Airborne solar wind energy systems (ASWES)

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Hi Pierre: I must have been in an optimistic mood that day. The problems with anything airborne are so repetitive and pervasive, that, overall, at least today, I’ll weigh in against putting solar up in the air, unless it’s to power specialty lightweight aircraft.

Reliability is a major factor for any energy harvesting device. Ground mounting will last decades, always ready to go. Airborne will always have problems and reasons it can;t be used “today” or “right now”. If you don’t have sun at ground level, good luck flying anything with a tether without interference from whatever objects are blocking the sun.

Overall, what’s at play here is a residual urge from AWE to automatically assume being airborne just naturally desirable, but I think that is just a bumper-sticker echo in our minds. I don’t see a compelling reason to make solar airborne. But the sad thing is, that takes us back to musing about the possibilities of AWE, which does not seem to be panning out for anyone yet. :slight_smile:

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AWE successes in the broad sense (no or small electricity production) are kite surfing, boating and carting.

As you know, all in ASWES topic is hypothetical or just experimented a little. Maybe by talking about it, it will eventually exist. :joy:

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Hi Pierre: In my opinion, citing things like kite-surfing as AWE is a stretch - one more example of the human folly of substituting words for reality. “We” started out talking about replacing wind turbines with kites, based on a fun experience: kitesurfing. What to call the “new” (actually old) idea of the wind not only powering an energy collecting apparatus, but elevating it as well? Well at forst it was "high altitude wind power (HAWP), but when the envisioned heights began to decrease to low altitudes, it was changed to just “airborne”(Airborne Wind Energy) - at any height!

As time rolled on, the “visionaries” were not seeing much success, slowly realizing talk was one thing, doing it was another.

At some point, what had become “AWE” began to retreat from its previous claims of “replacing those dreaded windtowers”. The idea that the towers were such a terrible part of wind energy, easily dispensed with, diminished, as the immense mental acuity of the AWE kitesurfer geniuses started to look less certain, and so as a weaker talking point, the idea that kitesurfing itself WAS “actually” AWE began to gain traction among AWE wannabes. Without ever achieving their original stated goal, they nonetheless attempted to claim victory by merely redefining words, which seems to be the main skill many wannabe AWE people actually have.

Yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe - talk, talk, talk. I think the first thing would be to have a reason for solar to be airborne. The only reason I’m seeing is because AWE isn’t working out, so let’s put some solar on a supposed “AWE” system, and pretend it is a solution. But a solution to what exactly? :slight_smile:

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This topic started with a device producing only solar, the author expecting to more duration of sunshine above clouds. Why not to add high altitude wind energy, using a single device?

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OK, well, go ahead. I guess we’re back to High Altitude Wind Power (HAWP). Have fun! :slight_smile:

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The image (see the turbines on the leading edge and the solar panels on the extrados) and the text (“Strong Wind and Sun Light in High Altitude”) seems confirm the orientation towards an ASWES, although an ambiguity remains in the “Project Overview”: “a land-based electric generator to produce power (left picture, image 2).”, the image 2 showing a winch. Perhaps this is a combination of fly-gen and yo-yo modes. In any case, the use of solar energy does not seem to raise doubt.

The wing and solar could be achieved by using lighter material (solar film integrated in fabric).

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OK, as I was saying, the only sensible place for solar on an aircraft would be to keep it aloft, then you might be dealing with adding heavy batteries if it is supposed to remain airborne overnight. So such a scenario might make sense for a kite-reeling or skygen craft that doesn;t need to land, if it could be light enough.

Of course then you get into “tether-weight”, and the whole AWE scenario goes back to day-one from 16 years ago, trying to even figure out basic concepts and where to start!

However, I would be very skeptical of Toyota. Do you know the real story of Toyota? They started out manufacturing oil-engine-powered weaving looms for fabric.
So when people deride Japanese cars “powered by sewing machines”, they are onto something.

The one thing that makes me wonder if anyone at Toyota these days “has both oars in the water” or “is playing with a full deck” (of cards), or might be “a few sandwiches short of a picnic lunch”, is their endless pursuit (or at least talk) of hydrogen as energy storage. Who told them this was a good idea???

As amply-covered in this forum (by me, of course) is the abysmal performance of hydrogen as energy storage. Nothing else even approaches the ultra-low level of efficiency of the entire process of using hydrogen as energy storage! If you charged your phone or car all the way up, then found a 12% charge on the meter, you’d freak out, right? Well, that’s what you get with hydrogen.

The only thing I can think is politicians and maybe even the people in the boardroom running large corporations know nothing of science or even simple 6th-grade math! So, to me, any press-release breakthrough from Toyota should be taken with a grain (ton?) of salt.

They did a good job with hybrid cars such as the Prius, but beyond that, a lot of what they come up with seems like nothing more than symbolic greenwashing, or complete ignorance of basic science and math, again, at a junior-high-school level!

Renderings are nice. Favorable articles are nice. Wow, another article with an impressive rendering promising to “harness the jet stream”, “power 1000 homes” etc. How many of these come true? We all know the answer by now.

