Per-Year AWE-Sector Activity Shares

Analysis Industry and Market Analysis
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My thoughts:
It is not known what AWE activity at any given future year will be most dominant. AWE sectors might be measured and compared by the number of participants, the number of persons served, money invested, dollar-amounts in sales, mass of systems involved, effective good achieved, visibility, media load, number of articles written, number of photographs taken, number of books written, etc. Many sectors of airborne wind energy are advancing; some sectors are being given less attention than in prior years. New foci will probably appear as the years roll in. AWE sectors: traction, lifting, electricity generation, recreation, transportation, sport, research, play, science, communications, and more.

This topic could trace the AWE sector shares. How many people are in the AWE transportation sector? How many people are using AWE transportation devices? How much electricity is being fed to village or large electrical grids? How many miles are ships being towed by AWE machines? How much energy is being saved by judicious use of upper air currents by powered aircraft? How much time is being spent by humans in soaring? How much money is being spent for sport AWES? How much money is being spent by consumers on recreational AWES? Other questions are invited to help discern AWE-sector activity shares.

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Joe why do you use such stilted, unconventional language? “Shares”? Like in the stock market? Most people would call it “info”, “information”, “Statistics”, “figures”, “data”, etc. Shares, sure Joe, make a noun out of a verb. Sure. Just to be weird, right? Well you succeeded at that, at least.
You make it sound like we’re talking about “Mr. Rogers” putting on a sweater on TV.
I think a good percentage of normal people would not even understand what you mean by “shares”. I only do from years of trying to decipher your strange communications.

Hey Joe I think you forgot a major statistic: “How many AWE group selfies are on the internet?” Isn’t that the MAIN statistic for most of the AWE poseurs out there?

There is ONE BASIC MEASURE in energy in general, including wind energy.
Do I have to explain it? Yes it looks like I do. The basic measure of energy is…
drumroll please… ENERGY! Yes the basic measure of energy is ENERGY.
ENERGY is the one thing missing from all the “work” by you and Dave Santos, and is the only thing that matters in the field of energy, whether it is wind energy or coal energy or whatever.

Even the government figured this out early on, and changed the tax credit for installing turbines that would break down, to a production tax credit - you have to generate energy to get the credit, not just hire people, take selfies, or watch airplanes fly over, trying to somehow take credit for any tailwind that may exist. Please grow up if you want to participate in an adult conversation.

I believe your and Santos’ attempts to include so many unrelated fields in the category of airborne wind energy is… just one more… of your attempts to redefine words in a futile effort to mask the fact that, between the two of you, there has been no significant generation of electric power or any other kind of power in all these years, despite the endless bragging and posturing. Mindless wandering through topic after topic, talk of “good works”, etc. Joe, if you have a AWE solution, it is to make power. Power is energy per unit time. Scientifically, Energy = Work. Whether the work is “good” or “bad”(?) is not really a technical question, but a value judgement that will vary from person to person.
If your system produces energy, that is defined as work. Since we live in a world powered by electricity as the universal currency of work, we measure work as kiloWatt-hours, MegaWatt-hours, etc.

The term “airborne wind energy” which you claim to have originated, was meant as a modification of the common term “wind energy” which means generating electricity from the wind in our civilization. Replacing those dreaded “windtowers”, remember??? Of course you COULD say it means ANYTHING YOU WANT, such as the total amount of energy contained in all the wind on Earth at any give moment, but no, wind energy refers to generating electricity with wind. Look it up. Read a wind energy magazine. Look at official statistics for wind energy output. It will not include airplanes in tailwinds, people flying kites for fun, windsurfing, spinnakers, leaves blowing in the wind, or any other of your attempts to change the subject. This is irresponsible nonsense you’re trying to inject into the conversation, to create confusion, so you and Dave Santos can continue to pretend to even be involved in wind energy.

The answer to your question of “How much electricity is being fed to village or large electrical grids?” has a simple answer ZERO!!! Just like it did when all this started 12 years ago. Zero then, zero, now. Why? Well as I’ve long explained, nobody knows what they’re doing. Very simple. Including you. Why not generate some power, rather than going on with this nonsense?

