kPower LLC filing

Analysis Company Development
21

Answering kPower questions whose answers were cut-off when the AWE Prognosis Topic was suddenly shut down.

Luke,

Airseas and Skysails seem to be more partner/merger consolidation candidates, not fight-to-the-death competitors. There are plenty of ships to put kites on, and they need each other to advance fastest. SkySails is also pivoting onshore.

Olivier,

kPower has never had an employee. We are a sweat-equity co-op, with around 100 folks so far who have made vital work contributions, people you may not yet know anything about. Recall your surprise that the AWE Documentary was kPower (pilot premiered at AWEC).

Most of the greatest kPower figures are now very elderly, but real. Dave Culp himself was a quiet kPower founder, even as he sold KiteShip out to Makani/Google. Do you know of our close Boeing veteran engineering circle, with an exclusive MOU partnership long already in place?

We now have our own “Oliver” too, a military trained master rigger of massive parachute-drop payloads, paratrooper, paraglider, certified industrial rigger/climber expert. There has also been French kPower collaborations, like Gipsa Lab TUGrenoble. Even PierreB has long been a welcome collaborator online, and his work will be honored just as it is found effective.

Wayne German is back in the kPower orbit. He is a key AWE visionary who led Boeing’s Flight Research Institute after McCready and Rutan before him. Keep old Joe Faust in mind too, as the soul of kPower, with his Old Forum and vast 50yr+ Archives, unmatched by any other player. No other AWE venture has so such royal kite blood.

Joe and I were really excited about the Kiwee-beta offer, just as kPower duly tested a Dan Tracy Pacific 40 historic AWES product, then donated it to the American Wind Power Museum, a path you have so far specifically cancelled, citing cost. Beware judging reality from Forum posting only, and cutting off beta-partners like kPower. Watch out for relentless new competitors, who will see nothing in AWE as too “booooring” or costly to undertake.

Then don’t forget kPower’s Open-AWE_IP-Cloud, with serious IP, including quality Patents by an A-list of pioneers, and a mountain of published CC art. TACO 1.0 is still the most authoritative overview of FAA FAR AWE compliance for the emerging industry. AWEIA is not dead either, its draft Code-of Conduct, and other forward-looking industrial foundations, are in place. kPower played a key role in these contributions.

We were also essential to organize HAWPcon09, the first major conference, and we hope to bring conferences back into overseas rotation (Seattle is long lined up, at Boeing MoF), if the secretive AWEurope venture insider circle that took over AWEC will relent. Meanwhile EU AWE lives in a bubble, a tool of Google.

Kitewinder is long invited and hoped to provide its best video for future production rounds of the AWE Documentary, as AWE matures. You are always welcome to team-up with kPower in any way, that’s what open AWE is about; we are not currently competing with small product dev, but can help with ongoing design refinement. We are playing the long big game, as long as it takes,

Good Luck, Lift,

22

Glue-trap alert. Beware of mistaking what looks like “solid ground” for a discussion, for something that will support you in conversation. Look to your left and right and check for other hapless creatures struggling to escape. What you think is a simple, straightforward question, with simple answer, that can shed light on a situation is, in reality, your first step onto a surface that will not support your attempt at an honest back-and-forth, but is instead a dark, sticky mess that can only draw you in, as each attempt at escape pulls you, limb-by-limb, ever-deeper to the glue of nonsense, and never let you go. Such glue traps are opposed by many animal-rights advocates, as excessively cruel, due to the duration of unreasoable mental suffering and torment suffered by whatever creature is unfortunate enough to mistake the glue for solid ground.

27

Now that you yourself revived this thread - I find it suspicious to say the least that you talk about kPower as a company, presumably involving more people, presumably having had some funding to do R&D on kites. Still you are not able to find any information to prove that this company is just not a product of imagination.

As an example, I will share some information about my “one man” company (unrelated mostly to Kitemill):

Not that these should be interesting to anyone except myself. But they do show that running a company of a certain scale does in fact leave some traces on the internet.

