I think that I am partly getting out of the topics concerned and I don’t know where to put all this and if it is worth it.
Both should have the same angular speed. It will be assumed that gliders are faster than the thick blades of the wind turbine on the ground, benefiting also from a higher average wind speed. As a result the kites could sweep much more space. The control would allow the angular velocity of the whole to be adjusted.
I think we definitely need a new topic. Let’s call it : “Twin Kite TRPT System”.
I inagined the Pyramid to have a smaller cartwheel/carousel [I believe Tiira uses the term carousel]. So the swept area would not be hugely increased by adding a blade inside the carousel diameter. The TSR of a HAWT is 6-8 [source chatgpt] so I expect the glide ratio of kite and tether to possibly go above 10, meaning that this idea is past the most obvious hurdle on paper being that the blade and kites don’t want to move at the same synchronized speed.
I think though that making the cartwheel strong enough at larger scale could be very hard or very expensive, if you also need the inner of the cartwheel to be an efficient blade…
VAWT: DS-3000 (10.6 m², rated power 1.4 kW, yield per year (at 5 m/s wind): 2460 kWh) vs HAWT: Skystream (10.9 m², rated power 2.1 kW, yield per year (at 5 m/s wind): 3420 KWh).
V-A machines do not last. Find one actually operating anywhere. We have hundreds of homes in my immediate area powered by H-A turbines - more than anywhere in the world by far. We had one large, expensive V-A machine up the street. It obviously used more material, to make less power. It lasted a year before throwing a blade, and being dismantled. The owner sold his house in disgust and moved back to Italy. There are very few reliable wind turbines for single homes, and none of them are vertical-axis. Try to find a single vertical-axis operating anywhere in the world. Try to find a happy owner of a vertical-axis wind turbine. In reality, only people who know nothing about wind energy even want to have such a discussion, let alone understand it. In wind energy, either you “get it”, or you don’t. Most people don’t. 
I might also mention that I have not seen ANY new turbines installed in this area in several years, other than replacements for existing turbines covered by insurance or in one case, by the government when they bought 40 acres from a neighbor whose turbine had one guy wire anchor on that 40 acres. The government bought him a brand new Bergey 10 kW turbine on a 120-foot FREESTANDING tower for about $120,000.
That neighbor sold me his old one, that I used to replace mine, that had burned out due to a faulty installation by an incompetent installer who, as it turned out, sent a new guy up the tower to connect the wires, with one wire just resting on its terminal, instead of being firmly connected, so when the wire fell off its terminal after a few years, it burned out the generator.
So now I have two of these turbines - one up on my 120-foot tower, to provide power, and a spare that will need to be rewound someday. And of course it is all so expensive that with the new net-metering agreements that only pay the wholesale price of 3.5 cents/kWh for power contributed to the grid, against the 35 cents/kWh they charge, it’s not even worth the price to REPAIR a turbine OR solar panels anymore, let alone buy and install any new turbine.
The super-cheap solar panels from China had already made home wind turbines too expensive to bother with, and everyone was putting in solar instead.
Now, with the new pricing of 1/10th the retail price for electricity produced from the home, you would need your own overpriced batteries to make either wind OR solar worthwhile, and so with solar being cheaper and more reliable, nobody is installing small wind turbines anymore, even in this area that has more wind turbines powering homes than anywhere in the world.
The only significant remaining manufacturer of small wind turbines is begging all of us “real wind people” to sign a letter, with our logo, to congress, to keep the existing tax incentives in place, otherwise there will probably be no small-wind manufacturers left.
They really charge you that much. That almost German/UK//Ireland levels. Is that’s because you are in California? My understanding most of US except perhaps Alaska and haiwaii is max 15c?
Yes I was surprised. I only started scrutinizing my electric bills in the last year or two. Before that i was just happy that the turbine paid the bill. You’d think that as someone who was doing government-funded research and manufacturing and shipping wind turbines internationally, i would have been locked into all the numbers, but no, I was too busy and if the bill was paid, why did I care/ But the tariff rules were changing, due to the electric utilities protesting that people with solar and wind (mostly solar) were getting a free ride, bypassing the profit the electric utility normally would make. And the utility was paying us the same high retail price for the unwanted solar electricity being produced when it was not needed, when the sun was at its peak output.
Yes i always ballparked our kWh price at 12 cents, and was “blown away” when I saw MUCH higher prices, depending on the time-of-use, sometimes around 50 cents/kWh. And YES, a lot of the reason is California is a total ripoff-scam state. They just assume everybody here is rich, not true at all, and we pay WAY more for gasoline - currently over $4/gallon, when other states pay like 2.50, and even our water is expensive. California also charges a STATE income tax (besides the federal tax) of up to 14%!!! Add in sales tax, gas tax, etc., and they take more of your money than you get to use yourself! Crazy! Meanwhile, our roads are in famously poor condition, and what everyone constantly wonders is "Where is all that money going?" They can't even build a single new train from L.A. to San Francisco, after decades of trying, and many tens of billions spent! That’s why we have so many people leaving this state, and they leave all their extra stuff with me!
A solar power plant project:
A solar power plant achievement:
World’s Largest Solar Power Plant Site - Al Dhafra Solar
Hi Doug,
Could you please clarify your point of view and choose one of the 3 proposals?
Hi Pierre: Well, first of all, the reason I use these terms is because, beginning in the 1970’s, I have paid attention to wind energy technology, and after ordering to book “Wind machines” by the Mitre Corporation, I already knew the basic types of wind turbines, their advantages and pitfalls, then paid attention in my fluid dynamics classes at university, always thinking, always designing.
