I look at this particular talking point as having put me to sleep over a decade ago. Like, “Hey, did you know sometimes wind speeds can sometimes deviate from averages at certain heights?” “No, really?” The hypnotic catalyst here seems to be the word “jets”. Sounds pretty serious, right? “Hey, look out, there are JETS up there! You better duck before one hits you in the head!”
It rationalized bringing in someone who studied weather, like a ribbon on a gift-wrapped package that was mostly empty, but the ribbon kept the newbies excited because it made the package look nice. It seemed to lend “credibility” to longwinded presentations about AWE accomplishments that mysteriously always seemed to be perpetually relegated to “the future”. Lately we even see such a nice person being giddily called “the mother of AWE” by the perpetual newbies. OMG. Reminds me of having a den-mother in cub scouts as a little kid. “Adult supervision”…
It was basically one more distraction from the simple reality that nobody had anything workable or working on a regular basis. That still seems to be the case. This is typical behavior for wannabe or pretend wind energy innovators, reminiscent of a group prosecuted years ago for fraudulently promoting rotating rooftop beehive ventilators as a wind energy breakthrough.
Never even connected to a generator (typical vertical-axis “development”). Rather than selling a product, they were selling “territories”. Their sales pitch would start by lecturing the audience of the vastness of the wind resource, how much energy was contained in the wind, how wind contained X hundred or thousand times more energy than we could ever consume, etc.
These well-known scientific facts were then substituted for any slight indication that the rooftop ventilators were providing, or even could provide, ANY of this energy. They relied on an audience who did not have the background to make logical connections about the difference between citing a source of energy, versus demonstrating the ability to harness it. Very typical sales presentation for vertical-axis machines, etc. Some people got arrested for some sort of financial fraud over it.
The guys running the last forum spent quite a lot of “hot air” over LLJ’s, so many years ago. It served to keep an otherwise empty conversation going, like coming up with lyrics for one more verse of a tired song, which at this point is more like a dead bug laying on its back, still wiggling its legs. 