But AWES can’t seem to do much of anything, so far… 
It’s just an example. A very good example. A comparatively easy starting place. And when most AWE companies keep promising how many hundred or thousand homes they “will” power, an obvious starting place would be one. But of course, therels that old saying, if you want to have your lies believed, make it a really BIG lie! If someone says they have a race car that will win all races, one might be excused for asking if their car has ever even made it around any race track, anywhere in the world, at any speed, ever…
Hi Doug, you are right. But “AWE promoters” are also right, announcing for 15 years now that AWE is the energy of the future. Indeed, today, AWE (for electricity generation) remains the energy of the future. 
Interesting discussion, but it all sounds so familiar by now. Always talking about MegaWatts, while still unable to power a single home, with an AWE system of any size.
Yes. However SkySails’ kite generated more than 100 kW : this is much more than the needs of a single home. So the AWE problem is not “making small then big power”. It takes a lot for AWE to become competitive, if it is possible: costs, control requirements, reliability, land use etc.
To get back fully to the topic, NPWs have an advantage: they pull very hard in a narrow flight window. I will explain why it is an advantage.
The flying window is a bit smaller, partly because the NPW’s need a certain angle of attack to stay inflated properly but also because they weigh so little that there is no momentum in the kite that helps to expand its flying window when in flight.
The smaller flight window is presented here as a disadvantage. But I think that for AWE use it is an advantage because the trajectory of a kite crossing the flying window greatly exceeds the useful swept area. Moreover in yo-yo mode it is preferable to make U-turns at the limit of the flight window, during short reel-in depower phases. Therefore a NPW wastes less space, and we can increase the density in a kite farm.
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Hi Again Pierre:
There seems to be a continued huge disconnect between these impressive power output numbers published by Skysails years ago, and the lack of follow-up activity.
You have been citing these results for what, maybe 5 years or more?
What I’ve noticed about AWE in general and Skysails in particular are:
- Skysails has some great expertise in kites - impressive kite accomplishments over many years, but no real success to speak of, that I’ve seen anyway.
- Skysails promoted pulling ships for years, gave it a good try, but gave up on it after all that talk that went on for over a decade;
- Skysails then “pivoted” to kite-reeling, and that was years ago, announcing “a factory” and “Worldwide sales” maybe 4 or 5 years ago(?)
So while it seems impressive to see such nicely designed and built large kites, Skysails has been at it now for something like 20 years - a fifth of a century - with no success. Their “pivot” to kite-reeling has led nowhere. Their stated “factory” and “worldwide sales” seem to be on hold or not functioning.
Meanwhile, a main claim for kite-reeling and AWE in general has been “replacing hardware with software”. if that is the case, why not develop that software AND whatever hardware is needed, at a more affordable scale, then, once working, consider larger installations?
My take is that the people pursuing AWE are actually unable to get anything actually working reliably at any scale, so money is raised on the basis of promises of future success rather than present success, with the promoters knowing the whole time that they don’t have anything worthwhile to offer, so they talk about MegaWatts because it offers a built-in excuse to produce nothing useful while talking endlessly about “future” success.
So they talk about making really big kites, while unable to power a single home on a regular basis with a smaller kite. The built-in excuse part is “How can you expect us to make kites that big???” Therefore they can go on talking forever, producing nothing useful forever. Kind of like “a shell game”. If they think nobody notices this, one person does.
This same dynamic seems to afflict most of the AWE efforts. It’s like “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” Not to sound mean, but, at this point, why would anyone believe ANYTHING Skysails says?
The posts before this post have been moved so this post now looks very out of place.
It said
At this point why would anyone believe anything Doug Selsam says?
Which was my reply to Doug saying something similar about ( was it Skysails? )
Well this is messy now
Enjoy the video
Maybe because I’ve been on-target for the whole 15-year AWE hype cycle, and the only voice of reason and factuality, and one of the few with actual experience in wind energy, while almost every statement made by AWE promoters has turned out to be false, and to this date, there is still not a single AWE system in regular operation anywhere in the world, despite all the false press-releases that so many newbies take so seriously. Maybe because I’ve been sounding a warning the whole time, to a bunch of people without enough actual interest in wind energy to have ever built an operational system, or even bought one, that wind energy is more difficult than they are aware of. Maybe because I’m the only source on any of these forums whose messages just happen to be powered by wind energy. Oh well, I’ve tried to help. But wind energy perpetual newbies are never interested in facts. Flounder on!
