Hello Tallak:
I’m not seeing any similarity between the inflated steel towers with a turbine floating on a piston at the top, and the Kite-X turbine. But I DID happen across a whacked-out video about it on Youtube:
(1) Kitex CEO: Showcases Electrostorm Rotor - YouTube
For years now, so many videos on Youtube are just clickbait, with nothing meaningful to say, often showing stock footage of piles of hundred-dollar bills and generic lab techs wearing white coats and safety glasses, generic “business people” sitting around conference tables, etc. The “narrator” is apparently AI, using recorded voices, because they always get pronunciations wrong and emphasize the wrong words in sentences.
It says KiteX got the idea from kite-surfing, but never explained how a kite has anything to do with a fair-weather turbine on a short, temporary tower. The AI computer also said something about having sold, what was it, 1800 turbines? Or did they mean the price was 1800 Euros? Not sure if KiteX had anything to do with that mistargeted clickbait video being produced, but it is way off target and has nothing factual to say. The only thing I noticed is their footage of it running shows the shaft wobbling a lot. Maybe I noticed it more since, with my short attention span, I need to run videos at 1.5x speed.
Anyway, back to the video of the inflated tower, I will say, for one thing, Makani had a patent on a SuperTurbine™ with an inflated tower/driveshaft. Copycats. But the wind resistance of such a fat, lightweight tower, would interfere with rotor performance and tend to be blown to a horizontal position along the ground. Still, just goes to show, all roads lead to SuperTurbine at some point… (Oh no, he said it again!) 