Questions and complaints about moderation + unlisted, mostly unmoderated, free discussion

Pierre, I have no control over the AWES Forum, only JoeF does, and he would never censor you. Here is a typical post of mine from 2010 on the Old Forum on the airspace and land maximization topic, discussions you may recall-

Sparse v. Dense AWE Arrays
Yahoo

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dave santos santos137@yahoo.com
To:
airbornewindenergy@yahoogroups.com

‎Nov‎ ‎9‎, ‎2010 at ‎4‎:‎33‎ ‎PM

Take a 2mw single-tether kiteplane (like Joby’s model) operating under a 2000ft ceiling. To keep safely clear of neighbors it occupies a circular plot near a mile across. Presume a 3x3 array of nine kiteplanes for 18mw from a 3 mile square kitefarm. The same land developed with conventional 5mw HAWTs, spaced normally, could develop greater than 100mw, presuming that better wind capacity-factor aloft roughly offsets the lowered system availibility of complex delicate aircraft. Conventional HAWTs win overwhelmingly in raw land efficiency without even touching the upper-wind. However, the same land & airspace the nine kiteplanes sparsely occupy can be densely packed with airborne turbines or wingmills, in string latticework based on classic kite methods, for over a rated gigawatt. AWE arrays of cross-linked semi-captive elements seem to have a fantastic advantage in space-efficiency, not just safety & control, over single-tether designs.

I used crude geometric methods to estimate these figures, so it will be fun to see how well someone else’s calculations coincide. A suggestive guesstimate is that there is well over a gigawatt average in a tiny mid-lat crosswind patch of sky, just 100m across & 10km high."/