The only exception I can think of to this is that most windmills, worldwide, by number pump water. Let’s be clear, wind energy statistics do not include farm windmills. But technically it is wind energy. Do AWE systems pump water? No! Why not? Who knows, everybody is lame? Of course you guys talk about pumping water, usually under the topic of then using it for hydroelectric generation, but do you ever DO anything about it? Of course not! Joe if we took everything you’ve written in AWE chat groups for the last 12 years, it amounts to basically nothing. Probably a million words, conveying almost zero helpful information, in a supposed energy field with zero generation into any village or grid. Well maybe the people at Delfts etc. send some power to the grid in their experiments, now that I think of it. Supposedly they are flying on a regular basis, although still only “experimentally”. I don’t know about that. I guess we could ask them. But no, Makani is not generating into the grid, Altaeros is not either, or is Magenn, Minesto, KPS, “kPower”, etc., etc., etc. Nobody is powering a remote village either. It was all fake the whole time, every “500 kW” system, every future grid feed thereby, all nonsense, all just people who didn’t even realize what they were getting themselves into.

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Making something like this would require a lot of work…

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Tallak, as AWEIA matures, the tracking of data may become easier for some of the AWE sectors. AWE is barely getting started in some of its sectors, while other sectors have advanced associations wherein some data types are being traced; the sharpening of pencils for the now-Olympic kiteboarding sector comes to mind. I side with you about the amount of work for the project while many AWE sectors are scratching with relative isolation. Let’s be open to search tools, reporting tools, and bots that may help. Identifying data sources would be part of first-level tasking. Someone may grab at part of this project and make it a life’s work! Meanwhile some start may be designed. Just counting “number of companies” in a sector might be a start. How many AWE companies or corporations are serving the electricity AWE sector, the traction-of-water-hulls AWE sector, the aloft communications AWE sector, the traction of recreation/sport boards AWE sector, the scaring-of-birds AWE sector, etc.?

Doug, AWE harvests energy from the wind and then sends that energy along to perform tasks; one task that interests many people is the task of generating electricity; such task forms one of the many sectors of AWE. KiteMill seems most interested in the electricity sector of AWE. SkySails is interested in hull-tracting sector as well as the electricity-generation sector. Others dabble in electricity and also communications. Lessons learned in antennae lifting, photography, logging by AWE, etc. have potential of informing other AWE sectors.

Doug, “market share” was the clue for “activity share”.… the portion of the full AWE spectrum for a certain activity. By some measures, electricity generation is small compared to traction use of the harvested wind energy. Towered turbines have not the flexibility of service of free-flight AWE or kiting AWE. The electricity sector of AWE has the potential of service at many scales from microscopic AWE to utility-grid input and beyond. I sense a tone in your post that urges me to suggest that you concentrate on the AWE sectors that interest you; you need not get involved in the full AWE spectrum; just suggesting a bit. The full AWE spectrum will play itself out over time even while any particular person might concentrate on say just one of the AWE sectors. Easy does it; invest in the sectors that interest you; no need to diminish the other sectors of AWE. I aim to bring to the electricity generation sector lessons found in some of the other AWE sectors; indeed KAP is integrated with electric generation efforts, for example.

Doug, the total amount of energy harvested per year from the wind varies in the several AWE activity sectors. Kiteboarding is slowing the wind a certain amount. Pulling ships is slowing the wind a certain amount. Makani Power is no longer slowing the wind by tethered wings; neither is KPS. KiteLab Los Angeles is slowing the wind by its energy kite systems a certain amount; I have not calculated how much wind energy is harvested by our AWES. Ampyx: I have not seen them reporting how much wind energy they have been harvesting. Etc. Nor have I yet seen such kind of report from KiteMill.