I find it strange and also disturbing the way that you do not reply with any factual information but rather just dodge any question with “counterattack” after “counterattack” to other companies/europe. These comments add absolutely no value. Please remember that you were the one to keep mentioning kPower time and again.

At this point my conclusion must be:

  • You are on purpose dodging the subject
  • kPower is just yourself
  • kPower never had any funding to speak of, nor any other employees

I’d love if you could correct me, but please no more irrelevant distractions to other subjects.

Now, if I am right about kPower, there is actually nothing wrong about that, and I appreciate your efforts into promoting AWE and the experiments you are doing and have done. BUT - to advance AWE will probably take more than just optimism and use of spare time. My time at Kitemill has shown me that progress in AWE must be done in painstakingly small steps each taking pretty substantial effort. I believe no one-man company will be able to “break the code” on AWE. It will take a team effort.

In fact, the way you quite often mention how “kPower discovered this” and “kPower tested that”, it would seem it was always only you? Is this just a way to make you claims seem more substantial?

You keep badmouthing other players in the field - the rest of us just end up believing that you are jealous of their success in terms of getting funding and getting a team behind a common effort.

Let me break it to you - these other teams are quite competent. They actually know what they are doing (to a certain extent) and they believe they are on some right track. If you are so sure that you are the only person in the world who is sitting on all the correct answers, while everybody else is wrong, I think you should spend some time thinking about this first. When you have done that, please return to the forum thinking that each person here is a source of valuable ideas and thoughts, not just someone to needs to be taught the singular truth.

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28

Yes Tallak, you are wrong about kPower, and also wrong to flag as you do while allowing yourself to “badmouth” and be factually mistaken. You are also posting off-topic comments as you wish, without my censorship. Please quote offensive comments if you wish them fairly answered. I will continue to invoke kPower, and allow anyone to identify as they choose.

Good Luck to all AWES ventures, regardless of credentials.

29

Questions about moderation go here: Questions and complaints about moderation.

30

A post was merged into an existing topic: Questions and complaints about moderation.

31

Lets let Tallak stand on his written comments then.

Thank you all for any sincere critiques, even as mine may not be welcome.

The Old Forum contains good discussion on what a voluntary association is, and its traditional rights. kPower is indeed incorporated (twice), but that is not what makes an AWE venture real. What counts is the people, the ideas, and the AWES prototypes. Let anyone think otherwise.

32

Example of badmouthing (though I won’t spend the time to make an exhaustive search):

varied concerns publicly raised since AWEC was privately created in 2010 by a closed insider group dominating to this day

This year has seen major mishaps of high-risk high-complexity AWES architectures; a low- MTBF statistical pattern long predicted by various expert stakeholders. Especially menacing architectures are the premature scaling down-selects of Google’s Makani and AWEurope’s leading venture insider members, like Ampyx, Kitepower, and TUDelft.

At least US and China AWE R&D is not Makani-Shell PR-distorted research; that venture recipe has been adopted by…Norway, who also now fills the AWEurope lead position, by the KiteMill CEO. Let them boycott China and US to look progressive. No that, won’t happen. Its really just a small inside club minding its own narrow interests.

A decade ago there was a lot of EU venture optimism for rapid AWES commercialism and deployment to poor emerging economies. The failure of these hopes by technological incompetence owed to an elite academic top-down venture-capital cultures

If Ampyx made its Flight Logs public, there would likely not be very many hours between crashes, and no hours logged operating the AP3 from a catapult perch. All that “safety” is pure speculative marketing.

Kitepower is currently withholding crash data on where its UHMWPE tether dragged and ended up, especially whether it draped across Valkenburg traffic and pedestrians. The safety reporting offered is very incomplete, and reflects venture capitalist self-interest more than sound aviation sector precedent.

Yes, AWE R&D involves a lot of crashing, as a pioneering aviation field, but should not involve a lot of venture-capitalist cover-up.

We can go on at great length about unwise Kitepower engineering design, like how its operational planning, power electronics, mechanical reeling, and software all failed together in its Valkenburg crash.

