This specious and threadbare argument does not stand. Indeed @JoeFaust , Dave Santos (@kitefreak), Chris Carlin and some others believe in a future for AWE.
In the process of creating a new industry, such as AWE, every approach is valid as long as it progresses towards the establishment of common ground. Every single endeavour is contributing to raising awareness and learning more about this complex and beautiful technology whose potential is to majorly contribute to the global energy transition to renewables.
Here the role played by failure essentially stands out as an implicit ingredient for pioneering recipes.
At Kitepower we have embraced these constructive values and developed our way to marketability based on two core features: Simplicity and low cost of failure.
Substantially, soft kites are much simpler, lighter and a lot cheaper than rigid aircraft which allow for a clearer roadmap to a viable commercial product.
We send our best wishes to Makani and truly hope to see them standing up stronger than before to walk the Airborne Wind Energy path together with us towards a new sustainable future!
Completely agree! We can all learn from each group that is trying to tackle this monumental challenge of developing an airborne system. Pioneers have setbacks and yet they always trudge forward. Makaniâs approach of being secretive and elusive has obviously not sat well with some in the industry. Thatâs their right. Throwing stones now is absolutely useless and non-productive. Garner what information we can and use it to learn from.
I suspect the tight control over media output has allowed speculation to become a bit sensationalistâŚ
Weâre obviously not immune here⌠See the title of this thread⌠There is no shutdown.
Still a going concern at Shell. So itâs Party on Makani, and Party on Garth!
Do not we conclude too quickly. It may be the sinking of a submarine, being ready to resurface.
True we do not know much. I had heard weeks ago that Google was about to get more serious about getting rid of âmoonshotâ projects that werenât working out. Astro Teller (the guy who runs Goog-X) was interviewed on the financial channel and what he had to say seemed like just a bunch of typical blah-blah blah. Maybe Makani can do better without the deep pockets that encourage spending but not necessarily results. Then again, maybe the people involved know better than most if the concept has been running on fumes for years without the true potential that was originally envisioned. At least they explored an idea. Sometimes you have to settle for negative results. Negative results are still positive, in the sense that something was tried, and knowledge was gained.
Oh classyâŚ
See if you can guess who wroteâŚ
I donât see Makani shutdown, if it appears to be a real shutdown which is not for sure, as a bad thing. Design was weak from start, that is one of the reason I start my project. Scaling was probably another big mistake, too big too fast. That might result on a focus on other company which is good, or maybe put awe in the shadows for some time until something interesting comes up which is also good. Well maybe funding will become harder but I believe you can achieve greats things even with low funding but with a good team, good strategy and good idea.
Tallak: âI call BS on this one. Lots of people will always predict failure of anything new. This is because people are inherently resistive to change. The arguments put forth by people doubting Makani are not in depth enough to be taken seriously.â
Chris Carlin and other early aerospace observers identified many critical flaws in the Makani architecture, in public, on the record. Summarizing years of doubts, the flaws concerned low-safety, high-cost, high-noise, poor-scaling, over-complexity, and low-power-to-weight.
Its odd if Tallak thinks Makaniâs failure was only lack of funding.
March 19, 2009 [Post #6 in old forum]
Dear Harry,
I spent 30 years in the aerospace business. Iâm convinced that youâre absolutely right government funding and the paper mill that goes with it is the kiss of death. If your technology is good pursue it privately for a profit and you may achieve success. Government funding is great for keeping engineers employed but not much good for getting a product to market.
Regards,
Chris
__
His other posts under âchristopher carlinâ in old forum:
6, 21, 72, 79, 80, 91, 130, 159, 170, 174, 213, 219, 440, 445, 608, 655, 705, 752, 754, 802, 803, 857, 859, 937, 958, 1411, 1635, 1918, 1934, 2879, 2887, 2924, 3098, 3099, 3155, 3251, 3260, 3334, 3550, 3974, 3999, 4070, 4526, 5531, 5557, 5632, 5644, 5718, 5721, 5727, 6141, 6345, 6676, 6680, 6686, 6688, 6706, 6710, 6853, 7247, 7338, 7387, 7752, 7985, 7990, 8000, 8004, 8250, 8434, 8466, 9769, 9828, 9862, 9864, 9867, 9875, 9914, 1000, 10191, 10226, 10228, 10231, 16244, 16286, 16287, 17120, 18641,18656,18759,18760,18973,18974,19322,19324,19326,19333,19337,19342.