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Joe if you look up any statistics on wind energy, it will NOT include sailing, sailplanes, tailwinds for vehicles, kite forestry, kids flying a kite, dropping bags of flour to watch the dust cloud, kids like you and Dave flying kites pretending you are doing AWE research, no blowing leaves, no air-conditioning credits for a cooling breeze, no mythical shipping of packages by kites, nope, none of that. The wind energy statistics will be in kWh, MWh, GWh, etc. or for the few people who would pay attention, measures of how much water was lifted how high in gallons and feet by farm windmlls. For most people, “wind energy” will be referring to generating electricity. Airborne wind energy will take generation to the sky. Too bad for you guys it turned out to be more difficult than you thought. Join the long parade of crackpots that hve come before you down a similar road. Nobody is even grinding grain using windmills these days Joe. Get real. I know, I know, it affects my historical sensitivities too. This whole kite sailing ships thing may not even catch on, you know. Remember, in crackpot wind energy, all “accomplishments” are “in the future” and always will be. They never happen, The perpetrators “quietly go away”, like I’ve always told you guys. Auctions. At least at the end they can say they did something - “We had an auction! On April Fools Day!” Meanwhile, I don’t think you’ll find sailboats in the wind energy statistics. Nor sailing ships. This constant attempt to redefine the term airborne wind energy is a very transparent excuse for being unable to master the art of airborne wind energy as the term airborne wind energy is commonly used by most people who are even aware of it. If you were generating significant power, you wouldn’t keep talking like this. Again, you’re just stretching word definitions. That is your real interest - changing word meanings so you can just sit there NOT doing AWE while pretending it is so complicated of a situation that nobody will notice. (I mean, you’ve got so much to keep track of, with no end in sight as long as you can find a way to add more phantom activities to the “definition” of AWE.) Or that opinions can legitimately vary since you once took an airline flight and there was probably some tailwind at some point. Why not just declare “I am king of all I survey!”? That way you can be in charge of everything, including AWE. Isn’t that really what you are doing anyway?

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If any such report was released, if would not conform to a standard format. It would probably be made to maximize the PR value of the report. Only when there are many such reports in existence would it make sense to establish a standard format.

We could rely on existing windmill standards, but AWE may be slightly more difficult to represent in graphs/numbers, because there are ways to vary the output, such as changing the tether length based on local conditions.

I think this work is too soon just now. Rather just make any AWE rig capable og making a sensible amount of energy relative to building costs. At the very least make a scaled down rig with a clear scaling path, to establish feasibility.

Makani were spendings heaps of money at this point and still had not released such numbers. Ampyx and Kitemill have also not yet released such numbers also (I think we both will eventually). I’d wait for these numbers before I put any more effort in tracking AWE statistics.

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@JoeFaust,

This topic looks to be something like a remake of the now unlisted “conjecture” topic and some other messages where you extend the definition of AWE ad infinitum, as for the old forum. This leads to confusion, as people in AWE field generally assign two sectors: electricity generation, and transport. Concerning electricity generation, the answer is simple: 0 kW/h.

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Pierre, this topic is not a remake of “Conjecture” at all. This topic is with quite a different focus. "Conjecture was about AWE conjectures. This topic is about per-year AWE-Sector Activity Shares.

AWE is an art/technology of harvesting wind energy (air, water, plasma, and the like media) by means of fluid borne objects that have by design means to cause pulling, pushing, rotating, lifting, dragging, vibrating, bending, compressing, pumping, cutting … in order to effect the fulfillment of desired practical purposes. AWE activity or application sectors form when focus and investment occur over some selected purposes.

This topic would find and display sector data.

Doug, again: it is easy to select an AWE sector and discuss the work being done in that sector.