We both know key people in both ventures. Its the now classic Cowboy vs Playboy AWE cultural divide.

https://forum.awesystems.info/t/awe-prognosis/258/74

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33

Tallak,

Its quite valuable for any of us to question critically. Please have natural doubts about kPower and its affiliates, as I have doubts about AWEurope’s ventures. Let time prove which side was more correct.

It never hurt the Wright Brothers that European public opinion labeled them as “liars”, and that they lacked the formal business (Maxim) and academic credentials (Langley) of their contenders in flight. Venture capitalism has its own vulnerabilities. Whichever AWE R&D culture prevails is what counts. We may yet work all work together, if not under the Google X model.

Thanks for the tolerance of differing opinions. Its not easy for any of us. If I must go, at least keep Doug on. He’s not so bad.

34

Your words are nauseous almost anytime. What does that mean to have doubt about European venture? What do you want to say precisely? There is not complotism between Europe and USA regarding AWE. We all have doubt about kpower and about your presumably discovering and testing everything on any Awes architecture. You send me a mail 2 days ago to teach me rope drive when obviously you never had anything that worked on that subject, telling me we made bad design decision and that it is now too late to save kitewinder. Man open you eyes, kitemotor 1 is not even workable, not counting the fact that it is ugly. Regarding design, I like to think that something beautiful will work better that something that is not.
And please leave Doug apart from that, he is not concern about that.
As you finally manage to upset almost everybody with you perpetual nonsense, I am currently checking your sayings on some particular points, like your presumably collaboration with French gipsa lab in Grenoble.

35

As an informal association, kPower can be seen as a test bench of different AWE concepts. So kPower has some use.

36

I got my response from gipsa lab today. I won’t name people but I know them for 4 years now.
I can now say that no collaboration has ever occurred between Dave Santos Kpower and that lab. Some emails have been exchange, gipsa lab has evaluated Dave Santos arch and… That 's all folks. Results of this evaluation may have not been consistent enough to continue investigation.
I am done with that subject. Not there for that anyway.

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37

Thanks for the confidence, Olivier. If only you were as curious about KiteMotor1. Gipsa collaboration consisted of online and conference interaction with Lozano, Hably, and Dumon. A benchtop wind-tunnel experiment of an arch kite, as a scale model Mothra, was tested in Grenoble. Professor Hably was kind enough to give credit at AWEC, when the work was summarized. You will not name your source as a matter of how you operate (not Open AWE).

Tallak, I don’t just buy Chinese kites like a typical Norwegian kiter. As a lifelong Sinophile who lived under the same roof with a Cantonese engineering PhD, and as a lifelong supporter of Tibetan Rights who also protested Tiananmen Square, I also have multiple Chinese business connections in the modern kite industry, and helped curate traditional Chinese Kites at the World Kite Museum, and made a comprehensive literature and artifact study of their kite traditions spanning millennia. Close affinity to Chinese kite culture and people is not the same as PRC regime support. Pray for Hong Kong’s freedom. Free Tibet! Free the Uyghurs!

As already stated, kPower is a real corporation that started in Delaware and was reincorporated in Texas, but has opted not to pay State Taxes, to conserve capital for projects like the Kite Landboard EV. Its understood that simply paying back taxes will restore kPower to full compliance. The Norway LLC path looks cool from here. How much would it cost to buy into your corporation Tallak? kPower has the kitegod heritage and DNA, and if EU paperwork has competitive value too, the combination is ideal.

I do often praise the EU players that seem to me superior, like SkySails, and many outstanding EU individuals, from Wubbo on down. Its Google who I have long found to be the worst player. They could have funded 300 AWE ventures and engineering schools worldwide, at one million USD each, and AWE would be farther along. Google has also long cooked AWE online search, which is an unfair business practice against everyone else. Funny if anyone thinks kPower is worse. We are not. Let excluded players single out kPower for attention, while kPower singles out Makani. Its now about public Mishap Reports, and MTBF, LCOE, and power-curve data.

Thanks to anyone for melodramatic challenges to kPower’s extraordinary claims. Allow some time to carefully review cited comments that may have seemed factually unsupportable, time to marshal years of supporting references and evidence. Clearly not all EU ventures can survive the coming big shake-out rounds in AWE. Public and private investors deserve more than just AWE marketing PR, they need access to critical viewpoints in a free-speech dynamic.

