modules to have their octagonal shape so you always get inspired what of what has been done before and then you try to add on where you can and so because you have this modular design and you're able to build um essentially a a wider base than a steel structure because again this modularity means that you can build it almost as wide as you like what is the limit on the height and when you hit that limit maybe it's limitless i don't know um but at least where you're imagining the tallest tower that you could build in the near future to be how much power could you generate from that wind turbine that's a tricky question which part would you like to yeah i think so there are several hypes that you can mention here but i think there is a sort of if you build a straight tower out of wood and you only consider the self weight to speak i think the maximum height is around four kilometers yeah exactly that's without any wind and with no turbine on top of that and stuff so that's but that's sort of like the it's not even the theoretical maximum in it because then you still have a sort of prismatic shape so you can sort of build a pyramid or stuff but it's a funny funny sort of angle to look at it but then we have another angle which is where does it stop to pay off to build the taller and taller wind turbines and that's sort of where the the wind gradient that we mentioned earlier uh stops having an effect so when you go higher and higher up the wind picks up because the ground sort of breaks the wind and but that effect diminishes quite a lot and at about 300 meters it's basically no effect anymore that in theory means that the under the lowest part of the the rotor would be at 300 meters and usually then the the diameter of the rotor would be 300 meters as well i think yeah that would mean uh 450 meter tower yeah but that's very tall so that would mean a total height of 600 meters uh and currently they're at 240 perhaps the tallest so um so i mean the tallest wind turbine in the world could be made out of wood yeah they they should and we think they will that's so cool and i mean as you mentioned earlier the blades right now are largely made out of balsa wood as well yeah it's a composite with balsa wood and glass fiber or carbon fiber i think yeah i think you could do it just about either way but yeah i mean it's you know when people kind of think about wind turbines they're generally not thinking about wood because it looks so metallic but every wind turbine that you see practically has wood in it in the blades the the part that does arguably most of the work and blades or the balsa wood have a very high specific strength and that's the reason to use it and that's the reason to use wood in the towers as well now when you were just picking up that block of the cross section right there in front of you it looked very light like i was trying to picture if that was a block of steel and i think you'd have a lot of trouble picking it up it's light right i mean how much lighter is it than if you use steel um normally i speak about the the strength required for for the the tower so for the same strength our tower only use about two-thirds of the weight so it's 30 percent less and for the for a specific volume it's 1 16 uh of the weight uh sort of wow having a wind turbine that weighs uh two thirds the the weight of a steel one that means that transporting the materials to where you're going to be building it there's going to be less effort required so that means a lower carbon footprint but also the manufacturing would also have a lower carbon footprint i've got to imagine what does that look like first thing you can mention is that the production of steel is very dirty so to speak and carbon intense yeah carbon intense yeah that's the word uh and that has to do with the fact that to make iron out of iron ore you need to get rid of the oxygen that's connected to the iron atom and then you have a what's it called blast furnace where you put in a lot of coke which is basically coal and you heat it up and there's tons of carbon dioxide spitting out to produce the steel so that's what we compete against in this world so it i think it's it's about two or three tons of carbon dioxide per ton of steel while we sequester is it one ton per ton of one ton per cubic meter yeah that's right so two tons per tonne of um of wood wow so you're almost doing the opposite so to make steel you need to get rid of oxygen by attaching it with carbon and so you use hydrocarbon to take away the carbon but then essentially what you're doing is the tree is taking in all that carbon in order to build itself and then you're you're leveraging uh nature to create uh something that is going to ultimately benefit nature and humanity [Music] now i was on your website and it looked like as you guys are growing that you need uh more employees is that true are you looking for engineers and builders yeah that is true uh modvion will grow uh for numbers of uh years uh hopefully so we're currently uh still quite a small team and and we have to take in new employees at the time that we that we can manage but uh definitely the the team will grow so i mean if you're watching this right now and you might be interested in joining this growing industry go check out modvn's website and for those who are watching we get lots of emails all the time about just you know startup companies and they're always asking me zack what's the next company to invest in are you a publicly traded company how could people get involved in your company we're not publicly traded previous rounds have been taken care of to a large extent by business angels but it's it's that kind of investment okay so basically keep your eye on this company and who knows where you guys will go in the future in terms of funding rounds and so forth but i assume that eventually if things work out you're going to need more capital as you build out you know bigger and bigger factories and so forth now they must be fun factories to work in i can imagine like as a woodworker myself like i love being in wood shops and this just sounds like you're going to be building giant wood shops yeah kind of the the production of the prototype tower was a lot of work by hand with the tools of the trade so to speak it was a lot of fun it was hard work for for a long time but it's a lot of fun to work with the material which is an additional benefit and can you just talk about your intellectual property so basically i mean if jesse and i wanted to go out and build this tomorrow you guys i believe own the intellectual property to this idea yeah so we have patents on several parts of the um of how to do this basically on the joints and so forth and also on the what we see as the most efficient way to build a wooden tower for wind turbines basically um but if you want to build it for yourself that's okay as long as you don't sell it don't give jessie any ideas i mean i'm just it sounds like a lot of a lot of thinking went into your actual design and if i tomorrow wanted to do it it sounds like it'd be a whole lot of work and i'm just i'm so glad that you guys are actually doing that work because uh it's going to be such a benefit to everyone if if we can have a larger and more efficient wind turbines that can be running uh more frequently and then lastly if people are watching right now from around the world maybe in the united states and they're hearing like wait we could build taller towers can they reach out to you are you available to build towers say here in america yeah definitely uh modvion aims to be a global company in the future we start off here in northern europe but of course we will we would like to go to americas and and very last question uh have you been on top of a wind turbine and are you afraid of heights yes wow gayer used to be a monster climber so he's he's not afraid of things like that um i i feel the taller you go when when you're above a certain altitude you don't really feel like you're gonna hit the ground anymore if you just jump off to the side fast enough you'll just go into orbit right yeah have you ever felt that when you it's it's more scary to bungee jump than to um to have a parrot jump so uh that's my take on it awesome well thank you so much for for joining us today and answering all of our questions um i'm really excited about wind turbines now especially wood ones yeah i mean it's so nice to to know that there are more earth-friendly ways of making earth-friendly technology and i want to thank you for all your hard work and everything that you do because it gives us a little bit more hope in the world so thank you thank you we should have hope and thank you for telling our story

Channel: Disruptive Investing

Views: 11,761

Keywords: disruptive, investing, stock market, stocks, stock exchange, new york, usa, companies, startup, invest, what to invest in, future, technologies, tech, company, disruptive investing, club, top, investments, money, save, bank, growth, exponential, science, sustainability

Id: 98_TQhh9UUg

Length: 29min 56sec (1796 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 08 2021