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Going forward I will move most comments that I would normally delete to here, if I remember to. That should be better for transparency and keeping track of things. I will still delete comments that should be deleted, but after moving them here.

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Good point Pierre: It’s been said the key to getting the right answers is asking the right questions. In this case, “The question” seems to keep repeating: “How much money can we raise?” Well, I’d say McBlarney, with their almost unlimited funding, answered that question: It doesn’t matter, since zero times any number is still zero. A bullet of any size, aimed incorrectly, will not hit the target. “We need a bigger bullet!” No, you need to aim in the right direction. My take is people need to start asking a better variety of questions. Seems possible the answer might be found without having to spend much money. Certainly, “just raising a lot of money” is not guaranteed to bring success. To me, if you can’t power one house, thinking you have to build it bigger and you’ll power a thousand houses is foolhardy. “But people won’t take us seriously unless we build a really BIG one!” OK but isn’t that “The Professor Crackpot Syndrome” in action? - How well has it worked so far?

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Sorry I realized this link was redundant to a previous post by Pierre.

I*'ve found these sort of contests can become a great distraction. There is an endless parade of them. Takes you from working on your actual art to filling out forms where you are encouraged to concoct overly-optimistic statements of how many million tons of CO2 your project “will” cause to be avoided, etc. Take all such statements and add them up and you’d find they are really just a heap of lies you “need” to tell, hoping they will throw you a bone, while they are really just sucking your imagination dry while you try to jump through their stupid “hoops”. They get you all hyped up thinking “if only I win, my troubles will be over!” (like McBlarney?) but in reality, it takes you off your game, reducing you to the level of the people you wait in line behind as they take all day buying lottery tickets at a convenience store. As one whose research has even been funded by the government, I can tell you most of this stuff is a waste of time. If you know what you are doing, do it. There is nothing stopping you. If you want to play these games, you are playing someone else’s game. Play your own game. What did they do for McBlarney? When you see a worm dangling in the water, look for the hidden hook. If you are an ant sniffing some free food, think of how you will feel as the hidden ingredient takes effect and you are upside-down with your legs twitching. I’ve tried a few of these contests like the GE Ecomagination Challenge for example. Just the application process is so exhausting you may realize at some point you could have put all that energy into offering a product, however simple or basic.
Every such contest further delays your actual progress. After a few such “can’t miss” “opportunities” you will have no energy left to actually DO anything. If you check my website, it’s still asking for people to click on this and that to support the GE Ecomagination Challenge. Today, GE has been kicked out of the Dow Jones Index and their stock is worth only about $6. Their price-to-earnings ratio is now infinity, since they no longer have any earnings, (or negative earnings) with many analysts predicting their impending demise. The accumulated disgust after falling for so many of these borderline scams can really end up having the opposite of the supposedly-intended effect, instead just using up your energy and taking the wind out of your sails.

There is nothing more frustrating for people in wind energy, than the level of ignorance often displayed by those who claim to know all about it, and sell you either some whacky excuse for a wind energy system, or their compiled ignorance “report”, for thousands of dollars, while not comprehending a single relevant factor, the whole time.
Similarly the whole field of AWE is mostly populated by a similar level of noncomprehending ignorance.
And it gets worse. Basically it’s ignorance piled upon ignorance, piled upon more ignorance, easy to see in many cases, once the years have rolled by and it becomes easy to see the almost universal lack of results, despite over a billion spent, and thousands of supposedly smart people participating. Well it’s actually always been this way in wind energy. Either you know what you’re doing, or you don’t, and it does not matter how much money you have, or how many “engineers” and “PhD’s” are hired. In wind energy, either you get it, or you don’t. Just as many of the very best guitarists, like Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix, never read music, talent in wind energy is rare, and not necessarily related to academic credentials. In some fields, you can’t “hire” your way out of simple ignorance.
What did McBlarney show us? That flygen can’t work? No, they just showed us that they were one more “Professor Crackpot” effort powered by cluelessness. The glaring classic “Professor Crackpot” symptom in that case: “We need to make it really big or people won’t take us seriously!” Well who is taking them seriously now?
The only people stupider than the promoters of these reports are the people who would buy them!
:slight_smile:

OK We’re talking about McBlarney as it relates to the flygen/skygen kite-lifted turbine(s) in general, and I don’t think it would be accurate to say McBlarney disproved that whole entire design or conceptual space, only that their particular final implementation seemed very disappointing. Not sure about their earlier, smaller versions. Just because they chose to do it a certain way, doesn’t mean that’s the only way. They went down one road - doesn’t mean it’s the only path that could be taken. OK this is reminding me of the words to Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin…