5 posts were merged into an existing topic: Is âAWEâ already "commercially viable? - off topic discussion split from [Makani shutdown]
Right now, there is a lot of speculation and time will tell what really happened. I tend to agree though, that Makani took on a monstrous task without a lot of thought of developing a minimum viable product first, testing, and then scaling. We chose to go the route on MVP first. Thatâs a perk of having a CEO who has 27+ years of new product development from IBM and Xerox. We follow the TRL matrix, as some others in this industry do to. You canât develop a product starting with the end game first. IMHO, Makani was new, novel, and they had a lot of money early on. They may have been caught up in their own hype. It happens.
I believe some quick calculations might reveal that they needed to go multi kite for the next scaling step⌠If they told Google this, that could explain why they figured too much time was necessary.
This would mean that they changed plans, giving up the M5 (5 MW).
A bit more perspective of Makani from Andrea.
See the picture at the top of the article⌠Love your tiger jumper Andrea but, Whatâs with the skinny blades mixed with the massive paddles on the turbine blade rack behind you? Optimising for VTOL on one sponson and generation on another?
It looks as they are the same blades with different pitches.
Well not that most of the AWE wannabes wanted to hear it, but my original assessment a decade ago that pretty much nobody pursuing AWE knew what they were doing, or understood even the basics of real wind energy, was resisted by the wannabe wet-behind-the-ears perpetual newbies with all their millions of gullible funding, endless nearly identical promises to power X hundred homes with the obligatory â500 kW systemsâ, was absurd on its face to people with wind energy experience. I was sometimes chastised or outright censored by the suddenly anti-censorship Joe Faust of the now defunct âold forumâ (Yahoo Groups) for my short-version sarcastic-yet-now-understandable simple explanation of âidiots, idiots, idiotsâ.
Kind of like if you knew how to drive a car, and some kids said they were going to jump a car across the grand canyon and land safely, it was a slam-dunk trainwreck in slow motion. Only a mater of time. Seems like the typical AWE efforts have suddenly shifted from âall accomplishments are in the futureâ to ânow defunctâ or as I often warned was typical of all wannabe radical new wind energy innovations âThey quietly go awayâ. Well Mark Barnard was right about a lot of things, but I donât recall him ever saying anything about SuperTurbine-type machines. Off the radar screen of outside âanalystsâ. Funny how the working system, running for two days at the first HAWP conference, built for less thaan $1000, that actually could run for days unattended, got so little attention once I stopped actively showing and promoting it.
Just one of probably many possible AWE solutions that could yet emerge to surprise people as an economical wind energy solution. I think Barnard made a lot of good points, but he was wasting his time analyzing idiocy rather than seeing possible workable approaches might have legs in spite of the highly-funded, heavily-hyped dead-before-they-started wannabe efforts by so many people and groups who, as it turns out, were either chasing unworkable schemes, or at least not getting their chosen schemes to work well. It got pretty obvious to anyone really paying attention after a few years when all the promises made slowly failed to materialize, one after another. Well, just remember who first told you this would happen. :)))
Hey if anyone still has the keys to the Makani super computerâŚ
I heard Protein folding is in vogue for fighting COVID19
If you have a computerâŚ
Also if Google still have itâŚ
My older bro does this stuff for a living⌠He said elsewhereâŚ
There is an impressive amount of science aimed at this. IIRC, CryoEM machines and the Diamond light source have both been used to get positions for every atom on the surface. AlphaFold has figured out flexibility on the key proteins. The major problem I see is the caution going into the drug and vaccine development. I think now is the time for a bit of risk (and locking up any lawyers who get in the way).
@Makani
Dudes, what happened with the crash then?
What went wrong? Go on tell us.
Iâm going to suggest a new suspect mode for what caused the crash⌠Line twist wasnât released before reeling in, so that when the cable was recoiled ~ 9/10ths way back in, there was a significant torque along the remaining short section ⌠This probably didnât get time to be observed for control compensation in the NLMPC⌠& spun the wing over into the brine. Drat.
Go on⌠Definitely was eh