OK just as I thought: I take quite a bit of my time to write a VERY meaningful reply to a basically meaningless message, and the guy running this site not only deletes it without notifying me, but violates his own rules in this latest response to me. If he had any guts at all he would at least include my original reply. The people with a personality type that leads them to run an AWE forum are incapable of running a fair and impartial forum, or even of being honest. That is now proven by both examples weāve seen. I think I need to stop wasting my time here. Iāll let Windy himself solve AWE. I hope his main talent of deleting messages and moving them to other topics serves him well throughout his AWE journey and life in general. You donāt need my help. Have a McDay.
Hi Doug: the deleted message contained some interesting thinking about the limits of AI, but not directly about the topic, if I remember. Perhaps you could edit this comment on a suitable topic, such like āLimits of AIā.
I think the response youāre referring to may not be appropriate, but on the other hand, you should accept that if you use the term āidiotā a lot, you shouldnāt complain too much if it is turned on you from time to time, although the meaning is not the same.
At the same time, since @Windy_Skies is being criticized, he can also be praised for the enormous amount of work he does into classifying the comments in the forum, which makes it easier to read. In most cases Windy moves the comments in the right place.
My usage is more benign, it is not a blanket unchanging statement about a group of people (who, if anything, should be praised instead of ridiculed for trying something new to them), but in reference to a single, idiotic, belief or opinion. And the target is present, able to defend themselves.
I donāt agree. Here.
This was a stupid comment about a serious issue. I regret posting that, sorry.
@dougselsam I did see your replies but they were already hidden. I can see why @Windy_Skies may have hidden them. But I would not like to have an opinion about was the decision right or not. I really appreciate that @Windy_Skies takes the effort to make this forum a better place. Also it is hard for me to say whether this or that moderation was the right thing. I see that the problem is more relevant for you @dougselsam than for me as it seems more of your messages are disappearing than mine (no hidden meaning in that, just an observation).
I would like to just keep on going. But if this is serious enough, we should meet some of us and discuss if the current status quo is what we want. In that case please DM me @dougselsam or anyone else who thinks things are not right and I will try to initiate something. Know though that this is a hassle, and I would rather just keep things going like they are. But I will gladly do it rather than having people here being upset about this.
Could I suggest immediately at least that moderators inform about hiding posts if the posts are not clearly spam. I can see it is annoying not to know if the moderator or a software bug was the cause of a message disappearing.
When I did that previously, @dougselsam complained about getting these notifications instead, so I stopped doing that on his comments. I could start doing that again - first flagging and only then deleting.
Being upset about this is like being upset and surprised at the flame for burning you the hundredth time youāve stuck your hand in it. Most people learn not to do that after a few times.
Iām done with this bullshit. Iāll stick with what Iāve been saying for 15 years. The lack of respect for others by these people whose goal is to be able to express their own opinions, while deleting the opinions of others, is not something anyone has to put up with. From Zuck to all the rest, their goal is not to allow open communication, but to have a place to express their own limited opinions, and place themselves in a position to delete the opinions of others, usually on the basis of those opinions being factual. Nothing new here. Social media = a proven poor use of oneās time, not leading to the happiness it would suggest.
Pierre: I responded to a topic of āAIā, giving at least three (3) specific examples of how it does not even work, and is in fact a joke. There was absolutely no excuse for deleting my post. No excuse for not notifying me about it. No excuse for any of the posts deleted by the last guys who placed themselves in a similar position to do the same.
And I could care less if anyone calls me an idiot. I call myself an idiot every day, when I make some stupid mistake, as we all sometimes do. As Iāve explained, the term is what we in wind energy affectionately call people with no knowledge of wind energy, yet claiming they will āimproveā it. So far, after 15 years with nothing running on a regular basis, Iāve been proven correct. I now rest my case and have to move on. You can always email me. 
Hi Doug: We may have forgotten your explanation of the use of the term āidiotā, and taken it in a literal sense.
I think that beyond the topic with the link to Google DeepMindās AI Weather Forecaster, you broaden towards a reflection on AI from some statistics (āaverage annual precipitationā), although not about weather forecasts, to AI in general, by aggregating it to AWE, with all the philosophical and even civilizational background that this implies. This is a choice that I respect but which may not be suitable if we want to restrict thinking about DeepMindās weather forecasts.
And still, Doug, havenāt you noticed that weather forecasts are now much more relevant than they used to be. And thanks to what? Maybe thanks to AI.
This is why your contribution is essential and appreciated by your experience in wind energy, and not only by @tallakt, @Rodread, @gordon_sp , or me. When I think about an AWES using a propeller, I have to ask you questions, as I do regularly, to find out if it could work over time.
