Doug: (Santos is the) “biggest (ST) skeptic I know of.”
TRUE, I am skeptical with regard to the ST being competitive with Power Kites for AWE, but never have used the word “impossible” to describe ST scaling challenges. “Impractical” is sufficient. Good Luck to anyone to show otherwise.
Let SkySails represent Power Kite commercial scaling in AWE, and for Doug to be the “biggest skeptic”. I am not the major source of commercial kite energy demos, just one of the best, “on even the smallest scale” (Seiko self-winding watch AWES), and for sheer variety of novel kite experiments.
More new SkySails buzz-
RWE REnewables is their latest high-profile customer for a 100kW beta system. RWE is an international renewables developer with 10GW of installed capacity (enough to power NYC).
Its this Forum’s reliance on anonymous TL4 Moderation that is failing. There is far more to AWE than the intolerance, doubt, and ignorance imposed here reveals. Power Kite AWES continues to advance wonderfully, regardless.
Latest News not reported here: US Department Of Energy preparing a major AWE Report, at US Congressional Request; final draft due in May. A sleeping giant awakes. Less news here, due to unwise posting limits.
When will we understand that towing a boat with a wind rotor (see the photo below) has as little chance of being carried out on a large scale as producing electricity with power kites?
The current forum moderation has nothing to do with AWE achievement. If the system is good it will work, whatever moderation. It was the same for the old forum.
True in Windy’s case, with no known achievement, but untrue for Rod, who does achieve and report here, but also enforces restricted posting on others.
Doug: “In AWE, all “accomplishments” are in the future…”
Doug overlooks Skysails commissioned grid-tied 100kW plant, operating for almost a year now. Their RWE sale is current.
Doug’s main claim is future-based: “All Roads lead to the ST”. He seems currently inactive in AWE, however. SkySails is active.
Lots of Inuit WindSled news. As Covid emergency passes, new Polar Missions are in planning. Not just kite traction, but electrical generation is being developed. No details on this Forum, unfortunately, due to severe posting restrictions.
There is no mention of AWE tests for electricity production in the Inuit WindSled website below. Moreover there is no report and curves of achieved energy by the 100 kW plant.
AWE for power generation is not the future: it seems to be an attempt from the past, unless there are significant improvements in concepts and materials.
No, these photos are available on the link I provided on the forum (see below) among other links.
Dave, your predictions since more than 12 years were never realized. There is no point in wanting to predict over and over again: it is like writing a bad check to pay off debts made by previous bad checks. Something that does not generate electricity will not generate more electricity if it is in a network of similar things.
Wow I must be getting lucky - I’ve never won anything in my life!
Thanks! (takes a bow)
Well the answer I got when I asked this same question was pretty clear to me.
“Do you think we don’t know what we’re doing?”
At first I thought it was kind of a rude answer, but it came from a guy I really respected, who knew his stuff. So I pondered it a bit and realized his answer was enough to answer my question.
Nowadays the internet is so busy - so full of outright idiots, whereas back then you could learn stuff from wind energy groups online.
This is supposed to be a group even smarter than real wind energy people, right? So the last thing that we should need to explain to such “advanced” wind energy people is the ABC’s of wind energy, right? I’ve found that actual facts and good information are not appreciated in these venues, so why bother explaining further? Figure it out, like I did.
By the way, I remember some futurist or some such “expert on everything” with a PhD, on some radio show, derisively explaining to the world how silly wind turbines were since “obviously” so much un-utilized energy was slipping between the blades. “Obviously” all the professional wind turbine designers could not figure this out, whereas he, being “a genius” was happy to explain the stupidity of these career wind turbine designers to the unwashed masses. Too bad he wasn’t enough of a genius to notice how stupid he himself was, to think that in the entire world, nobody had ever stumbled across his keen insight to add more blades.
Let’s try to overcome the disagreement mentioned above, by considering that the official AWE is based on Loyd’s model while current wind energy is based on Betz limit. These differences can cause misunderstanding. In AWE both models could be used, from Loyd’s to Betz’ models and vice versa, according to the considered issues (power to wing area ratio, power to weight aloft ratio, power to space use ratio…).
Hi Doug, until a short time ago I thought that the AWE projects would come up against advanced elements such as land use, the non possibility of secondary use, the danger of a heavy wing advancing at full speed with its rope. … I was far from thinking that they could struggle on efficiency (see Makani producing from only 11-12 m / s wind speed).
To say more, I was amazed when I saw @tallakt’s questions on his topic and in particular the one you are highlighting: “Could you not increase the output of a HAWT at lower windspeeds eg. by increasing the wing area (add blades)?”
Finally I prefer your reply as mine on the forum. Indeed how is it possible to ask this sort of question? Perhaps the lack of basic knowledge in current wind energy is frequent even in official environments where the aerodynamic elements for the flight of the wing prevail over wind energy aspect. Perhaps this is the key to the lack of AWE progression that we have seen (well me and a few others, apparently not the leaders of this forum) for some time.
