Hi Rod: Thanks for saving me the trouble of posting this.
Their stock has rebounded a bit, but still a fraction of its price in February.
My take:
This is just one more “press-release breakthrough”, authored by the company themselves, as a public relations exercise to maintain optimism for their investors.
If you read through the recent communications carefully, they don’t really say much, and I wouldn’t put too much faith in them. They say data will be available to customers. Customers? (They have customers?) If they have good data, why not make it public? I’ve seen this movie too many times before. I’m not buying it. I believe in the fullness of time, we’ll all see this story slowly fall apart. What would be nice to see would be a story that did not originate in the company itself. Obviously they are going to walk on eggshells and carefully play word games to make everything sound great, but personally, I don’t believe it.
It is both satisfactory and vital to see that the February installation of Dragon 12 has resulted in a three-month period of successful production testing.
I read this as they were able to perform testing for three months without the equipment breaking down. And they were able to capture data to support their business case.
I think this is nice progress report. Looks like they are making some progress. Probably still not there ready to deploy hundreds of these, but that should not have been expected so soon.
Yeah, well, “as you read” is just “as they wrote”.
Where did it say the equipment didn’t break down?
They said uninterrupted testing, not uninterrupted production.
What happened to the thousand homes they were powering?
Where are all the happy people with electricity they didn’t have before?
Where are the suddenly unemployed people who were previously powering this area?
Oh wait - tides are predictable, but still “intermittent”…
How many Kwh or MWh did they produce in 3 months?
Key information mysteriously missing…
It’s easy to just read press-release info and just accept the message as it is hopefully intended to be (mis)understood.
But what is the real story behind it?
Either we will see a lot of these happily powering a portion of our civilization, or it will fizzle out as one more press-release breakthrough.
With our background I think we know a bit better how to read between the lines in these news stories (though the news value is indeed limited). Im sure they would have liked to share the information you want, so the fact that its missing probably means they didnt get there yet.
Though as it stands, I don’t think Minesto commited to a certain date. What they are presenting does actually look like steady progress
[note when I say our background I dont intend to compare them in any way, I just mean your background and my background]
OK well, none of these “powering X hundred homes at remote location Y by date Z” stories has proven true so far.
Let’s remember the original press-releases:
They were supposed to “power 1000 homes” using an intermittent - what was it - 1.2 MW device?
If it ran at full power 100% of the time, that would be 1.2 kW per home.
Maybe if they were small houses with coal or gas for heating, cooking, etc., you could power a home with 1.2 kW continuous. No air conditioning or heating, maybe no hot water… I know my home takes a 10 kW wind turbine (which actually produces 12 kW) and I end up with extra at the end of the year, which i only recently noticed, and started heating electrically. But I would not even notice a 1.2 kW turbine - well I had a couple of them running, and did not notice any difference. but I wasn’t looking that close.
But I’m thinking this tidal turbine might have a similar capacity factor as wind turbines and solar, about 30%, because the tides are not always moving at top speed, if at all. So maybe they could produce 350 Watts per home on average? That casts doubt on their first claim of “powering 1000 homes”, as a start. But it does fit the pattern. Next, this project was not announced as just some test - it was supposed to be the real deal - a ready-for-prime-time installation to power a certain number of homes.
But then even THAT story is quickly watered-down - now it’s just “a test”, “verification”, getting “data”, “reducing uncertainty”, you know, stuff like that.
If they wanted to make good on their original claim, and pretend they were in fact powering 1000 homes, full-time, for 3 months, they could have included the only relevant data required to back up that original statement, which would have been how many MegaWatt-hours they produced in 3 months. Then even dumb kids like us could have done the simple arithmetic (maybe with the help of a teacher) to figure out if that original headline about the 1000 houses was correct. Based on their original statements, the ONLY relevant outcome was how many MWh they produced - that’s it - but they did not provide even the slightest hint as to what such a number might be, so… :0…
Big tether fairings
I have been wondering about tether drag for Minesto because the physics involved for subsea tethers is more demanding than for flying devices (forcing a very short tether). It is interesting to note they installed the fairing.
Also interesting to see they installed real 3D fairings rather than tustles. I would think the latter would be much easier to maintain and handle…
Did you mean tussles? I’m not following anyway.
Hi. I am actually not sure what the term is. I was referring to those thin strips of leather that could hang on the back of a country style leather jacket.
I have seen those being used to reduce drag on seismic streamers, a use case nearly identical to Minesto’s I suppose.
The device I am referring to is a simple one made of thick tarp, sewn as a tube into which the streamer is inserted, then having triangular tarp patches hanging after the streamer.
The device is cheap and easy to handle, eg. it could be put on a reel. A solid fairing I suppose could not do that.
I think its easy to make the design for subsea components too fine and detailed. Things grow subsea, parts need to be coarse and solid. For instance, I expect a solid fairing may grow stuck quite quickly. But these are just guessing and speculation. Time will show if Minesto’s fairings do the job or not.
At 0:35 on the video, we see the modular fairing.
I thought those were called tassels, but google says it is either that or “fringe”. Towing streamers with them:
Note the thin cables, you could wonder if that still works with thicker cables.
For under water flygen I like Minesto’s solution better:
- Likely much better hydrodynamic performance.
- Less likely to catch seaweed or to foul due to the smoother surface and the likely anti-fouling coating, and with that have a likely similar cleaning schedule as the kite. Cleaning a coated surface should also be easier and quicker than cleaning that much fabric all at once. Their business plan calls for servicing every 6 months, but it had been operating without problems for 4 months at the time of this talk so I think the speaker is implying longer time between servicing might become possible.