The truth is that AWE for electricity production faces unresolved difficulties with current techniques and for the moment. Maybe things will work out. Sometimes all it takes is one triggering detail.
Interested - I searched, found and read your āRant about Somethingā post Doug
What a load of pish - I could have done without it TBH
But yeah you explained that it was a load of mince by clearly calling it a rant.
I have no complaint about the rant other than it was myopically blinkered pure decided opinion
and took more than my new low standard of 6 seconds of attention to read.
Didnāt exactly aim to push the AWES needle forward.
The fact it got deleted is not your problem
Itās a group and interface thing
Weāre all here to work on AWES
Thatās why this site exists
So what could help us all hereā¦?
The homepage
When a new topic comes up we see the replies, views and activities scores
Could we also have the topics flagged as new ?
or show the number of likes within a topic ?
Is there another flagging helpful - Or - I found this useful button?
The original topic was posted in the lounge section
I see that section as being rather like a pub
I donāt have much experience of pubs these days but I do remember them being pretty rowdy
A good rant was not out of place in a pub
Thatās what I named the topic. I originally just deleted the comments from Google DeepMindās AI Weather Forecaster Handily Beats a Global Standard, but as there was some discussion, put them in a new unlisted topic to let people decide for themselves what they think of it. The title could be better.
Pierre: You are nitpicking here. So I slightly broadened an already Non-AWE topic - so what? Why didnāt he just delete his own post for being off-topic? Obviously, I did not want to restrict my reply to āDeep Mindā or whatever, but slightly broadened it to show that what is being billed as āAIā is nothing but the same old search algorithms weāve become used to for decades now.
Yes of course Iāve noticed we now have 10-day forecasts. That has been the case for at least 20 years. There is nothing new about computers helping to juggle and organize statistics. Nothing new about computers being the main tool for weather forecasting.
Let me tell you about our latest 10-day forecast here:
We were supposed to get 1.5 inches of rain, over 3 days, starting yesterday, with the peak of over an inch today. That was our āstormwatchā from only 4 or 5 days ago, and we in the desert were worried about flooding and erosion, since the desert does not handle rain well. Instead, a 3-day āStormwatchā turned into a 1-day āsprinkle-watchā. It sprinkled yesterday slightly more than predicted, and today it is sunny, with blue skies and no rain in sight for the foreseeable future. So much for āAIā - it failed yet again.
Maybe Google should try applying āDeep Mindā to āsolve AWEā. Maybe they already did, and weāve seen the result. Maybe we could then flag āDeep Mindā as one more in a series of a thousand āidiotsā who, without any real background in, or understanding of, wind energy, can pretend to have an āimprovedā āsolutionā. Then Deep Mind could promise to power X hundred homes on a remote island somewhere and never follow through, like so many others. Reminds me of these āfusionā people who donāt even know what Avogadroās Number is. Reminds me of Sergei Brinās new giant airship, that they wonāt let outside its building. The stated reason for it? āDisaster reliefā - what else? How imaginative.
Really. How could anyone know it is there if it is āunlistedā? This is all a waste of time.
In defense of AI
Before an AI can simulate or design a physical object ( such as an AWES) through evolution
(Thatās one of their best tools so far - the tools and methods are improving fast)
ā¦it has to be able to train and test billions of variations of simple bot vs world interactions in a physics simulator gym (Such as NVIDIA ISAAC Sim gym) then it has to be able to score the results of these designs on objective metrics in order to retrain itās own design weights and biases.
So far this is only yielding simple machines and mechanisms - you should see how weird some of them look and behave.
Other AI design methods exist too.
A lot of the output of these short long term memory neural networks is stochastic averaging and not very informative. Yet with enough breadth of experience and given enough agency to guide itself - some of the results of AI are starting to become exceptionally impressive.
One general rule being
AI is now at a state which is as poor as it will ever be from now on
https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/182lm3i/chinas_goldwind_installed_a_16_mw_offshore_wind/
Old numbers. Modern offshore windparks go as high as 60% capacity factor. The bigger the better, so this 16MW turbine may even performs north of 60% in the right locations.
[ā¦]
Thatās not really true. We tend to build in the easiest places first not the best. Because the best places for offshore wind farm are more expensive. The project I am working on is limiting us to a depth of 20m because the equipment needed in that depth is MUCH cheaper than whatās required in deep water. Even though deep water would be more profitable.
Hello Pierre:
My take is the short intermittency cycle of kite-reeling is not suitable for such a longer-cycle-time solution as this CO2 turbine idea. Probably a battery or even capacitors would be more suitable. The CO2 solution, if it actually works as an economical energy solution, would be better suited to address longer-cycle intermittency, such as generating power after the daily wind stops blowing.