Oh, OK I thought he was just a well-known “visionary”. I mean, I sat on a board of wind energy experts at an investor conference, next to Corwin Hardham. I had thought Corwin was the founder of McBlarney. Anyway, Corwin himself was OK with me making fun of McBlarney, or so he said to me. He was an easy-going guy who just took things in stride. (Too bad some people don’t know when to quit partying when some big internet company wants to buy them out …)

I attended the second world AWE conference at Stanford, and yes, Fort Felker was there. I could tell it was really because NREL had enough curiosity to at least want to see what was going on in AWE - not be totally left out if it showed any promise. But I was kind of surprised too, because he really didn’t belong there. Like a fish out of water.

Fort Felker was the first and only actual wind energy person I know of to ever participate in AWE (except for people helping me). Out of all the real wind energy people, he was also the one who attended the conference. Coincidence that they hired him away? Google had money burning a hole in their pocket, so all they had to do was exceed his government paycheck. But it was a bad fit, because if an administrator type was what they needed, why did they go then down in flames? Something told me when they first hired him, it was a bad omen, probably the beginning of the end for McBlarney and their flying McBlarney-stone.

Then again, maybe Fort’s contribution was to let them know he wasn’t sharing “the vision”. Maybe he provided a glimpse of reality. But reality can change if we apply our imagination - that’s progress! The whole idea that they got stuck with a too-large, too clumsy prototype, and that meant they had to “just give up” was silly, I think. They had barely dipped a pinky-toe into the design space, barely scratched the surface of possibilities. And now everyone thinks AWE was just a bad idea. Well, there are bad ideas, and there are bad implementations… (At least they tried!)

“McBlarney”

Hi Pierre: Impressive-looking watercraft. Looks like they are not having too much luck getting anywhere near 80 knots. Another case of all accomplishments in the future? Well, at least they have a group selfie… :slight_smile:

Well, right on schedule, MSN (Bill Gates’ company) feeds me endless nonsensical “game changer” clean energy “breakthroughs”. In this case, as I’ve been asking so many times lately, if sails for container ships is a good idea, why don’t they just use, well, sails?
Company begins construction on innovative wind-powered cargo ship — here’s how it could revolutionize the maritime industry (msn.com)

It uses regular sails - as sails! Sails! like a sailor would use! Another breakthrough! Turns out using regular sails can actually POWER the ship - not just “reduce fuel use”, - well, or so they say… (Bbbbut what happened to flettner rotors???)

Must have required a lot of A.I. to figure this one out! And it promises (promises… hmmm…) to REDUCE shipping time - traveling faster than regular container ships. Hope the winds are favorable!

It doesn’t LOOK like a container ship, and I don’t see any containers onboard, mostly just a lot of windows, but that’s what the article says. it can carry over 50 shipping containers, and the target market is pharmaceuticals. It has its own crane onboard for small ports without an unloading infrastructure. Supposedly already being built (of course all news is “in the future”).

Backdrop: I’ve been noticing much clean energy “news” is blatantly fraudulent lately.
OK so I put this under “news” because it was a supposed “news” article, but I’m a bit skeptical whenever I see anything similar to “perpetual motion”, which is, in this case, a car that is supposedly more charged after driving than before driving, due to “zero point energy” boosters that can produce 10 Watts each. Now 10 Watt is not much when it comes to powering a car, but any way to get 10 Watts should work at higher power levels too, or just combine many 10-Watt units to get higher output.

Well besides the idea that someone has come up with what usually turns out to be a scam - free energy without a normally recognized power input, the round number of exactly 10 Watts per unit sounds quite convenient. The thing is, if these free energy units are for real, why combine them with a car to prove it? I mean, forget cars per se - such a source of free energy could power almost everything

Couldn’t the power itself be measured, without the possible complicating factor of charging a car while it is driving? This would be unbelievable energy breakthrough news, a true scientific breakthrough, without needing a car. Anyway, here’s the article:

EV with ‘unlimited’ range tested, car battery’s energy increases as it travels more

What do you think? How could Interesting Engineering print something like this? Or MSN for that matter? Could it be real? Are the author and publishers this gullible? Or are they willing to print what they know is fraudulent, just to get more clicks?

From the guy with the long running scam producing fusion energy? If you are reading this stuff you are wasting your time.

UAE’s Masdar Delays Green Hydrogen Capacity Target Beyond 2030 – BNN Bloomberg

Funny, I was at Home Depot yesterday and when we came outside, the car parked next to us had “fuel cell” logos on the rear and side. I was like “what?” I don’t think I had ever seen such a logo on a car, and it was a compact car that looked a bit beat up.