38

Answering Olivier regarding KiteMotor1. Maiden Flight Coverage of Kitemotor1 confirms it worked in front of a large audience in 2007 at the West Coast Climate Convergence.

Let Olivier call it “ugly”, but its a DIY turbine of carbon-fiber, foam, and nylon, driving a line loop to a groundgent, almost ten years before Kiwee. The “quick and dirty” engineering goal was to be first to design and fly a groundgen AWES autonomously. Dave Culp, the Master, answered the 1st phone call ever made with AWE.

Kitemotor1 is now in the World Kite Museum Permanent Collection, available for inspection and retesting. WKM also covered KiteMotor1 demonstrations at WSKIF (Aug 2007) in its newsletter, The Flyer. Kiwee is cool too, and its an actual product.

KiteMotor1 Press Coverage copied from Old Forum archives-

HIPFiSH Columbia-Pacific’s Alternative Monthly (Aug.-Sept./2007)

“Possibly the best example of sustainability at the 7-day West Coast Climate Convergence was the successful maiden voyage of David Santos’ Portland KiteMotor. Like a modern day Dr. Frankenstein. Santos, a Quaker educated aerospace roboticist & bike nomad from Austin, Texas, crept the night collecting materials for his invention. But instead of cadavers the KiteMotor is comprised of such salvaged pieces of trash as fishing poles, a wine cork, & electronics rescued from dumpsters & yards around Portland. Santos glued his contraption together in the “bowels of Clown-House” where he has been staying for three months & calls himself the “Clown-House Science Officer”.
Santos led onlookers to a campground on the Columbia River about a half-mile from the Convergence campground in order to find good wind. Four assistants were needed to get the system off the ground as a crowd unaffiliated with the Convergence gathered to witness a debacle. After three failed attempts a cheer went up as the turbine hanging from the kite strings took flight & spun madly in the wind- its own strings turning a reel connected to a generator on the ground & a flashlight & a dead cell phone. As the reel spun, the flashlight flickered & the bars on the cell phone jumped to life & for nearly 30-seconds there was power before the contraption’s generator weak-link parted.
The 500 gram flying weight prototype generated about 8 watts at 6 volts, but according to Santos, who says kite generated hydrogen may mean the end of big oil, is capable of at least 200 watts flying higher over a bigger generator. Santos calls the new energy “sky juice” & marked the occaision by using his cell phone to call a mentor [Dave Culp], & exclaim “I’m making this call using kite energy!””
Kyle Cassidy, covering the West Coast Climate Convergence in Skamokawa, Washington

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39

Correcting any misimpression that kPower cannot do beautiful product design, as well as hot “ugly Betty” proof-of-concept prototypes.

image

Perhaps no AWES venture ever designed a more beautiful part, not just esthetically, but as a higher-order integrative AWES solution.

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40

Windy Skies shut down the AWE Prognosis topic just as Olivier asked about kPower staffing. Here is the answer prevented from posting, as a kPower company development issue.

Olivier,

kPower has never yet had a payroll, its all been sweat equity, professional work on speculation. I remember being just as mystified about WoW Italian analysts, that they were not familiar with this typical “American style” venture start-up model.

The wide kPower circle is seen in countless videos and posts over many years. For example, the video just shared on the student project topic was made and hosted by my biz partner, Ed Sapir, with years of hard work on all kPower aspects. Joe Faust, a key kPower person, is a member of this Forum. The core circle is small in number, but talented and persistent. 2019 132m2 kite testing on the Texas Coast was four of us.

The wide circle of professional collaborators over the years is very large, with many national and international figures. Starting in 2007, kPower can document more co-workers and collaborators than almost all AWE ventures. Our mentor list includes some of the greatest figures in kites; if quite elderly, still with us all the way.

kPower’s community was built from Drachen Foundation and KiteShip’s circle, with major presence in the nearby early Makani circle, and many other players. Hidden behind the PR glare of Makani and AWEurope players, ours is a quietly expanding global kite-pro AWE community, with active direct communications between dozens of major figures in kites and applicable engineering fields.

