Is anyone aware of any large company that is developing AWES inhouse?
The closest that comes to mind is the spinoff airseas by airbus. There’s also some investment from EON and the likes. But inhouse?
“On 5 September 2013, Dr. Chris Spruce, Vestas Senior Product Engineer, served as member of the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) for the kite-energy-systems project ERC HIGHWIND, a project at KU Leuven dedicated to the research and development of tethered airfoils dedicated to generating energy by airborne wind energy (AWE).”
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That’s a university project with an advisor from Vestas, not an internal project at Vestas.
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AirSeas looks like a rebranding of SkySails AWES tech rather than Airbus “inhouse” R&D. Similar deals are occurring with outside investment by companies like Shell, SABIC, Mitsubishi, etc., with a trend to bring some R&D inhouse, like Shell’s hosting M600 R&D in its offshore operations.
GoogleX’s Makani is the best known major inhouse R&D case. SAAB’s Minesto is another top case, in the energy-paravane space.
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Do you have any evidence of a connection between AirSeas and SkySails?
Skysails did go under but through company structure black magic survived. They’ve got Skysail Power and Skysail Yacht under the Skysails Group GmbH. Might have handed their large ship business over to Airbus.
Clue: Two ship kite companies using the same configuration from Hamburg.
Airbus is not in the “large ship (AWE) business” to start with. It can only partner or M&A into the tech.
What do you mean? Airseas are based in France. Do you know anything I don’t?
Airbus are operating ships as well and that’s where the first airseas systems will be tested.
The whole skysails thing could use some investigative journalism.
It seems the French office is to service the Airbus corporate relation, but the tech comes from a Hamburg branch.
Given the ongoing poor state of public knowledge of EU AWE ventures, observers like me resort to informed speculation.
Is this speculation as well?
It looks like a SkySails system, and there some shared Hamburg connection, all that is not pure speculation. Could there be a unlicensed copy made in Hamburg? Not very likely.
For comparison, we know Boeing has long been interested in AWE at upper-management level, by MOU, but lacks organized applicable kite-expert culture in-house, since they focus on transport aviation, like Airbus.
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