I was wondering where they get their hydrogen from, since I had heard all the hydrogen stations in California, remnants of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Hydrogen Highway”, had been closed(?)

The idea that anyone familiar with 6th-grade math, and the inefficiency of each step in producing, compressing or liquefying, storing, distributing, then burning or generating electricity, from hydrogen as a means of energy storage, could take it seriously, let alone dedicate millions of dollars toward such a hopeless, mistargeted, and inefficient goal, could lead us to believe that there must be some “derangement” factor knocking people off balance, to make such absurd decisions.

Yes, hydrogen is a great fuel, already powering our entire civilization, best used in its natural state here on Earth, bound to a carrier, which is not adsorbent metallic substrates or anything else you read about in “press-release breakthrough” articles, but rather hydrocarbon molecules, using carbon chains as a carrier. Who knew? The world is full of idiots, not restricted to AWE! :slight_smile:

So numerous and, to me anyway, obvious, that if someone doesn’t comprehend them, they never will, but which an 8-year-old should be able to grasp. :slight_smile:

OK, so anyway, trying to wrestle with the constant moving of conversations from their original, exactly targeted “topic”, to “slow chat III” or whatever whim is in force on any given day. The continuity of this conversation has been ruined by this arbitrary and unnecessary restructuring, but it goes to the general incompetence seen across the entire field of AWE.

My point is this. My comment, above, about renderings and charging a phone was meant as a short way of saying the following:

We’ve watched as one startup after another raises lots of money on the basis of renderings, only to create the next failure, ostensibly running (very rarely) out of a 20-foot half-shipping container. Why? Why do they need millions of dollars and why does it always have to be the same 20-foot half shipping container?

Here’s one example of a simple fact from regular wind energy that the AWE wannabes don’t seem to grasp: If a large version of your idea will work, usually a small version of your idea will work too. So if you have to start with a certain size, a smaller size is easier, cheaper, and quicker to build. It’s called “proof of concept”. The idea is you learn at a smaller, quicker, cheaper size, and only build larger, more expensive versions after you get a smaller one working well first. As i said, this is stuff an 8-year-old could easily grasp.

So I think someone said this particular company or group has been around for several years, and counting. And in all that time they have renderings, and that’s all. So if they have the expertise to do such a project, why don’t they demonstrate it at a size that is easy and quick to build, and when they can show how well it runs, and maybe if it is supposed to be automated, show that automated operation to investors, THEN think about building a bigger one?

But no, they already KNOW they are geniuses - of COURSE their idea will work great on the first try. What they need is YOUR MONEY! Only THEN can they build one, and they will bypass the small, proof of concept stage, because as Professor Crackpot always says: “We need to build it big, tho people will take uth theriouthly!”

Of course we know all the AWE people really ARE geniuses, with GREAT depth of understanding, design and fabrication skills, so their GREAT and indeed already PERFECT ideas WILL definitely work on the first try, so there is no point in working their way up a learning curve starting with a small size.

Nope, they need your millions of dollars to build one that can “power 50 homes” or whatever fantasy number they dream up, and the predictable (to some) result is, they end up with nothing, because as it turns out, they had never thought the whole thing through in the first place, but their renderings sold the idea to some gullible investors, and they all end up with one more predictable (again, to some) unworkable AWE failure.

And like the La Brea Tar Pits, no matter how many animals before them are mired in the sticky muck of failure, after being tempted by the apparent simplicity of an “easy kill”, it turns out that this next inexperienced-yet-overconfident newbie too, becomes stuck in the muck, with their corpse standing as one more stark reminder of the dangerous reality of the Tar Pits, which is, of course, ignored by the next overconfident wind newbie, and as the saying goes “lather, rinse, repeat”… :slight_smile:

I think wannabe AWE must be up to what, maybe 100 skeletons at this point?

:slight_smile:

Sorry Pierre and Olivier,

Recopying content here does not resolve Moderation topic-splitting and topic-changing on pretexts like “no third party reference” or “no prior reference” of new ideas and terms.

Windy Skies in fact cited your Netiquette objections as the justification to break up posting about kPower’s falsifiable claimed knot state-of-the-art to Lounge, and a lot of referenced andvanced knot content, with no one able to offer any more correct example.

Oh yeah sure, another “breakthrough”. Hold your breath until the fantastic “results” emerge. Meanwhile, maybe go back to sleep and get some rest… :slight_smile: