I wonder how anyone invented anything before the internet and wikipedia.
My guess? Much faster. Ever heard of “paralysis by analysis”?
What is “paralysis by paralysis”? Posting ten times/day the same post on Yahoo?
This is one of my bigger weaknesses. I think it is a good idea to allocate a small budget and some time every week for testing.
Hi Pierre: Yes I know I have wasted a LOT of time trying to break through to the nutcases on the Yahoo forum. I came from another Yahoo group populated by real wind people such as leading manufacturers, installers, NREL “scientists”, turbine designers, turbine home-builders, Paul Gipe (who ran one of my turbines for a year) etc. That forum is almost inactive nowadays, because there’s just not much left to say, plus these people had reputations to consider (talking to obvious idiots on the web is unseemly for a government scientist - I’m pretty sure NREL outlawed it). But one of the main things, which was the most fun, was explaining simple reality to “newbies”, “crackpots”, people-who-would-never-“get-it”, and outright idiots, insistently promoting ridiculous ideas based on sheer ignornce and typicl newbie misinterpretations of wind energy reality. I took up the cause after Paul Gipe got tired of it. It takes a thick skin to deal with true wind-idiots every day. They cannot be reasoned with in many cases. They becoome insistent, while aking no sense and more importantly, generating no power. Most wind people can’t handle the stress. Or they just don;t care to engage with peope who know nothing because realaly, theres no bsis for even a converstion when the newbies are insistent enough in promoting their own gnornce against known working systems. In my case, I decided to just try hanging in there to see how long wind-idiots would go on spewing nonsense when they were clearly. It’s been an “experiment” of sorts: How long would idiots go on spewing their nonsense if one jjust kept engaging them? Well, so far, the answer is “12 years and counting”. I had never encountered the level of extreme obnoxiousness combined with persistent ignorance, combined with thinking they know everything, and of course, as usual, combined with an inability to generate any electricity whatsoever. The people on the Yaahoo forum are orders of magnitude more ignorant, insistent, obnoxious, toxic, and just completely wrong, than any wind-idiot we on that formely-active group had ever seen. We were used to them lasting maybe a few months - a year at the most. So my experiment was to see how long the most insistent, obnoxious, intolerant, ignorant pseudo-wind people would persist if someone were willing to keep engaging them. OMG it is SO bizarre. Anyway, it’s been an experiment on my part. I think I’ve learned a lot about the extent of how unreasonable people are in some cases capable of being, how intolerant, and how convinced people with not only no knowledge, but no hope of ever achieving anything, can be. I think I’ve also started to understand the hopelessness of mental illness, and how it can manifest unrecognized by some people who, without the knowledge to recognize nonsensical statements when they see them, can be swayed or influenced by what re actually the ramblings of madmen. A good debate is one thing, but when you have people unwilling to engage in fair debate, especially when they relly know nothing and are wrong about most everything they say, real interaction is not possible. Nonetheless, I tried. I stuck with the experiment. Hopefully I’ve “saved” someone from getting sucked down the path of complete ignorance, but not as much as I would have liked. Some people, apparently, do not have the “detect-the-bullshit” gene.
By the way the term is Paralysis by ANALYSIS, (not paralysis by paralysis).
It’s become a common term. It means spending too much time thinking about what to do, rather than just doing it, to the point you never get anything done. Like, say, pretending to be a wind energy researcher for, oh I don’t know, let’s say over a decade, without producing any electricity, or anything even capable of it. Currently being used in a TV commercial for stock trading, regarding people who think too much and never make a trade. Some people say Analysis Paralysis. 
Hi Doug, indeed my “paralysis by paralysis” was an erroneous expression.
Producing electricity in a viable way with an AWES is not easy.
Pierre: Yeah I figured it was just a typo. But a great expression!
I do not think AWE needs to be difficult at all.
I mean, at least something that works well.
But getting it reliable and economical, and have longevity, those are not so easy.
But I’m really surprised how many simple, workable ideas people talk about, yet nobody bothers to try them.
i think a possible solution to this are agile methods, which are nothing else than keeping the scope of your project small: a good-enough-design, quick implementation (fast prototyping), testing, finalizing (put on the market). Then go on with the next project. And if problems with a previous project arise you re-iterate, and thus improve your projects step-by-step.
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I agree with the agile methods concept, above all when large organizations and companies like @Massimo’s KiteGen, AWESCO, Makani and others would use it, sometimes following player’s ideas.
As a player I experimented various concepts comprising flygen, traction (for yoyo), rotating reel…, but “finalizing (put on the market)” is a difficult and perhaps not required task. Only @Kitewinder put an AWES on the market.
for airborne wind i am thinking about, for example:
- development of high strength tethers
- development of generator, winch, electric converter etc.
- dev. of a high lift unmanned aircraft
- dev. of durable kites
- dev. of autonomous control systems
- for software there are probably plenty opportunities
each of these processes could be developed independently, and be marketed before a whole airborne wind system is finished. And might end up being used for a different purpose (e.g. skysails marine performance software ending up as their main product )
I guess the kiwee made it to the market because it is small and simple enough.
There you go: paralysis by analysis.
“Let;s take one giant step backwards to 2010.”
Making it worse, assuming “kite-reeling” is the answer.
This reminds me of the blind guys describing an elephant - but with no elephant.
AWE: “land of the lost”.
“This feels like a tether! AWE is a string!”
“This feels like a winch - AWE is kite-reeling”
“This feels like fabric - must be a kite!”
“I think I smell a generator. They must be using the winch to turn a generator!”
Except it is just copying what the last “team” tried.
Meanwhile nobody bothers to try simple ides that work the first try.
You forgot one I heard many times at the first high-altitude wind power conference in 2009: “Jesus will solve AWE”, an idea floated by the illustrious Wayne German, credited with being the overriding main genius of AWE at that first conference (by the guys running the Yahoo forum). Wayne put meteorologist Cristina Archer on the spot, knowing he could get her to say she agreed, since she was from Italy and would have been brought up Catholic. Another slam-dunk technological innovation by Wayne, eh? Jesus. Uh-huh. Guys, let me tell you: Wind energy has always been magnet for crackpots, because wind is invisible, therefore people can “imagine” it doing whatever they want. In that sense, AWE is a neodymium super-magnet for crackpots. Beware, they are all around you, at the minimum. Kitewinder is a product because somebody bothered to actually DO something rather than just talk. It’s cheap enough to be bought as an interesting curiosity - for entertainment and maybe to learn something. It works, and it is fun. Whether it will lead to anything useful, we will have to wait to know. At least they picked something straightforward and made it work rather than sitting around, talking about “Jesus”, “Glorious Kite Gods”, and “quantum physics”, pretending to be an armchair-genius do-nothing wannabe prophet. Or bilking gullible investors for millions of dollars to turn out unworkable crap and annual lies about the next nonexistent grid-feed non-project. That places Kitewinder ahead of most. A good lesson for the rest of us. Nike: “Just DO It.”
Thanks Doug for the compliments.
What you say is a good resume of what I tried to explain in the no market hypothesis.
Awe are great, kiwee works but unfortunately that is not enough to have a success. Whether people will like it, buy it, use it or not is hard to tell. So even me, the founder I don’t have the answer yet. We made a hundred sales so far but delivery will be in August and then we will have the answer to those questions.
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