Slow Chat III

Lounge
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Hello Pierre: I have a friend who was peripherally involved with my work several years ago, who started an electric truck company before anyone was talking about electric trucks. He had what I thought was a great idea, to simply electrify an existing popular truck model. At one point he told me he had copied me by getting some funding from the California Energy Commission (only because some group applied for him) - in this case it was a 50% matching funds offer for any trucks sold.

Well, he was a fun guy, and a great talker, but not so great at fully grasping actual technology. One day I remember was after he had gotten meetings with Google and maybe some other big company, he triumphantly told me “I just sold seven trucks!”. Now, knowing him as well as I did, privately, I was pretty skeptical. My impression was “Yeah, they may have indicated some interest, under certain conditions, but it is you who will fall through.”

He was all about “meet and greet”, but seldom came thru on whatever he said he would do. Anyway, that all evaporated, and his electric truck efforts fizzled, without ever producing anything beyond an initial prototype that may have even used lead-acid batteries, and which had been sold to a hopeful municipality in Southern California. Not sure how long they used it, but anyway, just because someone “says” they “sold 5 units”, years ago, if you see no evidence of it, then maybe it never really happened!

You have to remember, you are in the land of extreme bullshit at the edge of the La Brea Tar Pits! (By the way “La Brea” is Spanish for “The Tar”.) In Southern California, we have more oil than Saudi Arabia, but nobody is allowed to drill for it, to keep prices high.

I used to live in Huntington Beach, where you get “Brea” (tar) on your feet at the beach from natural underwater seeps, where the air smells like oil, and the high school teams are named “The Oilers” and at that time the city itself was full of oil wells. And also in Fullerton, a city adjacent to “Brea (tar), California”, which still has several oil derricks and wells, although they have been mostly removed from Southern California to make room for sprawling housing developments, which are apparently more financially lucrative. :slight_smile:

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Hi Doug, you have not proven that they did not sell 5 units.

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Hello Pierre: I throw the ball right back to you: You have not shown any evidence that they did. And if such a notion were even so, in any stretch of the definition of the word “sale”, such as perhaps a “memorandum of understanding” about some possible future sale, or more likely, maybe a mere and vague possible “expression of interest”, we certainly have no photos, articles, or promotional material of any kind, from the original source, which we would definitely expect if it ever happened.

Pierre, you are an intelligent and often skeptical person, not usually prone to falling for B.S.
Wannabe wind energy is a field of almost 100% B.S., and always has been.

How many times do you have to hear the same sorts of lies, before getting to the point of realizing almost every such statement you will hear is just another lie?

In light of these well-known (to us) facts, why do you put the onus on me, for merely expressing some well-founded skepticism?

Have you ever heard the saying “You can’t prove a negative”? It’s not up to me to “prove” what they said, it’s up to them.

No I can’t “prove” nobody gave them any money for 5 of their systems, but simple logic tells me that if they did, and if the systems were delivered, we would have heard all about them, long ago, because their best interest would be to make sure people knew about such success, to promote further sales, right?. Are you telling me they sold and delivered 5 systems, two or three years ago, and somehow we’ve never heard any details? Are you saying that was all they sold, 5 systems, years ago, then no more after that? Why no more?

I would say the onus is on you: Who bought 5 systems? Where are they today? Who ran them? What are (were) they powering? How consistent was their operation? How could five systems be sold, and presumably, in operation for years now, without anyone hearing anything about it?

I’d say “use your head”, but I know that you already know, and pretty much agree, with everything I’m saying, and are just “playing devil’s advocate”, which is fine. I can play along. I hope I’ve made sufficient counterpoints to overcome your well-stated “objections”, and I will stand by my assertion that we’ve seen no evidence of such years-ago “sales”, let alone delivery, let alone installation, let alone “commissioning”, let alone operation. It’s all “par for the course” in wannabe wind energy! :slight_smile:

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This article shows the difficulties of the AWE sector.

I have heard of these few sales before.
And we know that electricity was produced.
It is not yet known whether buyers were satisfied. In your opinion?