I was also initially intrigued when I read about the CO2 cycle energy storage idea. But then, I thought about it just a bit, and realized we had not seen any of the little details which might present problems with this idea. If all we see is the press-release, all we are exposed to is a possibly over-optimistic treatment of an idea that may have fatal flaws for all we know.
I would caution anyone reading any of these online āscienceā magazine āpress-release breakthroughsā to generally be skeptical, as these articles are mostly click-bait, and do not present a sufficiently round view of the story to properly analyze it. Instead, these articles are like free advertisements for the promoters of these often unworkable ideas.
For reference, think about all those articles from a couple of years ago, about cranes lifting concrete blocks into stacks for energy storage. What ever happened to that? Any follow-thru on the development of that silly idea? Someone finally did some math on the back of an envelope and figured out it was not a workable solution?
Anyway, back to hydrogen: It seems that it is often combined with other stupid ideas. For example, if some idiot wants to promote a bad, unworkable and uneconomical wind energy idea, their instinct is often to ācombineā it (on paper only, of course) with āhydrogen productionā. How many times have you heard that in the last few years? Whacky offshore wind turbine ideas, always claiming they can be combined with electrolyzers, to produce hydrogen(!) Wheeee! Weāre on a roll now!
The idea is, if they can make the story complicated enough, they can avoid any direct comparison of, letās say, their wind energy idea, to existing wind turbines. That way they can just keep pretending, with their more complicated scenario, that it could ever pan out as an economic energy solution. No, throwing away 75% of your energy is NOT a good storage solution. It is a bad idea. Period. The people promoting it areā¦ idiots.
As far as compressed air as an energy storage solution, the idea has been around forever. Maybe ten years ago, we were treated to soon-to-be-popular compressed-air-powered cars. I think one main company was in France. So, after all these years, where is a single compressed-air energy storage system? What it amounts to is an old adage: āA little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.ā As long as we only hear one side of a story, we are easily convinced. We need to step back and look at the whole picture. The problem is, the whole story usually wonāt fit on a bumper-sticker.
Yes indeed. But the management of temporary storage would not be valid with batteries either, due to unnecessary additional cost. It is enough to phase the units to have continuous production, especially since using Low radius loop would allow a smoother power during power reel-in phase than by using figure-eight, because the traction force remains constant thanks to a permanent distance to the center of the figure.
I am not sure. In addition to the option I just mentioned, small CO2 batteries (for temporary storage like reel-out phase) could perhaps be achieved?
Well, make up your mind then. It would not take much battery capacity to accommodate the reel-in part of the cycle. Doesnāt seem like a showstopper to me. The CO2 thing seems way too complicated for such a trivial amount of storage. Sure, phasing an array to provide continuous steady-state output has been mentioned for years, but so far nobody has more than one kite-reeling system to coordinate in such a way. One other thing to keep in mind: wind energy has natural variations depending on the wind speed, which often changes.
Meanwhile, let me just remind everyone about the dubious nature of these āpress-release breakthroughsā: Where is the operating CO2 energy storage system? Oh, it doesnāt exist? Why is that? If it is so simple, why doesnāt someone have one operating now? Maybe the same reason no kite-reeling system is in regular operation to this day: There are problems and issues that are never mentioned in such promotional articles.
Donāt get me wrong: The idea sounds great to me. I canāt see a flaw in it. But that doesnāt mean there are none. It just means that I donāt happen to know enough details to point out any flaws at this time.
I donāt know when the people on these kite power lists will ever learn that almost every single article in these online science magazines turns out to be wrong. These kite-power chat groups must be some of the most gullible people on the planet! What would it take to recognize such an obvious fact? We humans are supposed to have a memory. How about using it? Just go back over the last 1000 press-release breakthrough articles youāve ever read, How many of the projects are operating today? 1%? Thatās probably optimistic!
Thereās a lot of factors that go into that, execution, investment, timing, and so on. It is not a useful metric to determine if the idea is good or not, which is the only thing I think an applied science forum would care about. Which makes your endless hand-wringing about it just so much noise. Try to use better metrics.
Since you are interested in that, maybe try to find out? Here people seem to be standing in front of a test facility at least. You have to test things first if you want to try something new.
Reel-in phase can last quite a while, while consuming power. If CO2 batteries work and confirm the claimed advantage of lower operating costs, this would be an option not to be overlooked.
Devices flying by figure-eight may delivering insufficiently smoothing power (reel-in phase aside), the irregularities perhaps not being able to be compensated by the multiplicity of units, due to their random nature. Thatās why I thought about low radius loop trajectories in order to produce a more consistent and predictable power during real-out phase.
And sometimes the wind even stops blowing. Did you know it? In this case CO2 batteries could be useful if they work as claimed.
But just as a conventional wind turbine produces steady energy hampered only by the irregularity of the wind, so should AWES, or at least close to it.