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Joe you are off in your own little world, as usual.
NOBODY is “pulling, pushing, rotating, lifting, dragging, vibrating, bending, compressing, pumping, cutting” (or grinding grain) directly by wind energy, ESPECIALLY you and Dave Santos, kPower, KiteLab, whatever tags you wish to apply to you and Santos typing on the internet and occasionally flying a kite. The only exception remains farm windmills from the 1800’s still providing water for livestock.
If anyone WERE doing these things, your post might make sense, but nobody is, and your post does NOT make sense.
What you are displaying is the urge to camouflage your lack of success by attempting to create a “shell-game”, where you can name bizarre, steam-punk-esque brainstorming topics based on thinking from the 1800’s, that will never happen, so fast and profusely that you hope the reader will become lost in the resulting confusion, be distracted from seeing that you are actually not involved in airborne wind energy at all, except for your archiving, said brainstorming, and over a decade of silencing anyone, with common sense who would dare call you and Dave Santos out or otherwise stand up to your attempted tyranny, through censorship masquerading as “moderation”. Luckily, we are not subject to your censorship here, so we can honestly call you out and express a counter-opinion without being shut out, kicked out, or ganged up on by you and Santos with you two holding all the cards regarding the ability to post or not post.
If we stipulate that airborne wind energy is about generating electricity, moving boats, or pumping water, powering the grid, remote villages, or even a single house, what can you and Dave Santos offer as evidence you two are even involved in airborne wind energy at all, besides just saying you are, on the internet?
On the other hand, if we were to all agree that all those fantasy wind-powered activities such as “vibrating” etc., should be counted as AWE, even then, what would you say your combined actual involvement is, or has been? Anything after 12 years?
Can you show us such work done by your and Dave Santos’ devices? Any tasks accomplished? Any products developed? Any sales of such products?
AWE: all accomplishments in the future, or in the case of kPower and KiteLab, also in la-la-land. I think maybe it’s time you two stopped trying to tell the rest of us how to think, or what we should think. Just as “Low and Slow” sounded good until enough people died flying too slow, while too low, running factories by belt-drive powered by kites etc. sounded good - until it didn’t. I love such crazy ideas, but don’t you think maybe it’s also time to get with the electric groove of the 20th century, let alone the 21st century?

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This topic started without a clear focus.
I’ve skipped a lot of it.
Does this help?

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Dangerous to show them that! :slight_smile:

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To clarify for Doug regarding the works. Take, for instance, the KiteMill kite system with all of its parts. One may look carefully at the machine and find that wind energy is harvested and in the operation one finds that pulling is present, pushing is present, rotating is present, lifting is present, dragging is present, vibrating is present, bending is present, compressing is present, pumping is present, cutting is present, stretching is present, wearing is present, vibrations are created, etc. The KiteMill system has airborne parts. The KiteMill kite system operates in air media and soil media. The KiteMill system has a focus on a purpose that gets fulfilled because of resultants.

The example given by Rod: Rod apparently understands by showing that when parts are moved by something, that conversions occur. AWES harvest energy from the media involved; during that harvesting the energy gets converted to light, electricity, heat, mechanical motions of material, etc. Judicious design of the involved machine parts will permit certain goals to be achieved.

I did not mention contemporary grain grinding as I have no report of AWES grinding grind in these current months.

How one judiciously designs an AWES for purpose can become a matter of record. Some designers will emphasize pulling (but the other processes still occur in the machine, as Rod’s example begins to show). Some designers will emphasize lifting of mass to effect purposes. Massimo of KiteGen seems to emphasize pulling. Pulling is frequently found used to cause rotation of an electric generator’s drum. Or pull a ship. Or an arm. Easy does it; harvest the wind and work the parts to achieve designed purposes. If we get data of how much a system slowed the wind, then such data could be compared among various AWE machines.

Rod, about the clarity of the topic’s focus: Take a certain year and identify AWE-Sector Activity Shares. Take another year and do the same. Etc. In each year any particular AWE sector will have a share of the total AWE activity; a share might be zero, tiny, more, or large. The total activity could be 100%. A particular AWE-sector activity might be 7% of that 100%. Discerning metrics would be part of the challenge. Why do such measuring and portion analysis is another question with its own potential answers.

Tallak noted: I’d wait for these numbers before I put any more effort in tracking AWE statistics.

Tallak, that sounds like an efficient plan; someone will start finding data and reporting such. This forum need not put in any more energy on this topic right now. But we have a meta outline of what may occur to help planners, investors, leaders, and decision makers. It is my guess that robust stats about the AWE activity sectors will become part of the literature. Some companies right now are approaching this kind of reporting; they are asking a considerable amount of money from report receivers; every day I get a notice inviting the buying of the reports.