How many of these stories ever come true, or lead anywhere whatsoever, beyond buying the company a few temporary brownie-points to get thru the propaganda onslaught from delusional tyrants spreading ignorance as “science” and demanding compliance with their ignorant demands? :slight_smile:

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Wow, what a difference a couple of hours can make! Today’s latest (yawn) “press-release breakthrough”: Solar Power from Space! (They don’t mention HOW the energy gets back down to Earth! - Microwaves? What could possibly go wrong? Sounds like a new weapons system to me…)

30 MW space solar plant to send electricity to Earth by 2030

Now, given the odds that any single “press-release breakthrough” comes true, what do you think the odds of this story coming true actually are? Given the previous “sure success” of AWE, should we take bets?

BTW, did you see the costs of manufacturing the system? What is that, about half
a million dollars per house? They don’t include the cost of launch to orbit, the cost of the receiving station(s), let alone operation of this system to power maybe a few hundred (they claim just over a thousand) houses.

And there is NO MENTION of safety - do you want to be caught in a multi-MegaWatt microwave beam? Why not? What if the wrong person gets control of the aim and intentionally re-aims it toward populated areas? What about a quick conversion of a powerplant to an out-of-control adult version of chasing ants around with a magnifying glass in the sun? How would they prevent such an obvious possibility?

Anyway, why bother with flying solar farms, when you can just take them to orbit?
Or why bother with ANY of this, when you can just issue another “press-release breakthrough” and all the idiots will totally believe it, and by the time it’s supposed to be executed, they will never notice, having all forgotten they ever heard about it, too busy reading all about the NEXT “press-release breakthrough”… :slight_smile:

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The solar device mentioned in the initial post describes a reversible electrolyzer fuel cell.

I tried to collect some information:

From the pdf available on the website:

Specifications:

  • High performance reversible PEM fuel cell
  • Dimensions (w x h x d): 54mm x 54mm x 17mm
  • Total Weight: 69.7grams
  • Color: Blue or Transparent
    Electrolyzer function:
    When applying an electrical current (solar or D.C power), the
    reversible fuel cell acts as an electrolyzer that produces hydrogen
    and oxygen from water.
  • Input Voltage: 1.8V ~ 3V (D. C.)
  • Input Current: 0.7A
  • Hydrogen production rate: 7ml per minute at 1A
  • Oxygen production rate: 3.5ml per minute at 1A

Fuel Cell Function:
When applying a load, the reversible fuel cell is able to generate electricity from the hydrogen and oxygen gasses.

  • Output Voltage (Parallel/Series): 0.6V(D.C)
  • Output Current (Parallel/Series):360mA
  • Power: 210mW
    Before applying a load you must perform electrolysis and capture sufficient hydrogen and oxygen gasses as in the previous steps.

These figures suggest that a reversible electrolyzer fuel cell would weigh tens of tons at 1 MW range.

Electrolyser alone:

Weight approx. 36 t (operational)

The reversible electrolyser fuel cell would probably be far heavier.

If we add the mass of the water to be carried, we obtain something much too heavy: literally it would be a factory carried by an aerostat.

The factory would have to remain on the ground if this solution was adopted. Thus the balloon would be inflated by the hydrogen station (such as can be found to power the rare hydrogen fuel cell cars). And the electricity supply or complement of supply at night (or when no wind by night for an ASWES) would also be done on the ground using the fuel cell hydrogen function from reversible electrolyzers.

The balloon would produce electricity only by day.

An ASWES would produce electricity by day and when the wind is blowing.

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More “evidence” that we may find solar uses in AWES

OK Interesting Engineering website has spouted garbage reports before but
Hey that looks like a solar drone _ Cool

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My Comment:
***** Round trip efficiency: ~12% *****

Who needs energy storage at 12% efficiency???
As usual, any promotion of hydrogen as energy storage must ignore simple arithmetic. It boggles my mind how a story as full of holes as Swiss cheese can be foisted on politicians, famous for being bad at math, resulting in, as one example, a former bodybuilder, Arnold Schwarzenegger, announcing California’s “Hydrogen Highway”, which was, for anyone who understood elementary-school arithmetic, a nonstarter. Then we get to wait 20 years for it to disprove itself and be dismantled: no customers, all stations closed, even within the unreality of such a misguided and delusional state.

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Apparently airborne isn’t enough for solar
There’s a large looking (1km wide) Chinese plan
For space based solar coming along

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Very impressive. About space-based solar power:

There are essentially 3 different ways which can be used to send energy down to Earth from space:

  1. Mirrors can reflect sunlight directly to a point on Earth where it can be converted by solar PV or other solar technologies
  2. Lasers could be used to send the energy collected in space in a concentrated high-power beam, but can experience higher losses due to weather and atmospheric scattering
  3. Microwaves represent another option for beaming power down to Earth, but can be operated independent of the weather and experience lower losses (essentially, it’s a more powerful WiFi or your mobile phone connection)

Could the latter (microwaves) also be used for AWES or ASWES?

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