Interested to know what materials and kites you favour for South Pole AWE
@Ollie found our old ram air kite turbine rotors difficult to use in the snow
The pockets would fill and the turbine became too heavy to operate
Dave: Nobody has seen a single shred of evidence of any working system from your circular-firing-squad, including your latest meme talking-point, JAL.
Talking about Antarctica, my house, or a thousand other âlocationsâ does not make a working system. All talk is just that: all talk - nothing more. 
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Single skin kites from Flysurfer? Anyways I dont hear a lot about this during winter hereâŚ
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I have still not seen any evidence of any such AWE system in regular operation, no record of continuous use, no data regarding cumulative energy production for any happy customer. If I had I could be recommending such systems when people ask. Didnât we recently hear a manufacturerâs offer to actually âoperateâ any such âautonomousâ system purchased? Very strange. Seems like maybe we could be putting the cart ahead of the horse in trying to see just how remote we can go with system siting, at this point.
Replying to @Rodread
For Snow Kites, Single-Skin or Valved Parafoils will do. Kites have been successful for decades in Antarctic Exploration. WindSled uses NPWs 20yrs now with no issue over undue snow or ice accumulation.
Antarctica is one of the driest places on Earth, so large amounts of new snow are not a factor. Wind-driven ice crystals are a factor, not so much at the kite as at surface hardware, to be cleared as needed.
Cool Idea- Rope-driving might be done under an ice surface, in self-maintained tubes. There would be a learning curve in how to set and maintain such novel power conduits.
Wow, that looks like fun!
Donât feel bad about not making much power.
Wind energy is a field famous for shattering peoplesâ dreams.
Improving on what has become the industry standard is just not an easy egg to crack. Letâs face it - the standard design has enjoyed 1000 years of refinement. But you never know what can happen, if you just keep trying!
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JALâs circle has not yet tried âmaking much powerâ. We focus on basic enabling R&D at small scale and will try making a lot of power when ready. 2030 is still our critical path target to scale up.
AWE is no âshattered dreamâ to us, but truly a âdream coming trueâ.
Yeah, well, after 14 years of big talk, why is that exactly?
Youâd have to be making some significant power now, to realistically meet that deadline.
Sounds like a future rock star explaining why he isnât quite ready to pick up a guitar or step up to a microphone yet, but donât worry, just wait for him to die of old age, and heâll get right on it.
I remember reading about a guy who thought he was such a genius that he could easily beat the stock market. He started a trading fund, and convinced a lot of people to invest, and then started âgetting ready to get readyâ. Never made a trade. Just wasnât ever quite ready. I donât remember the rest of the story exactly but it was a cautionary tale of situations to avoid.
I think your problem is the âEâ part of AWE. AW seems to be where youâre stuck. You know how to get something airborne in the wind. When I first encountered you guys in person at your first High Altitude Wind Power Conference, I quickly realized you guys liked to fly kites, and would never be able to generate significant power. It was that apparent to me - just like the sky is blue. It was like a teacher seeing a kid and shaking his head thinking âthis poor kid is just never going to get itâ. But yet you had organized the conference. SO that shows there is a huge difference between a fan-boy and a practitioner, and that wind energy R & D is a completely different skill set than organizing a conference, or hosting a website. Because what I thought has come true after this many years and you still show no hope of generating significant power - stuck at AW - with no E. No E wanted, actually. It is still just as obvious as it was then. Thatâs OK - nobody necessarily expects a conference or internet chat group organizer or a chat group host to also BE a leading practitioner of the SUBJECT of the conference or website. In fact that would be very unusual. Usually a practitioner would be too busy practicing the art itself, to have the time or inclination to host a conference or chat group. Why would they? If they knew what they were doing, they would want to develop their solution and talk about it later. They would not be super-inclined to try and sprinkle all their ideas out there to create a hundred more-capable competitors, right? It would only be someone who liked the idea of AWE, but couldnât really think of any way to do it who would spend their time organizing either a conference or a chat group. So if I were you, and Iâve said this for years, I would stop pretending you have any wind energy solutions to offer, if you canât show anything that generates significant wind power. What is the point of saying you will go from nothing to solving the puzzle in the next 8 years of you have basically nothing after 14 years so far? What, suddenly a few cloth triangles are going to change that? I mean, how many âthis is itâ ideas have we heard floated by now? So many promises. So few resultsâŚ
Answer: AWE is a ânewborn babyâ. Working at subscale is a far faster and cheaper strategy to test a lot of ideas. Premature scaling is a trap. Doug is welcome to share his scaled-up AWE if he has done the homework.