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What about shading? Indeed Joe you describe it in numerous messages in the old forum. Consideration should be given to how shading could impact agriculture. How many people are studying this sector? In what universities? What are the repercussions depending on the type of shade? For example continuous shading by using a kite? Or discontinuous shading by using SuperTurbine ™? In winter? In summer? According to the regions? According to hygrometry?

These questions are only a start.

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Pierre,
The AWE machines on average do shade star light, moonlight, radiations from space, and sunlight; and also views. Any developer that does care about such resultants from AWE machines would perhaps care about data forming part of the total spectrum and would, as you point out, be an activity sector trackable. My “…” was meant that the listing of resultants was not complete. You bring in the “shade” activity sector. Good on you, Pierre. Yes, I have looked at shade from AWE machines and continue to care about that activity sector; such is not to promote that sector above or below other activity sectors. But, as you know and mention, shadows can become important for many reasons, but may be overlooked and neglected in other circumstances.

In the same vein, during the day, some AWES patents care about using wing surfaces for converting solar energy to electricity; note that the AWES lift the surfaces that are involved in such PV technology. Mention has been made of lifting surface above clouds to get better insolation. Similar PV on towered wind turbine blades have been mentioned in the literature.

Thanks, Pierre, for composing some possible shade stats. Discerning what to measure concerning the shading activity sector is what you have furthered; but surely we are not done with discerning just what to measure about AWE shading activity. Shade time or duration? Frequency and its possible health effects of on-off cycling. Benefits of shade installations from AWES, Incidentality? Labor productivity changes from shading service? Scaring of pests? As you note: agriculture benefits? Size and dependability? Some neighbors to some AWES may get very disturbed with unwelcomed shade cycling; stealing their sunlight, disturbing their pets, disturbing their peace, changing the status quo of the area’s lighting patterns, Not all neighbors will accept AWES shading in good spirits, I guess.

So, it looks like there could be two general shade activity sectors: 1. Incidental shade from most AWES during some of their operation times. 2. Deliberate shading wanted by customers or consumers. Data reporting concerning both sectors could become part of the Per-Year AWE-Sector Activity Shares reporting.

One of the sellers of similar, but incomplete, data: HERE
Linking is definitely not to be taken as a promotion or recommendation; indeed, I opine for now: save your money; get the freebie teaser only. Sellers of such reports are even confusing AWE with towered turbines: see HERE2 And one AWE activity sector has a special reports deal going: HERE3.

So, this topic wells up from a hope that a robust full-AWE-spectrum per-year data picture will one day arrive. Tiny starts toward such a big task are underway. Following Tallak, watch one’s time and place it for the AWE thrust really wanted.

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Joe you’ve changed my mind. I suddenly agree we should archive all forms of wind energy used by mankind here. Now, wind comes from the expansion of heated air, right? Let’s take airborne wind energy: All those jetliners powered by the expanding air in their combustion chambers, impinging on the internal wind turbine at the back end of the engine. Air travel is already powered by airborne wind energy. Who knew? Archive it! The wonderful thing is we’ve learned to create our own wind, by using fossil fuels to heat the air! Similarly, the piston-powered airplane engines use a more primitive, compound Savonius wind turbine, each reactive surface provided with its own wind tunnels, each wind tunnel heating the air and providing its own wind for power. And of course we have most cars powered by their own compound Savonius wind turbines inside cast-iron wind tunnels, making their own wind by heating air too. And let’s take our power grid - already powered by wind energy: the wind that powers the turbines that spin the generators, with the hot air provided by coal, oil, and nuclear power. So almost all power in the world “is really” wind energy. It’s already here! Another important form of wind energy is the heated air powering all the bullets, shells, etc.,coming from all the rifles, shotguns, pistols, and cannons in the world, doing “good works” with regard to “bad people”(?). Same with all the bombs dropped by all the wind-powered airplanes - great examples of airborne wind energy. A bomber flies over a city, its shadow providing shade for the people below, then performs “good works” as its payload quickly heats and expands the air, creating a strong wind, useful for demolition of the city’s infrastructure, with the resulting cloud “providing shade” for the survivors, and fighting global warming… The city can later be rebuilt using, you guessed it, more wind power from burning stored solar energy, in the form of diesel fuel, in more compound Savonius wind turbines in wind tunnels, creating their own internal weather. The construction machinery “produces” still more “energy” even while not operating, as the stationary machinery “provides shade” for the workers taking a lunch break. The beauty is, most of this fossil fuel is all really stored solar energy from millions of years ago, changed to wind energy by clever engineering! So think of fossil fuels as stored solar energy, providing a important “sector” of wind power for the world. Archive it. Providing CO2 for plants, it’s the greenest power imaginable. Anyway, Joe, thanks for enlightening us, to more carefully examine how we might properly categorize our uses of energy into the most accurately identified sectors of “wind energy”. All we needed to do to power our entire civilization with wind energy was to adjust a few word definitions, or really, just look a little closer at the mechanics of how our infrastructure actually functions, powered almost exclusively by wind turbines, using almost 100% wind energy, much of it airborne, and embrace weather internally generated in wind tunnels using stored solar energy. Voila! The green future was already here the whole time! And all that CO2, by helping trees grow, “provides shade” around the world! Best to archive it all, if possible.
Oh, and isn’t all wind “airborne”, since, considering the wind gradient, there is zero wind right at the surface, so all wind floats on air below it? Which would make all wind energy “airborne wind energy”? :)))
(The sad thing is, this won’t stop him. Won’t even slow him down. From my observations anyway, there apparently is no cure.)