Pierre, the entire field of AWE is rife with enthusiastic know-nothings. The worst of it is the more enthusiastic and ignorant, the more likely they are to want to try to “control the discussion” and dumb it down to the level of their own ignorance. If anyone points out the obvio0us degree of their ignorance of the ABC’s of wind energy, they can then merely delete the post, as happened to me when I found every message involved in my simply pointing out this level of ignorance conveniently deleted, so these guys can go on pretending they know anything about anything. They don’t even bother with a notification of why any factual content must be deleted - they just delete it. Very similar to the old forum. Idiots, idiots, idiots…
Pierre, You don’t quote any such predictions. There were two major AWE predictions I made, now standing the test of time.
The AWE Critical Path Analysis of 2011 (WoW and KiteLabs) is on track, with SkySails now installing multiple grid-tied 100-200kW AWES for high profile clients, including RWE AG, a global renewable energy leader. Based on that milestone, 2030 is on-track for MW-scale AWES units to be operating.
Many 2007-9 early-Forum emails archived show I consistently predicted Makani would fail, and how they would fail. Perhaps you missed those messages. This email exchange shows career aerospace expert agreement on Makani’s fatal design flaws (emphasis added)-
On Mar 9, 2009, at 4:07 AM, dave santos wrote:
…Makani Power is finally revealing its top-heavy technological approach to nonspecialized audiences while actively withholding key information about safety & reliability of its designs from the better informed AWE & aerospace community. What are they hiding? Low MTBF, severe scaling limits, high flying weight, & nightmarish handling scenarios are just a start. "
Chris Carlin (Boeing Ret.), Mar 2009 Reply:
"I must agree. Why carry the generator and wiring up in the air when you don’t need to. Minimizing weight and equipment aloft has to be a primary objective.
Regards,
Chris
All this proved exactly true in Makani’s 2020 post-mortem.
Please take care to quote accurately and not accuse unfairly. Joe and I quote carefully and faithfully. We never accuse anyone of lying in AWE, lacking proof of deceitful intent.
We should all be grateful how AWE is progressing. Just look at kite sports bursting with growth and joy. Google failed in AWE just as surely as the power kite has triumphed. I was right in 2009. Wait for 2030, to see if I am still right then.
No these photos are edited as I indicated above. It is even not need to keep digging into your willful inaccuracies in the distant past.
Your 1. concerns a prediction for 2030. So it is not possible to tell if it is true or wrong.
Your 2. concerns Makani. For now there is no marketed AWE producing some significant amount of electricity, not even SkySails. So such a “prediction” has no value. Moreover Windlift uses also a crosswind flygen wing, as for Makani. The same for KiteKraft.
Now let’s talk about serious things:
Hi Doug, AWE is a mix of two fields: aerospace field, and wind energy field. The first field has so far been much more investigated than the second field. As a preliminary less important aspect M. Loyd model prevails over Betz model so much so that publications end up trying to reintegrate the Betz model in one way or another. But the more important aspect is the ignorance (comprising mine) of the requirements for a viable wind energy system such like steady operation, resistance in hard conditions, size of the generator… The advice of engineers in wind energy should be more often taken account for the conception of AWES, although in Makani’s case the eminent Dr Fort Felker met this condition, which shows the extreme difficulty of conceiving a viable AWES.
Hard to say where such “news of future results before the fact” is headed.
How long did we listen to “McBlarney is going to power hundreds of houses in Hawaii!” I consistently expressed doubt eventually just flat-out declaring “No they are not!”. You supposedly had spies in Hawaii monitoring all activity, but you never came up with just saying they were never going to power hundreds of homes in Hawaii, and that Altaeros was never going to power any homes in Alaska. Sad, how hard is it to power a few homes? OMG!
In AWE, all such accomplishments “are in the future”, and may remain that way for some time, if not forever. For 12 years you’ve believed most every press-release, then made up more of your own. They’ve mostly been wrong though.
Yes I do remember you citing cubic scaling laws re McBlarney many times. And I do remember you saying it would crash, fail, etc. I think you were imitating me cuz I had long explained my “Professor Crackpot Syndrome” that I had noted over the decades in regular wind energy, one of whose main tenets was “We have to make it really big or people won’t take uth theriouthly!” I think I was the only real skeptic in the AWE community, and you started seeing I was right every time, that these really were “the bloopers” complete with bicycle horn soundtrack, and you decided you wanted to be right about something for once too. So you started saying McBlarney sucked.
I do not think they disproved anything except their ability to get it right.
My opinion: Some version of that concept could work out to some extent, at least to the point of being workable, even if never economical.
Pierre: “these photos are edited… willful inaccuracies”
Untrue, This is an unedited RWE page layout, to underscore my longtime desire for AWES flyoffs, that RWE is now essentially conducting “in-house”. Hurrah!
Once again, its not the sort of “inaccurac(y)” Pierre often imagines and accuses, but never proves-
Doug is mistaken to think the SkySails100 is not yet operational, just fake “news of the future”. The commercial era of utility scale AWE has begun, and will only get better.
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