Hi Rod: We can’t all look like Movie Stars! 
1 Like
Partly airborne after the strike but
Not really a viable Airborne Wind Energy method
Seabound was mentioned in this Y Combinator podcast.
Seabound’s Bold Approach to Carbon Capture in Shipping with Alisha Fredriksson
You’re right to question the journalists.
The journalist will have asked Windlift - “How can I say that engineering in way my readers will understand? like how many houses”
Windlift know their product market segment
I suspect they’re not going to be looking at houses for now unless it’s a billionaire with a compound
I’d say you’re overthinking it. Wind newbies always think a 2 kW or 3 kW machine is sufficient to power a house. Even 1 kW per house is often cited. Why? Well, it sounds impressive, and they know most people won’t know the difference, for one thing. And they are idiots with no experience in wind energy, so they just try to imagine how much power they are using with a few lights and a TV on, and take the ball and run with it. Or they just repeat the erroneous statements of some other windidiot.
The reason I so often point this typical underestimation of nameplate peak output required to power a home is it’s just one of the easiest windidiot lies to spot, and most of them do it.
And it would take a lot more than a 10 kW machine to power a billionaire’s palace. The really stupid thing is, in a field of well over a thousand windidiots purporting to develop AWE systems over so many years now, how many of them have ever built, installed, or even run an actual productive wind energy system? Zero? So what makes them think they would be any good at it? Like Creighton giving up a perfectly good career in genetics to save the world by succumbing to the derangement of the latest end-of-world impending-disaster religion… What would he think of someone educated specifically in wind energy coming up with a revolutionary new theory of genetics?
More of the same BS, this time from MSN (Microsoft):
Tech company unveils giant drones that could transform how we power our homes — here’s how they work
Articles says it’s two (2) days old. Appears to be another AWE “news” “story” based on far-outdated information from half a decade ago - or am I missing something here? (Which is always possible)
Every day, MSN, through their “Edge” web browser that came loaded onto this computer, tries to sell me a vertical-axis wind turbine.
Every day they try to sell me a regular small wind turbine made by an old friend of mine who is obviously paying for ad placement targeting people interested in wind turbines. His mold-maker didn’t quite understand proper pitch distribution when designing the mold, nor did my friend, so he has to use up to 11 blades per rotor to even get his machines to work at all - still way suboptimal - I could tell his blades were wrong from a glance - sent a trial set back for a refund - oh well, he’s still in business after maybe 20 years - why? The average person knows nothing about wind turbines, and he has what appear to be wind turbines available. They are incapable of decent output, but people just shrug and figure it must be not enough wind or whatever, which is probably also true, cuz most people have no wind anyway.
Every day MSN shows me at least one, usually more, completely wrong story about some supposed new energy technology that is easily identified as just another fake clickbait falsehood.
Yeah but you keep sharing the MSN links with us… we click them… MSN sees the extra hashing code at the end of the link you shared which associates it with your account… MSN says oh
It’s good to give Doug S these things because it gets more visitors to our site… Let’s send him some more.
Let’s keep this bubble party going
Talking of which
It’s about time we had a network design based on edges and nodes in bubble froth
Hi Rod: What you say may be true, but the bigger picture is the consistent and relentless mental domination of complete bullshit science and engineering “news”, combined with the lack of knowledge of even tech-oriented people.
We’ve been exposed to it since long before MSN per se was even in the “news” business. I was pointing out years ago how all the online “science” publications seem to show the same exact “stories”, almost verbatim. a few days apart.
What we see today is now, I believe, “A.I.”-generated content that rewards just placing words into print or into a youtube A.I. “narrator’s” “scripts” that the “narrator” can’t even read correctly, re-telling OLD NEWS as though it is new - basically JUST LYING.
It’s only because WE have the inside scoop, able to see that many if not most of these AWE “news stories” are obsolete information from several YEARs ago, being served up as what are actually blatant lies, designed for no other purpose than to extend an agenda while generating more clicks to generate more ad revenue.
Whether we are talking about attempts to harness “wave energy”, “flying taxis”, “vertical-axis wind turbines”, “alternative” wind turbine designs of almost any kind, building-mounted wind turbines, “urban” turbines, “archimedian turbines”, “compressed air as energy storage”, liquified CO2 as energy storage, “hydrogen as energy storage”, producing hydrogen from offshore wind turbines onsite offshore, producing hydrogen on ships towed by kites, cargo ships using sails, kites, or whatever, ammonia as a major fuel source for internal combustion engines, underwater kites as a future energy source, we could go on for page after page of entire “gamechanger” topics that are all complete “nothing-burgers” - no logic or legitimate math behind them whatsoever…
And it’s not a new phenomenon: Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, etc. have been printing articles about the Moller “flying car” and others, for almost a century, and it has all been a fantasy - an illusion.