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Doug, don’t blame me for your extension!
WS, hold Doug to his own extensions; examine his text for attack on person; avoid burning the messenger. Edit#1: Doug, you mention neat things to consider, but consider starting dedicated topics for those ideas where they may be discussed following rules of this forum; your share is not addressing the present topic.

Rather HERE
My bent: tethered wings working.

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As usual, Joe is unable or unwilling to discuss what I wrote. And here he is, trying to have my exposure of his “absurdism” (great word!) removed, censored, eliminated by a moderator.
Language is a tool. Tools can be used to build, or misused to destroy and cause confusion. Joe, you and Santos were formerly able to control the conversation, tilt the playing field in your favor, not allow players to participate at all if it served your absurdist agenda. Now you are not in control. You may have at least popularized the term “Airborne Wind Energy”, but as I recall, the first conference was called “High Altitude Wind Power”. Back then it was all about the stratosphere, jet stream, etc., remember? The name had to be changed when people thought about it and realized a tether that long might be problematic. Windy Skies, your clever term “absurdist” is,a great descriptor of what we are now witnessing. New to you, it is an old theme: redefining words as a substitute for progress. These two can think of no real AWE solutions, but nonetheless wish to appear as “experts”. They are used to controlling the conversation. Now that “advantage” is lost. Yet they persist. Along with your great word “absurdist”, I would add a more clumsy term, maybe someone can think of a better one: “Pseudo-uber-expert”. This is someone who wishes to pretend expertise in a field while being unable to significantly participate or perform in the requisite art. Without the ability to describe, build, or operate a significant wind generation system, they seek to instead feign “uber-expertise” by attempts to move the discussion to some mythical “higher level” where nobody can pin them down as to the veracity of anything they say. Like taking a conversation about moving-air into outer space.
The first High Altitude Wind Power conference had one theme: generating electricity by wind energy in the sky, mostly using various versions of kites.
Now there was one person at this conference who was “worshipped” by Joe. Joe’s eyes were literally glazed over in abject admiration of one person who basically would hardly let anyone else speak, insisting that the only concept worthy of discussion was a free-flying, inter-tethered set of two (2) gliders (kites), employing an onboard reeling-powered generator scheme, that powered an onboard microwave beam transmitter that was supposed to accurately and safely beam the immense amount of power down to a ground station, then into the grid. Powering whole cities of course, just no working demo…
This is what I mean by “pseudo-uber-expert” - describing a system so futuristic, distant, gigantic, powerful, and quite likely absurdist, at least in this century, that it barely deserved comment, let alone debunking.
My thoughts were:

  1. What about the weight of the reeling system, generator, microwave beam cannon, etc.?
  2. Where is a microwave power transmission apparatus capable of this much power in use today?
  3. How efficient is it?
  4. Why isn’t anyone using it if it works so well? Why install powerlines if all you need is microwaves?
  5. How safe could it be, especially considering the potential for abuse including weaponization? What could possibly go wrong?
  6. Where is your tethered backyard preliminary-proof-of-concept demo, even just using two inter-reeling stunt kites, sending power down a tether?