Goddard would never have succeeded if he had tried to build a moon rocket. He did brilliantly with what he had.
Hey Dave (for anybody who does not realize Iâm replying to Dave Santos who is using Johnâs identity to post here) you continue to sound like the proverbial âbroken recordâ with the ânewborn babyâ crap, as usual. How many years did we suffer you constantly trying to âdebateâ everyone over whether AWE âwasâ a ânewborn babyâ? Just a bunch of stupid-talk! I of course agree that scaling up too fast is a major mistake that so many or Professor Crackpotâs minions tend to make, like Makani, but for you it is just an excuse to do nothing, and excuses are your stock in trade.
If you wanna know the truth, I think it is YOU who are a ânewborn babyâ in that it seems that you have perpetually âjust fallen off the turnip truckâ. I remember about 6 years into the current hype-cycle and I was saying you and your goofy cohorts were
wind newbies", and rather than say âNO Weâve been doing wind energy for six years now!â, you instead agreed that you were still a newbie, and used it as one more of your excuses, almost blaming me for not teaching you about wind energy. Not that I havenât tried, but you remain unreachable. Like I said, I had that feeling a teacher must get when faced with a kid who will just never âget itâ when I first met you⌠Meanwhile, you had been talk-talk-talking about AWE for six (6) years, which is more than enough time to earn a PhD in wind energy, yet you still basically didnât know your a** from a hole in the ground. I say the reason you have not made any power has nothing (zero) to do with âscalingâ. It is because you donât have any idea how to make AWE work. I think this is by now an established fact. I could tell you would never be able to do wind energy upon meeting you in person, and you have proven me correct, so for you to keep saying you âwillâ is meaningless to me. If you are, then you will, but you never do, so this is maybe the tenth time Iâve cited âThe Boy Who Cried Wolfâ as the story that best pertains to you. Iâd LOVE to see you take that electric skateboard and make some airborne wind power pulling it up and down the sides of a pit. Iâd recommend you use a sheet of plywood to get a flat surface. But it doesnât matter. All youâd come up with are more excuses, with no way to measure power, because you have stated you think the entire wind industry is too dependent on power meters. Sure DAve, so is the electric company, and that is how they know how much your electric bill will be every month. Know what MY electric bill is every month? ZERO. Why? Because I donât just TALK about wind energy, I practice it. This is my third Bergey turbine (because even Bergey is not perfect and they are the market leader in small wind) but I always have something running here. Right now we have the Bergey in the backyard and a partly airborne dual-rotor superturbine in the front yard that has been running continuously for about ten years now with no breakdowns and one set of new blades due to blade erosion - a common problem in real wind energy, that almost no AWE person is even aware of, let alone ever experienced. And why is that? Because you have to put some mileage on your machine before you will see blade erosion, and no AWE system has been run for long enough to wear out the leading edge of a blade. Iâll say probably no AWE system has been run long enough to even scratch the paint. So there you are again, with âRobert Goddardâ - as though you compare to the father of rocketry! And âThe Wright Brothersâ as though your excuses could compare to their accomplishments. Dave, give it a rest. Your talk carries no authority here, and is perceived as meaningless comedy, and for me, a waste of time responding. Let us know when you have your Jalbert system up and running, as you said you would do, and show us the power it is making in real time on proper meters! This will never happen. How do I now you will never get your Jalbert system running? Because you promised us you would, and anything you say is opposite to reality, so that means you wonât. Sorry to say, but it is as simple as that.