And starting over 100 years ago, Proctor and Gamble and other big food and agricultural conglomerates paid to promote their wannabe “science” that everyone should embrace their way-cheaper-to-produce “trans-fats” in the form of “partially-hydrogenated seed oils” over healthy butter and animal fats using the lie that it was “good for our hearts” whereas actually, heart disease was almost nonexistent until they started before that campaign took hold. Today, after 100 years of us being bullshitted, trans-fats are increasingly no longer allowed in our food, because it turns out they CAUSE heart disease, cancer, etc.
Wheat was promoted as about the healthiest food one could possibly eat - why? Because it was cheap to produce, and had a certain amount of protein - today, many people avoid wheat due to many bad health outcomes, and the protein is now called “gluten”, flagged as “bad, bad, bad”… (But what about my pizza???)
People are still running on the fumes of “The Jetsons” cartoon, where just an artist’s pen was enough to convince us that cars could just fly around in the future without any actual known technology to accomplish it, let alone without creating huge clouds of dust and sandblasting everything within 100 feet on takeoff or landing.
And of course, to fit in with “the syndrome”, they all have to be “electric” even though the weight of batteries ruins the entire concept.
We are living in a land of complete bullshit and believing our own public relations illusions, as the combined results over 1.5 decades or AWE “gamechangers” attests to.
Of course we don’t want to give up on the promise of progress, but also we have to remain grounded in what is real, versus what is mere idle fantasy.
And if I even open my computer to clear open tabs, I’m literally barraged with articles about silly “gamechanger” ideas like “gravity batteries” - luckily THIS one is a rare example of debunking the nonsense:
“It makes no sense”: DTU professor questions gravity batteries | Ingeniøren
Back to the supposed “topic” at hand - do we have any actual, current information about “Windlift”, or, as usual, are we clueless and relegated to whatever obsolete nonsense information that was already mostly false even 5 years ago, which “A.I’” has “decided” we “need” to see?
1 Like
Hi Doug,
I’m afraid you’re right about your entire comment.
As far as AWE is concerned, it has been an experiment that has not resulted in anything useful in wind energy.
When I praise the 100 kW I absolutely don’t mean that the thing is viable. But the other prototypes are even less so.
We can always dream about an architecture that could be successful. But we see that it is anything but obvious: how can you have something stable and efficient without a tower and without the super-sophisticated rotors that you have with HAWT?
Full text of study: Large recoverable elastic energy in chiral metamaterials via twist buckling | Nature
AWE applications? Wind storage kite AWE?
That video is garbage, someone laboriously and slowly reading the article for you, and adding unrelated stock footage. Just read the press release, or now I added the link to the full text of he study.
I thought it looks interesting as it looks similar to the torque transfer idea, but now instead of line tension you do:
Perhaps you could make a more generalized model that allowed you to analyze systems that included both tension and material stiffness and so on to come to an optimal solution for torque transfer.
The references of this article:
Fang, X., Yu, D., Wen, J. et al. Large recoverable elastic energy in chiral metamaterials via twist buckling. Nature 639 , 639–645 (2025). Large recoverable elastic energy in chiral metamaterials via twist buckling | Nature
Another excerpt, in “Buckling of chiral and non-chiral rods” section:
Lattices consisting of angled rods (Fig. 1c–e) show improved stiffness and max(F 1rod) with increased oblique angle (θ) (Fig. 2a). However, in buckled rods, σ cpr ≪ σ bend, resulting in nearly constant energy U1rod≈πr2L0σv2/16Es for a given stress σ v, regardless of the angle θ (Fig. 2b). Moreover, U bend in equation (1) is independent of buckling order (n). Thus, adjusting the oblique angle or inducing high-order buckling modes (n > 1) can change max(F 1rod) but cannot effectively improve U 1rod for a specified material strength (σ v). This severely limits energy storage in strut-based metamaterials.
To overcome this limitation, we must introduce additional deformation modes beyond bending and compression. Chiral metamaterials31,32,33, with coupling between axial deformation and twisting, offer exciting possibilities to store more energy by torsion.
I just want to let you wannabe AWE people know, this particular topic, as usual, is indicative of someone who has never built or run such a system, thinking this stuff is even relevant to such a system. Only if you are stuck in an armchair and never get out and build or run anything like this would you fall for such off-target nonsense. Have fun with your armchair-engineering!
A variant of Tiira or The Pyramid where the ground station includes a robust tilted wind turbine instead of levers, to increase the torque or/and to provide a longer range:
The blades are robust to handle the huge tensions, making them thick enough to hold a winch inside each one, or in the hub.
Why is this in “slow chat”?
Maybe the rotation of the kite and line combo will be slower than the rotation of the standard blades
1 Like