I was recently reading about friction-welding wood, thought it would be pretty cool to use friction welded wood along with mass timber to create wind turbine blades at the scale of traditional fiberglass/plastic blades. (i'm already aware of mass-timber turbine towers)
I think that would cause the economics behind wind turbines to be significantly different, as then the entire constructed unit could also likely double as a carbon credit-able sink.
Wood is nowhere near strong enough for this. Metal is stronger than wood, and even that's not strong enough.
Tensile Strength to Weight is the important measure here - but you can't just take a block of wood vs an equal weight block of steel and compare (if you did, wood actually wins). Steel can be formed into very efficient shapes that significantly lighten it, wood can't.
The same issue will arise here for use in a turbine - only worse, because the material they use even outperforms steel, and is very very carefully and efficiently designed.
As it stands the turbine blades are pretty much peak athletes. There's extremely little room for less than the perfect material in the mega turbines.
A lot of people look at the mega turbines because the bigger the turbine is, it reallllyyy tends to increase the scale of power you can get.
Maybe there's some auxillary value not to overlook wood tree smaller turbines (maybe for land use where harder to do mega turbines?) But I would imagine the peak material performance issue will restrict lumber from the mega turbines
I think that would cause the economics behind wind turbines to be significantly different, as then the entire constructed unit could also likely double as a carbon credit-able sink.