I could go on with a million such questions.
This is what I mean by “pseudo-uber-expert”. A true expert would show you a simple demo version that worked. An overly-talkative person who had not really thought it through, even at a most basic level, with no demo of any kind ever built or run, would think he was an expert, would think his idea was good, because it never need be put to the test as long as he could play that now-familiar shell-game of substituting enough “details” so complicated that nobody could expect him to have a working version, allowing him to fool some of the people (like Dave Santos and Joe Faust) all the time, but NOT all the people (including me) all the time.

The “Uber” part of “uber-expert” comes from the idea that someone who can’t be bothered to build a dime-store backyard limited-but-functioning version, as a start, talks instead about “powering cities” from the stratosphere or jet stream. The “pseudo” part comes from the likelihood that there are so many holes in the concept that it may not be workable at all, but the person can go on talking about it ad infinitum if you let them. In other words, the “pseudo” part describes how this is all a ruse to cover the fact that the person cannot get even the simplest backyard version of something to really work well, if at all, if they even bother to try, which they usually do not, yet they want to keep appearing as an “expert”.
The sad thing is, the first person they are fooling is probably themselves.
Meanwhile the flying SuperTurbine™ that had just won Popular Science Invention of the Year was spinning right outside the widow - of course this guy had no comment on something that worked. No, he wanted to be an UBER-expert. Too “brilliant” for anything that simply worked. He wanted to leapfrog what worked, with what could not be proven, even on paper. And several people fell for it. Well at least two people…
How many AWE projects fall into this pseudo-Uber-expert category? Well how about Makani? I mean, most AWE projects advertise a very impressive level of supposed expertise and credentials (MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Former Director of the National Wind Technology Center, etc.) that imply “expert” status, or at least high intelligence, but after they’ve spent say 100,000,000 dollars and still have nothing running, it starts looking a bit “pseudo”, doesn’t it? At that point, isn’t it getting into “The Emperor’s New Clothes” category?

However, most of these “absurdists” (what a great word) can only dodge simple questions, never answer them.

Windy Skies, you’ve let the absurdist killer-whale-orcas into your swimming pool. Obviously that is an absurd situation, so now you deal with the resulting absurdism.
:slight_smile: slight_smile

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For example, in the year 1910, activities in energy kite systems and other AWE-like domains amounted to some TOTAL. For the year 1910, studies could reveal where the harvested wind energy from use of tethered airborne machines was being spent. Some was spent for launching wings intended for gliding… Some was spent for lifting meteorological instruments. Some was spent for obtaining food. What was the share of RATs each year? How was kite energy being spent and in what portion to the total? And more. Finally, charts for 1910 activity shares could be made. Patent counts for each year on topic? Articles written in each year on topic? Experiments on topic each year? Each year could have its chart or summary of activity shares. Year 2019 could be the target of such charting. In the 1700s electrical kites were charging ground-based items.

AWEsector01in1910

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Modern Lexigraphy accounts for multiple meanings to the same words (homonyms). For example, a battery charged by a conventional HAWT, then carried up by aircraft, can be correctly called a case of “Airborne Wind Energy”, without undue contradiction.

There is no authority (word police) to decree otherwise, that “AWE” can only mean what one party insists. Joe and I, as originators of “AWE”, do not oppose anyone from using AWE as they wish (no censorship). Its a logical fallacy to argue from any one definition of AWE, as alone true.

Joe and I agree that to us AWE properly began with biological evolution, the broadcasting of airborne spores and seeds, that developed into complex insect, bird, and bat migration. Tailwinds to us capture ~5% of aviation fuel market. Kite toys and sports are AWE to us. Our urgent quest for utility-scale electrical power is just a latest major aspect of AWE. We have no problem keeping track of “AWE” usage in any identified context.

