WE Handbook- 3- Structural Design
So it is intuitive that the blade must be thickest, i.e. strongest, at the root and can taper in thickness towards the tip where the bending moment is less. As it happens, that suits the aerodynamics too: the blade needs a thinner section at the tip where drag is most critical and the local chord (width) of the blade is small. Also for turbines that rely on stall for power regulation in strong winds, a thin section stalls more easily so is beneficial at the tip. Closer to the root the chord is wider, but to avoid making it very wide (hence expensive) the blade needs to be thicker to generate enough lift given the lower wind speed close to the hub (thicker aerofoils can generate a greater maximum lift before they stall).
Unfortunately the thickness needed to make the blade stiff and strong enough is greater than that required for aerodynamic efficiency, so a compromise must be found between structural weight (= cost) and loss of aerodynamic efficiency.
Internal beam structure
If the blade was solid rather than hollow, the required thickness at each point along the blade would simply be determined by the bending moment at that point. But considering how the material in this hypothetical solid blade is working, as the blade bends downwind, the material on the upwind face of the blade stretches, carrying tension, and the material on the downwind face compresses. The material mid-way between the two faces, i.e. in the middle of the blade, is neither in tension nor compression – i.e. it does not do much work. So to reduce the cost of the blade it makes sense to take out some of that material in the middle, and make the blade hollow.
In the extreme case you would be left with two strips of material, one on the upwind face and one on the downwind face. This would not work for two reasons: shear strength and aerodynamics. The aerodynamics is obvious: there must be a continuous shell to give the aerodynamic shape. Shear strength is less obvious but is most easily visualised by thinking about what would happen to the two strips of material if they were not joined by anything: they would slide relative to each other and act like two separate, very thin, blades. They would lose all the bending strength that we are trying to maintain. So to work properly they must be structurally joined together; this connection is called a shear web. The classic embodiment of this concept is the steel I-beam.