Future wind turbines require larger rotor blade radius, leading to an increase of rotor swept area. The larger rotor swept area results in more energy production of the wind turbine. Further increase is however limited as a result of the structural weight, which induces a large bending moment and could result in buckling of the rotor blade. An innovative design solution resulting in a lower weight blade design could be acquired by introducing a grid stiffened structure as a substitution of the conventional sandwich structure. Design and analysis showed an increase in specific stiffness of the grid stiffened structure for higher loading conditions. In an attempt to validate the obtained results, one sandwich and one orthogrid panel has been manufactured and tested.