Hi Doug, your wishes below are granted:
All this is true, and we know that your turbines work well. But if, as you say, the âEâ standing for energy is missing for the JAL devices, it is possible that the âAâ for airborne is missing for yoursâŚ
This brings us back to the crucial point missed by all AWES: a wind turbine producing consistently and significantly in flight and at a decent altitude. And now everyone is stuck, and this for as many years.
Maybe to try to get this unstuck, we could go back to the initial post mentioning the energy potential of high altitude winds.
Perhaps instead of trying to implement an AWES crosswind that will actually be a turbine with a large radius of action but low efficiency and angle of elevation, the simplest would be a conventional wind turbine suspended under a large lifter kite or/and a balloon. @Kitewinder has done it and it doesnât work too bad: itâs steady, it produces constantly, and it flies. All thatâs left is to scale it up and automate it further.
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@dougselsam I will answer you in your own words:
"
Improving on what has become the industry standard is just not an easy egg to crack. Letâs face it - the standard design has enjoyed 1000 years of refinement. But you never know what can happen, if you just keep trying!
"
JALâs 2030 target in alignment with the global agenda is only a few years ahead. Doing in two decades what has taken others over a thousand years wonât be a bad thing after all.
Pierre, you are singing my song. The Kitewinder system is superior to the other systems. The turbine is oriented to face the wind and so there are no cosine cubed losses and the device can operate at much higher altitudes with a relatively short tether (cable drive). We should be working on lifter kites which provide more lift at high kiteline angles as well as autonomous launch and land of the lifter kite which controls the whole system.
Hello Pierre: That is EXACTLY why Iâve been saying âidiots, idiots, idiotsâ for 14 years now: The absolute simplest and most obvious AWE approach has been ignored - nobody even bothers to try it. Everyone would rather over-think it. Silly.
And speaking of âsillyâ yes that video of the skateboard shifting back and forth for a brief moment does look silly. Typical of the circular firing squad. However, I think I should qualify my previous statements about this group to acknowledge that they (or at least Santos) DO know about kites, and if I wanted some kite information, I would consider Santos a good source.
DaveSâ response:
"
Pierre and Gordon are now where I was in 2006, when Dave Culp and Dean Jordan came to Austin and asked me to work in AWE. I knew MSE would be ~3 for a HAWT rotor and upper transmission, and that a Lifter could automate a demo without computer control. This was about 7yrs before Kiwee decided on the same archetype to chase an imaginary market for expensive kite novelties.
Gordon: âPierre, you are singing my song. The Kitewinder system is superior to the other systems.â
Dave Culp and Peter Lynn taught me an SS kite is MSE ~1. Pierre and Gordon can now learn all this too.
"
DaveS to Doug:
"The KiteLab/kPower/JAL âPromiseâ is to âTest, Test, Test. and Test againâ, as Fort Felker asserted. JAL is constantly testing, but New Forum censorship is blocking a huge amount of content. JohnO is already too unfairly burdened and attacked to fully offset the censorship damage to the public record. Testing the Worldâs First Advanced Kite Network AWES is going well.
Let New Forum censorship be lifted for readers to review the all the JAL progress; to judge by objective evidence." Censorship is Ignorance."
As we tried to tell you and Joe when your censorship, and lying about it, were your main actvities. You are NOT being censored now. You just sent me the above message using Johnâs account. Your message COULD have contained evidence of power production from you latest claimed future accomplishments, but as usual, all accomplishments are in the future and will always be. If, this time, you are not once again âcrying wolfâ, and you HAVE an energy breakthrough, the steps to verify it are obvious and I won;t go into them again. This is like talking to a pet rock. Hello - knock, knock - anybody home in there? You can stop now. I donât think anybody is taking anything you say seriously at this point, More empty talk isnât going to help. There is no point in discussing this nonsense further.
Well, then you are ignoring that a quite big lift force is required to maintain this high elevation angle. But tou really need to include the lifter in your system model. If you want a high elevation angle Kitewinder style, you have a huge blade (the lifter) producing no energy. If you want to have high elevation with yoyo, you get less power output for the same wing. I dont see a huge difference.
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