Looks like a nice system.
So all the previous stories about AWE systems connected to a grid have been… (?)
Oh Geez, I was thinking of kiteMILL, not kiteKRAFT. I’ve never even noticed kiteKRAFT with extruded aluminum wings and a Makani-esque design before this moment. Sorry, but I also failed to notice the exact wording specifying it only applied to a skygen/flygen system.
Well anyway, here’s a list (that comes to mind anyway) of onboard-generator (skygen) (flygen) systems that were promised to be grid-tied:
Magenn - an early non-starter of an idea that raised something like 7 million if memory serves
Makani told us for years they were just about to power the grid in a portion of Hawaii with their flygen system, with everything all ready to go, We had a guy associated with the previous forum telling us he had a spy in Hawaii keeping an eye on developments there, None of it ever happened.
Altaeros was repeatedly said to be powering a small town in Alaska (small grid), with their too-frail-to-not-fail tubular skygen aerostat/blimp, but that seemed to have evaporated.
More recently, we have the Mauritius story of a groundgen (kite-reeling) system powering the grid there, as well as at least one kite-reeeling system said to be connected to the grid in Germany?
Also we have all those stories of test sites in Ireland - aren;t they grid-connected?
Hard to keep all these stories straight after awhile.
Maybe I should stop trying to even pay attention to all these stories.
I dont remember Kitemill ever claiming to power homes. Officially we did not yet produce kite power to the grid. It is a goal, but for us a bit pricey as our site is far from the nearest grid connection.
I hear @dougselsam you get annoyed by claims of powering N homes. This is obviously just an attempt to make AWE articles more accessible to the non scientific part of the worlds population. Any serious claims would certainly be in terms og kilowatt and the duration and variation of such. As you didn’t hear those expect it didn’t happen. Though I might have missed some progress outside my own bubble
Hi Tallak:
What I meant to say was I thought of the KiteMILL VTOL Kite-reeling airplane, when I saw kiteKRAFT (name) announcement. To me, all the Kite-this and Kite-that, k-power, k-this, k-that, etc. all fall into the same basket of my highly-unorganized mental filing cabinet, and I tend to get all the so-similar names of the “million flies”, and all the rest, mixed up, probably due to not really taking them very seriously after all these years. Or maybe there are just too many of the million flies to merit taking them very seriously, or remembering which is which. I do like the KiteMILL airplane though.
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Its ok. Until we have better results to show, we are very similar to the other actors. I don’t think we are on a higher moral ground than the other ones also, but it’s nice to point out the times we maybe are.
I get just as annoyed at the supposed “journalists”, “authors”, “reporters” etc. as I do the companies themselves. I think most of the people writing the articles are themselves non-scientific, just repeating what they have been told, usually misquoting the supposed-future-statistics as it is, usually saying some device will power X hundred homes “PER YEAR” of “for a year” which makes me ask “OK so what happens after a year is up? They can no longer power X hundred homes? What is there, an automatic shutoff that is triggered after a year?” The writers don’t even know the difference between energy and power, which is energy per unit time. So they quote power, then still add a meaningless unit of time at the end, just to show how ignorant they are to any actual astute reader. It’s all fluff, based on ignorance.
Nice to know such details, but is there any minor step too trivial to merit another “press-release breakthrough” article? To me, the real question is, if governments are so enthusiastic about advancing clean energy technologies, why do they make it so difficult? And if the companies are so serious about getting something running, why do they allow themselves to be held back by such artificial difficulties, when they could simply deploy in a place that is less restrictive to their attempts at participation?
Total BS Doug
What’s with all the whinging?
Get on yourself and deploy an AWES on the market if you think it’s that easy.
Some engineering teams have standards
KiteKRAFT is definitely one of those teams who put massive efforts in to designing, building, testing and continually improving their offering.
Trivial step? Oh safe airspace integration is trivial now. Did the Wright brothers not make it as far as your part of the desert?
The sky here in Europe isn’t as empty as your blustering.
Here was the only working demo at that first HAWP conference in 2009:
Photographers need to be told to increase exposure time, for a better look
This photo is from Popular Science “Invention of the Year” issue June 2008 (actually published in May 2008).
It all sounds nice, but today, 15 years later, with over a billion dollars spent, there is STILL not a single AWE system in regular operation anywhere in the world.
Professor Crackpot never Sleeps!
Wind turbine blades could be turned into giant batteries, says Swedish firm (msn.com)