Then awhile filing some key patents, I got educated by a lot of wind energy veterans when the internet was new and fresh and full of good people and good info. Experienced builders, fabricators, windfarm operators, aerodynamicists, even NREL scientists and engineers were free to speak on the chat groups for wind energy. Today the web is a watered-down clown show of ignorance and censorship, mostly about marketing Chinese junk and making sure nobody tells the truth about anything. By the time AWE came along, I was already at the head of the pack in the AWE realm with the Popular Science Invention of the year in June 2008, which I made in a couple of weeks after PopSci called and wanted to come and photograph something compelling.
So anyway, by the time AWE emerged as “a thing”, I had already been exposed to, and participated in, debunking the typical, repetitive bad ideas in wind energy. But at least in regular wind energy, people were building real turbines that worked. Even the vertical-axis people sometimes had turbines that worked for a little while. before self-destruction. Sure, we had plenty of “Professor Crackpots”, but also a lot of off-grid people building working systems that powered their homes - this was back when solar was $4/Watt, whereas you could get a wind system running at maybe $1/Watt or $2/Watt.
We did have a few stubborn “idiots” (usually Savonius advocates) who refused to learn what works, promoting bad ideas, needing to be told to actually connect a generator or shut up, etc., but nothing like what emerged when AWE got popular.
Once the AWE people came on the scene, it was already difficult to find good info on the internet, and the people were not only not even interested in learning anything about wind energy, they thought they knew better than the people practicing wind energy, without any good reason to feel so superior. In short, I had never seen so many complete idiots pretending to have anything to do with wind energy, ever, in my entire life, not even close. You know who the worst were - nothing but lies and arguments over ridiculous notions that made no sense whatsoever, and endless claims of immense progress, always set in future-tense, while NEVER materializing.
So while all of this new crop of perpetual idiots with their “smart” (stupid?) phones went on and on raising millions of dollars to hire a thousand well-meaning yet naive kids, with their only accomplishments taking group selfies, “renting office space”, promising to power X hundred homes at remote location Y by date Z, etc., it was apparent to anyone who knew anything about wind energy that NOBODY in this entire crop of wind-wannabes would EVER learn anything about wind energy, or ever create anything that worked out. There was no humility, no willingness, or even desire, to learn, just the misguided notion that if they liked kites, they could simply “replace hardware with software”, and end up with the best source of power generation yet conceived in the history of the world.
They thought they were about to change the world, whereas real wind people knew we were looking at an order-of-magnitude increase in outright stupidity, and really, there was nothing in the new field of wannabe AWE to talk about EXCEPT how stupid all the people were, and still are to this day. The results are as predicted: nonexistent - after well over a billion dollars spent. Today, we have a few stragglers, still writing that software, occasionally flying a few kites from half-size shipping containers, talking endlessly of “disaster relief”, and that’s about it.
As far as the 3 multiple-choice “choices” you asked my opinion about, I’ve always been amazed that none of these smartphone geniuses ever just hung an off-the-shelf turbine from an off-the-shelf kite or balloon, etc., at least as a staring place to show something that could technically at least work, without even having to build or design anything new, but that would apparently be too simple for such “geniuses”.
As far as virtually every forward-looking statement made by the smartphone geniuses being wrong, taking false statements by politicians as an example, it’s often said “Either he is lying, or stupid enough to believe what he just said”. Under Joe Faust in the old forum, a major “topic” was in fact whether his little buddy was INTENTIONALLY “lying”, or just somehow making endless false statements without knowing it.
In both cases, the clear choice is between being “a liar” or “stupid”. Either way, who cares? The result is the same. So take all the false statements of future progress in AWE, and take your pick - was the person making the false statements “a liar” or “an idiot”? That’s what it comes down to. Those are the only two possibilities. If you think they knew the statements were likely false, they are liars, otherwise they are idiots. Facts are facts, results, or the lack thereof, are what they are, and sometimes it is not too complicated.
Anyway, to my way of thinking, there is nothing to comment on in the general field of AWE as attempted today, except how stupid and uneducated most of the wannabe participants are, and while their instinct is to “shoot the messenger” that’s just part of their ignorance. Most of them are such a complete joke, subject to believing every lie they hear, they are in turn relegated to simply lying all the time themselves, while accusing me of lying if I even just quote them directly. There has never been anything like it in wind energy - not even close. AWE as it exists today is nothing but the biggest joke ever to appear in the otherwise productive and well-established field of wind energy.
Thank you Doug, that seems close to the 2nd option:
As you know, @Kitewinder developed with Kiwee, and with a certain success, something quite similar to a traditional wind turbine except for the rope-drive transmission with the generator on the ground.
I believe I remember that @dantmaui (Pacific Sky Power) has developed a sort of wind turbine suspended from a single-line kite. I remember also that Dave Santos experimented something similar. I myself have experimented with a FlygenKite with 2 lines but in stationary flight.
Perhaps using KiteX as a light wind turbine (but for strong winds) would lead to some possibilities.
In any case, a big lifter will be needed.
This is an old discussion, and nothing has changed, including the fact that everyone is just too lazy or broke to bother giving it a decent try.
“A Modern Blueprint for Coastal Power: China’s Offshore Solar-Hydrogen Integration”:
I can’t find the discussion now, but here is a video relevant to it. Carriages are riding along a circular or straight track, how do you connect power to them:
