On Tuesday 21st March Modvion was featured in Sweden’s biggest financial newspaper, Dagens Industri. The double page spread was part of a series highlighting impact companies in Sweden. Modvion’s wooden wind turbine towers, that can enable net zero energy generation from wind, fits into the theme perfectly.
Dagen’s Industri journalist, Jenny Stiernstedt, interviewed Modvion CEO and co-founder, Otto Lundman, Concept Engineer and co-founder, David Olivegren, and our CFO who was acting CEO at the time of writing, Maria-Lina Hedlund.
Sweden will get its first wooden wind turbine this summer. Getting there has taken many years for Modvion, the company behind the new technology. But already within a couple of years, they hope to have series production in place.
”When we scale-up, that’s when we can really make a difference to the climate,” says David Olivegren, one of the founders.”
In the article David reveals how the idea came about, first to build wind turbine towers with wood and then to make them modular. The next step was to take it further than an idea, that’s when the founding team was created at Chalmer’s School of Entrepreneurship and Otto came on board. Hi job was to investigate how the market would react to a wooden tower.
”It’s a tough job to enter a conservative market where everything depends on cost and established technology, with a lot of gatekeepers. You have to start by not listening to everyone who says ’no, it will never work’.”
For the Modvion team it has always been clear that it will work, and that this solution is exactly what the wind energy market is looking for when building taller and taller wind turbines.
”With wooden towers, you can build much more effectively. The higher we build, the more advantageous it is to build with wood,” says David Olivegren, co-founder and concept engineer.
After the 105-meter tower to be installed this summer, the next step is to set up a 6-7 megawatt wind turbine – with a 150-meter tower – which, according to Maria-Lina Hedlund, is the size of the largest on-shore turbines installed today.
”After that, series production awaits. The goal is to start a first volume factory in 2025 with the production of around a hundred towers per year,” she says.
And that is only the beginning, Modvion’s goal is to become one of the biggest suppliers for the next generation of sustainable wind turbine towers. Only then are we really making an impact for generations to come.
Read the original article in Swedish – De skapar höjdare som tål blåsväder
