Wood might seem like a construction material from a bygone era, but Swedish start-up Modvion is putting it to a very modern use. The Gothenburg-based company is using engineered wood to build wind turbine towers, and it recently received design certification for the tallest one to date: 119 meters, matching the height of most on-shore wind turbines in operation. The company’s tower can support a 6.4-megawatt turbine.
Wood has experienced a renaissance in recent years, with growing recognition of its potential as a strong, lightweight, and low-emission structural material. Engineered wood products are created by binding sawdust, wood fibers or even entire planks together with adhesive. They can be considerably stronger than standard timber and have been used to construct high-rise buildings in Australia, Canada, Norway, and the United States.
The material is particularly promising for building turbine towers because of its great strength-to-weight ratio, says Modvion’s senior development engineer Erik Dölerud. It also enables the manufacture of smaller modules that can be assembled on site, reducing transport challenges, he says. The company constructed a 103-meter tower in Skara, Sweden in 2023. Its new 119-meter design received sign-off from the independent certification and testing specialists TÜV SÜD, in Munich last month.
“Wood is the original high-performance construction material and in the past 100 years I think it’s been underutilized,” says Dölerud. “When you think about it, a tree has evolved through millions of years to carry load and survive wind so it’s not difficult to envision that it’s a pretty suitable material for this type of application.”
Engineered Wood: The Future of Wind Turbine Towers?
The company builds its towers out of laminated veneer lumber (LVL) which is made by adhering together many thin layers of wood to create a structural material that’s stronger than timber. Slicing the timber apart and bonding it back together evenly distributes wood’s localized weaknesses, like knots and grain differences, says Dölerud. The result is a material that is stronger than steel for a given weight.
Modvion assembles its towers out of a series of curved wooden modules roughly 15 meters long. The base of each tower is comprised of six of these modules and the top sections use four. Manufacturing these modules involves laminating several large boards of LVL together and then pressing them over a large cylinder to create their curved shape.
To create these curved shapes the company had to engineer bespoke LVL boards with a particular distribution of grain directions that makes them bendable and able to lock together during the bending process to create a stiff structure that holds its shape. Once all the tower’s modules are built, they are transported to the site and adhered together with glue to create tube-like sections that are then stacked on top of each other using a crane.
One of the biggest…
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The post “Modvion Builds Wind Turbine Towers from Engineered Wood” by Edd Gent was published on 03/26/2025 by spectrum.ieee.org