- Likely modular, so likely easier to make, to replace or to clean individual parts. The airfoils are never in focus in de video, but you do see dark spots at the chord line, which might indicate bolt locations to bolt the two halves together around the cable. You can imagine during servicing that makes it still possible to check the cable itself.
The airfoils do have sharp edges. If they are not aligned during operation that might be a place for seaweed to collect.
The talk has mediocre subtitles so it isn’t the easiest to follow. Some takeaways: partners are interested in hundreds of MW to GW scale farms; tidal is not correlated with other renewable energy sources, which is good; tidal has market potential particularly in Indonesia for example where other renewables are less viable than you’d think; total power delivered is important, so it’s better to focus on that at the cost of capacity factor; future work is also on developing larger kites that can also get closer to the surface and that can extract significant power from relatively slow moving water, which no other technology can. This leaves out a lot, so go watch the talk if you want to know more.
Hi Guys! See Minesto’s stock price, above, now down to the equivalent of just 7.7 cents per share. Jump in and buy if you still think it’s going to succeed! 
Minesto is interesting to us because even though it is underwater, it uses “a kite” pulling a turbine through the water, so I guess in the off-target language of AWE, it is a “drag” machine, right? (Two layers of lift = drag?)
With water being 800 times as dense as air, Minesto has that density as an advantage over airborne systems, albeit with slower current speed than wind. But the larger advantage, in my opinion, is the fact of buoyancy in water replacing the need to elevate the apparatus in Airborne versions of such “drag” systems, such as Makani, where gravity seemed to be the biggest challenge.
Anyway, as one who has designed, built, run, and even sold various wind energy devices, I’m aware of the difficulties of developing a reliable open-flow energy system. With Minesto, I was a bit “on the fence”. The advantage over Makani, of easy flotation, as opposed to the kite needing to lift the turbine(s), did not quite seem sufficient to result in success. As usual, I suspected the biggest problem with these “drag” systems was their main feature: the kite.
My description of this phenomenon is “It’s a great idea… except for its main feature!”
So a few years back, DaveS and JoeF of the old forum were quite optimistic over Minesto, because it used “a kite”, and was the brainchild of engineers from Saab (jet airplane design).
Well me? I already knew that expertise in wind energy did not equate to even advanced degrees in other technical fields, even if seemingly closely related. I remember another guy who designed jet engines saying all the same stupid things all the other wind energy newbies say, and figured the same was probably true of underwater “wind” energy, only moreso, with less established background knowledge to work from.
But the real reason I went out on a limb and predicted Minesto would be just one more “press-release-breakthrough” that never panned out was simply that Joe and Dave said it would succeed. That was all I needed to hear, after suffering years of them saying things that made no sense. I basically decided, if they were in favor of it, it must be a bad idea. So I placed my bet on the problems being more influential than the positive aspects for Minesto, as so often happens, and that it would eventually fail, based only on Dave and Joe predicting its success.
This seemed a way to finally test the veracity of the endless nonsense from these two guys: They were taking the naive position of simply believing the Minesto claims of future success, thinking they had a grasp of the relevant factors, whereas I saw an opportunity to prove how lost Joe and Dave really were, by using their very predictions of Minesto’s impending success as a negative indicator that pointed to a future failure of Minesto, despite a quite well-executed attempt at their kite-based concept.
More recently, on this forum, both Roddy and Tallak seem to have joined with Joe and Dave in predicting success for Minesto, so we can add their predictions to the list of not comprending the basics, assuming my predictions turn out to be accurate .
Well, Minesto hasn’t quite completely failed yet, but rather completed “successful” testing (that was supposed to have been more than just testing, but…)
I just checked their stock price, and if you had invested at the peak price of 30 Swedich Kroner per share, you would have lost something like 98% of your money, because their stock price is now down to 0.715 SEK, which is about 7.7 cents.
Now a price this low could be a great buying opportunity: One could quickly double one’s money just by “noise” in the price based on some lingering bit of positive-sounding “news”, or just other people bidding up the price for no reason other than the low price itself.
My assumption is that the combination of salt-water intrusion, barnacles, tether problems, not to mention steering a kite and all the inherent problems with that, the cost and effort to even install and maintain the cables to get that power to the grid, resulted in unreliable and inconsistent operation. One might note that these projects were said to be grid-tie systems placed into regular operation, but the projects were stopped. If they were working well, wouldn’t we expect them to still be operating today? But no, the projects that start out as finally getting well-developed, working systems installed and operating are later described as mere tests.
I’m guessing they’ve gotten to the point of seeing “There are a million ways to make SOME amount of power from an open flow, at SOME cost, but most will not turn out to be economical solutions. In the case of Minesto, it’s probably way way too expensive to even keep their contraptions running than the value of whatever sporadic electricity they might provide.
Anyway, it seems that maybe some investors are more tuned in to the real information about Minesto, and responding by selling shares before they lose 100% of their money. So I guess we’ll have to “stay tuned” to find out the exciting conclusion of this story, but as it stands, things are not looking so great for the Mjnesto project.
I dont think I ever predicted success for them. I remember having severe doubts. Though I also remember seeing them as an interesting project that could succeed.
Now it seems we are approaching the final answer to the question «Will Minesto succeed?» and its not looking good.