By the way, folks, the legendary AWE visionary, Wayne German, is back in contact. We worked together the summer of 2007, as KiteMotor1 took shape, and he continued to collaborate when KiteLab Portland transitioned to KiteLab Ilwaco. Payroll never came up, but lots of visionary AWES ideas did.

Its takes a serious but loving work community to advance greatly. I personally would not be anything in AWE without so much great collaboration. Someday kPower can have its payroll. Meanwhile, its an avoidable expense and distraction.

41

Dave: In my opinion, it was quite noteworthy for you and Joe to have played whatever role you had in organizing the first High Altitude Wind Power conference in Chico / Oroville in 2009, and starting the original Yahoo chat group for Airborne Wind Energy. (Though I was disappointed with the now-typical internet urge to squelch any conflicting opinion or factual information if the “moderator” can find a reason, no matter how strained).

And I agree that outside criticism of kPower’s “official” status as a business entity is meaningless, since it is results that count, not how, nor with whom, such an effort is officially-registered, at any moment, that matters.

But what results can anyone point to since 2009? Any articles? TV shows? Videos? Reports? Anyone citing the significance of achievements of kPower besides you guys? What about Dr. Peter Harrop’s group? Do we find kPower in anyone else’s articles covering supposed achievers in AWE?

So, God bless you four people for your enthusiasm, but don’t you think this ongoing self-promotion has about run its course? Can you point us to sources outside your small circle of talkers that share your own impression of your own “company”? What would you say is your most noteworthy wind energy project, and what results were achieved?

Ed Sapir was nice enough to visit here several years ago. His main topic of conversation? Plans to develop cargo pods for bicycles, based on cutting 5-gallon buckets in half. My impression? I listened politely, but thought it sounded more of the all-talk format I’ve come to expect from you guys. My impression was it was one more “project” that would never be completed.

Hey it’s OK, we all have dreams and uncompleted projects. But we’re not all calling our own people “legendary” for their uncompleted projects. Dave, can you show us any independent articles, videos, etc., about kPower by anyone else besides you guys? Anyone calling Wayne “AWE’s legendary visionary” besides you, and maybe Joe, or Wayne himself?

Many people have lots of ideas. For every successful new invention, there are often hundreds, or even thousands of people who can rightly say “Dang, I thought of that!” But there’s a difference between mere “brainstorming”, or publicly blurting out any passing thought that courses through one’s brain, and doing meaningful research or developing useful concepts or products.

My impression is this internet chit-chat may be counterproductive, in the sense that merely posting one’s daily thoughts, even if they amount to just unwarranted delusions of grandeur, gets tiring and redundant to read, while possibly serving to distract your group from actually doing anything.

It’s easy to say “we are great”, or to have a small circle of friends claiming each other is great, legendary, visionary, etc., but I’d be more impressed to see results, and especially results recognized by someone besides your tight circle who seem to have evolved into mostly just “drinking your own Kool-Aid”.

Compliments are best served by others, not ourselves. I’d recommend you give it up on the internet chat-group self-promotion front, and do something significant, at which point you might not feel such a need to keep claiming each other as key achievers in wind energy, but let others see your accomplishments and comment thereupon in independent venues.

What I’ve noticed is most AWE attempts can be easily explained by very old childrens’ stories and parables, such as “The Three Little Pigs”, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, etc.

Anyway, can you please provide a list of independent sources confirming the wind energy accomplishments of kPower, and the legendary status of the kPower personnel?

Thanks. :slight_smile:

42

Doug,

The information you request is archived on the old forum.

Good Luck with your SuperTurbine.

43

I am unable to edit the post above, due to improperly restrictive software.

Ed Sapir did in fact make a large production run of cargo bike paniers. They were not split buckets, but nicely crafted. He also helped with KiteSat’s small production run. These are coveted items.

Its Doug’s ST that has never neared production, despite PopSci mega-publicity.

44

How much carbon neutral energy are these bike paniers predicted produce? only as the technology matures of course.