Saving billions of pounds of jet fuel may be the top AWE app so far, and powering the planet may be next. Its exciting to be in between these AWE phases, seeing the present clearly in order to shape the future. Its a huge joy to fool around with kites; pumping, pulling, and lifting for fun. That’s AWE too. Let no one despair except those who will not fly kites.

The power kite has not failed AWE. Judge Joe and my predictions for large-scale AWE to succeed in the 2030 timeframe, not the premature claims of others. We are not product developers. Its enough to us that there are talented developers of small AWES products now (ie. Kiwee), circumnavigating sea-steads (Race for Water), polar-exploration platforms (Inuit Windsled), and players like Airbus as early adopters (ship-kite delivery).

What a fantastic new AWE technology is blossoming in our time.

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One thing I just can’t stand is liars. Another is people who make no sense trying to push their insanity on others. Dave, airborne wind energy by your statement above is hundreds of millions of years old, why do both of you keep saying it is “a newborn baby”? Both can’t be true. One must be a lie.
You said, above,"Its a huge joy to fool around with kites; pumping, pulling, and lifting for fun " Then you said “We are not product developers. Its enough to us that there are talented developers of small AWES products now”.
But for years you claimed to be some version of “the top AWE researcher in the world”. But you didn’t generate any power, didn’t spread any seeds, nothing. There do not seem to be any results of your years of being the top AWE researcher. How can you be the top researcher for so many years and not be able to show us any results?
I my opinion you two ran out of gas long ago, and somehow seek to dominate AWE in some way, even though it’s been over a decade since you’ve contributed anything significant, such as naming airborne wind energy “airborne wind energy”. I have a yellow house across town. If I name this yellow house “a yellow house”, does that then entitle me to somehow control or influence every usage of the term “a yellow house” from then on in perpetuity? To nitpick everyone using the term, endlessly “correcting” them trying to enforce my “right” to call a pink dog or a purple petunia “a yellow house”?
I’ve always maintained, as you well know, that wind energy is “a magnet for crackpots”, since the air is invisible and people can imagine whatever they wish, even though the air might act differently than their beliefs, and
Airborne Wind Energy is a neodymium super-magnet for crackpots!
Not only is AWE a neodymium super-magnet for mere crackpots, but also for the insane, and for outright liars. As I’ve pointed out, we have many examples of your own statements not agreeing with others of your own statements, and you seldom if ever admit you say anything wrong. I think you two both have at least one screw loose. Thank you both for getting the first conference going, and for changing your original name “High Altitude Wind Power” to “Airborne Wind Energy” as you slowly realized you were full-of-it with regard to Wayne German’s nonsensical mental forays into the jet stream, but I do not think the pollination and birds you refer to when explaining how your “newborn baby” is hundreds of millions of years old is “airborne wind energy”. Joe has also claimed that a buried concrete anchor “is really” “a wing”, and also that leaves wiggling on trees “is really” “airborne wind energy”. To me, you simply prove with virtually every post, your unprecedented ability to fit so many false statements into single sentence that it is impossible to keep up with them all to counter the B.S. The silly thing is, all anyone need do is compare your own statements to others of your own statements, to prove that some of them must be lies - it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Like when you declared in great detail you would be holding an airborne wind energy-powered concert in a certain park in Austin, Texas, with a certain country band you had lined up, in a certain season, of a certain year, and all any truth-oriented person like me had to say was “no you’re not!” to be right, knowing that basically every statement you make is either an outright lie or mistaken if we give you the benefit of the doubt. For years you would answer such criticism with “Wubbo Lives” - a statement you love to make over and over because it allows you to make one more blatantly false statement (he’s actually dead) feeling “protected” by political correctness. Pitiful. You can both stop now. Unless I miss my mark, nobody is impressed with you two anymore. Why not save posting until maybe someday you actually have something meaningful to contribute.
I believe the main and perhaps only skill you two have left is lying, and you are both so good at it that its hard to believe you are not politicians.

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