It’s almost palpably painful to watch these “companies” make the same, predictable “excuses” in the form of some stated “advantage”. Wifi connectivity. Taking the load off tower-mounted cell phone communication stations… Disaster relief. (Remember Altaeros?)
“Augmenting” real turbines in real windfarms (Why wouldn’t they use more of the same turbines that already work? Why would people combine bad turbines with good ones? Wouldn’t they just pick the best one? So Silly!) (DaBiri)?
Here’s what’s REALLY going on:
One more “Professor Crackpot” comes up with one more unworkable idea for capturing wind energy, but, realizing their idea is as full of holes as their locally-produced Swiss Cheese, they nonetheless decide that “moving the goalpost” can extend the time in which they can maintain enough dubious credibility to keep raising more and more money, so they “switch horses in midstream”, flip-flopping on the reason their effort even exists, suddenly deciding their airborne whatever-it-is that is otherwise unlikely to be useful, can nonetheless offer wifi or cell-tower connectivity. Most people, even investors, haven’t seen this movie ten times already, so they buy into the hype. Since they mention underdeveloped areas, “disaster-relief” etc., it sounds politically-correct (makes your heart bleed for the poor people without cell phones) which emotionally takes down your normal guard against bad, unworkable ideas. Are these people even aware of what they are doing? Or are they mere programmed automatons, unknowingly falling into predictably predestined, well-worn slots of previous inept wannabe “innovators”? This idea is going nowhere, I can pretty-much guarantee, just as I did with Altaeros. It’s an excuse-driven world, at least in certain circles, Sad, very sad. But, an interesting-looking scheme with some nice renderings - isn’t that what really matters? I mean, rings with wings - who wouldn’t want to buy into such nice renderings? I guess even if they noticed it is a “vertical-axis” turbine rotated 90 degrees, they probably think vertical-axis turbines are a good idea too, just that people are too closed-minded to accept them. (back to emotions, and blaming knowledgeable people for the failures of crackpots) Not that hard to get people to throw their money away, especially if it’s someone else’s money. (Like Swiss-Cheese-funded Swiss government money?)
I’m just curious: When you see this, do you “get it” that it isn’t going to work out? That it’s a rendering-based waste of everyone’s time and money?
Or do you fall into the “I can’t really tell” camp?
"Has anyone seen my brain? I know I left it around here somewhere. Can you please call it? :0… . . . . . . . . . .
We discussed brainwhere earlier, I dont remember anyone giving them much hope with their current design. Who knows, maybe a pivot…
I agree we need to change our mindset: When was the last time you were without wifi (or 4G cellular which is now basically as fast and mostly free) OR were in a disaster area desperately needing electricity (and at the same time worried about the emissions of the diesel generator you could have had)
Now think: when was the last time you filled your car with $100 worth of gas, or paid the utility bill of $200.
Now think: where would I go to make money…
Selling to disaster relief is a nice thing if it happened, and could be important for a growth of a company, but its not what you should be aiming for long term
Yup we discussed “where’s my brain” before (How did they pick such an appropriate name I wonder?) and I used the same joke, but this time I added a new joke for this Swiss company: their theory has as many holes as the Swiss Cheese whose taxes undoubtedly helps subsidize their ostensible ring with wings. And the device has holes too - one big hole in each ring. Gotta love those people re-inventing the wheel, eh?
Yes I put $100 of gas into my vehicle regularly, and it only gets about 11 miles per gallon (4.7 km/liter) but my electric bills hover around zero since we have a 10 kW wind turbine on a 120-foot tower here, already installed when I bought the place. It’s almost airborne - always appearing overhead against the sky - even has 3 tethers (guy-wires). Always launched, always ready to spin up at the slightest breeze. It can make power for 30 seconds during a dust-devil then shut down again, all automatically. It can start and stop as many times as needed during indecisive winds. Quite a breakthrough compared to prior AWE systems with such issues as when to start, how to start, when to stop, will they crash?, etc… At some point it will require major servicing, at which point I’ll have to decide whether to replace it with new solar panels for the same price as merely servicing the wind turbine. I remember in 1999 Gasoline was 99 cents/gallon, and I had a minivan I could drive all day long on five bucks. Those were the days… Still waiting for gas to get cheap again.
1.5 years later the website is still up. No sign of progress. Last tweet in April.