Kitekraft connects flying wind turbine demonstrator to public grid❗
We are excited to announces that we connected our first demonstrator to the public grid. This is the first of its kind, flying-generation, airborne wind energy system, that gets connected to the public grid globally! It is a key step on our path towards commercialization, as all generated electricity, even from our prototypes, will be sold to the municipal utility company Gemeindewerke Oberhaching. This is the first time, energy generated from an airborne wind energy system, will get paid for in Germany. […]
Oh Geez, I was thinking of kiteMILL, not kiteKRAFT. I’ve never even noticed kiteKRAFT with extruded aluminum wings and a Makani-esque design before this moment. Sorry, but I also failed to notice the exact wording specifying it only applied to a skygen/flygen system.
Well anyway, here’s a list (that comes to mind anyway) of onboard-generator (skygen) (flygen) systems that were promised to be grid-tied: Magenn - an early non-starter of an idea that raised something like 7 million if memory serves Makani told us for years they were just about to power the grid in a portion of Hawaii with their flygen system, with everything all ready to go, We had a guy associated with the previous forum telling us he had a spy in Hawaii keeping an eye on developments there, None of it ever happened. Altaeros was repeatedly said to be powering a small town in Alaska (small grid), with their too-frail-to-not-fail tubular skygen aerostat/blimp, but that seemed to have evaporated.
More recently, we have the Mauritius story of a groundgen (kite-reeling) system powering the grid there, as well as at least one kite-reeeling system said to be connected to the grid in Germany?
Also we have all those stories of test sites in Ireland - aren;t they grid-connected?
Hard to keep all these stories straight after awhile.
Maybe I should stop trying to even pay attention to all these stories.
I dont remember Kitemill ever claiming to power homes. Officially we did not yet produce kite power to the grid. It is a goal, but for us a bit pricey as our site is far from the nearest grid connection.
I hear @dougselsam you get annoyed by claims of powering N homes. This is obviously just an attempt to make AWE articles more accessible to the non scientific part of the worlds population. Any serious claims would certainly be in terms og kilowatt and the duration and variation of such. As you didn’t hear those expect it didn’t happen. Though I might have missed some progress outside my own bubble
Hi Tallak:
What I meant to say was I thought of the KiteMILL VTOL Kite-reeling airplane, when I saw kiteKRAFT (name) announcement. To me, all the Kite-this and Kite-that, k-power, k-this, k-that, etc. all fall into the same basket of my highly-unorganized mental filing cabinet, and I tend to get all the so-similar names of the “million flies”, and all the rest, mixed up, probably due to not really taking them very seriously after all these years. Or maybe there are just too many of the million flies to merit taking them very seriously, or remembering which is which. I do like the KiteMILL airplane though.
Its ok. Until we have better results to show, we are very similar to the other actors. I don’t think we are on a higher moral ground than the other ones also, but it’s nice to point out the times we maybe are.
I get just as annoyed at the supposed “journalists”, “authors”, “reporters” etc. as I do the companies themselves. I think most of the people writing the articles are themselves non-scientific, just repeating what they have been told, usually misquoting the supposed-future-statistics as it is, usually saying some device will power X hundred homes “PER YEAR” of “for a year” which makes me ask “OK so what happens after a year is up? They can no longer power X hundred homes? What is there, an automatic shutoff that is triggered after a year?” The writers don’t even know the difference between energy and power, which is energy per unit time. So they quote power, then still add a meaningless unit of time at the end, just to show how ignorant they are to any actual astute reader. It’s all fluff, based on ignorance.