In my opinion this is one small step for AWE, one giant leap for mankind, but I am certainly exaggerating. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Here it is, a new week, Pierre:
I’d say you could just have easily said you sold 5 systems of one of your experiments, such as a rotating sausage, then issued a press-release over it, then some random person could have read it, and gone on for years referring to your “sale of 5 systems”, but it would have been meaningless. Same for all of us. it’s all just more “press-release breakthroughs”.
Just sayin’
 Have a nice week! :slight_smile:

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Hello again Pierre:
Not to dwell on this question, but upon further thought, the following occurred to me:
In the early days of a much more free and open internet, we used to have a yahoo group about small wind turbines, and it was associated with AWEA, using that acronym in its name. So many knowledgeable people participated, including experienced teachers of turbine design and building, off-grid people sharing their real-life experiences, new companies introducing new products, CEOs of small turbine manufacturing companies, and even NREL scientists and engineers. I met so many people who greatly educated and helped me in every way.

One day, however, I noticed the openness evaporating. Suddenly we never heard from anyone at NREL again. It was obvious that the people running it had noticed this new thing that had previously been seen as a peripheral means of communication that most people hardly took seriously (the internet) was becoming the main way people communicated, and big-budget organizations like research centers and highly-funded companies could not risk having their people making public statements that could be interpreted as official policy statements from their employers.

Companies funded by investors could not risk having employees saying anything that could come back and put into question whatever the company itself might want people to know. It even got to the point that the whole idea that anyone could express their opinions without babysitting moderators making sure they didn’t spill the beans about so many false things we’re constantly being told, that Yahoo gave up in even taking the risk of hosting open forums!

My vague recollection, whether accurate or not, is that, years ago, AWE companies like Skysails, Altaeros, Makani, etc., used to eagerly participate in the online AWE forum. Maybe that is just my imagination, but once companies like that get funded, it seems the last thing they want to deal with is anyone questioning any statement they may have made. They have their optimistic-sounding stories they want investors and even potential customers to hear, and anything that might interfere with that is to be avoided. Hence the relative info-vacuum from AWE companies. I’m just guessing most employees are sworn to silence and made to sign nondisclosure agreements.

So here we are, sort of acting like fools in a way, discussing whether some statement supposedly made by a company years ago about selling 5 units, is true. Notice the one thing lacking: Any input from the company in question. So, unless we want to do whatever detective work would be required to answer such a basic question, we could (and have) go on all day, day after day, discussing the accuracy of such alleged info-bits, based on what we DO know (which is not much) and what seems evident from what we can see, such as zero follow-up information on those sales, which doesn’t match the follow-up publicity we have come to expect from any company in this field with any sort of success whatsoever.

So, to me, actually discussing whether such stories are true, in a vacuum of information, places us in a somewhat silly position, about which any outside observer might react to by saying “Well why don’t you just ask them?” Personally, I’ve stated from day-one that I never believed the whole story of the new factory and worldwide sales, and have been scolded for my “ignorance” (Uhhh Doug, apparently you haven’t heard about the factory and worldwide sales!) to me the (lack of) evidence speaks for itself after all these years of nothingness.

I’ve never seen it as worth my time to take such stories seriously, as we all know the pattern by now. Well at least I do. But if anyone really wanted to know the answer, they might at least try asking the company. But I think the reason nobody does is either we feel like we already feel know the answer, or in other cases, we don’t want to hear the answer. Assuming anyone could actually GET an answer. ,Just sayin’
 :slight_smile:

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We would be better off knowing the answer to avoid continuing a dead end if possible. Do you have any idea what might be wrong?

Or we are worrying for nothing, and SkySails is in a phase of progress in an ultra-complex field.

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Can you help me to to answer

In one sentence please, What was the question?
I’m quite sure Skysails will provide or already have provided the data you’re looking for

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In two sentences: we know that SkySails has sold a few units, produced electricity, tested at least one kite of more than 100 mÂČ for more than 100 kW. What we don’t know: the energy produced over a significant period of time, the frequency and duration of operations, and finally everything that would enter into the statistics of an operational system.

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Hi Pierre:
I thought that was the question.
Where did you get that information?
What are the details? To whom? Where deployed? Why the vacuum of information?
You keep regurgitating the same old “news”, every time this topic is re-examined by us.
If you have any new source or verification for that info, please share it.
Thanks! :slight_smile:

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They have now made and sold five units, Brabeck says, with the one in Mauritius the first in operation.

This looks to be the same article (and the same author) than the one you had linked. I also heard this information but without the sources. To be honest, I have nothing else.

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Hi again Pierre and thanks for responding so quickly.
OK here’s a quote from that article:
" They have now made and sold five units, Brabeck says, with the one in Mauritius the first in operation."

Now there’s a reason I keep bringing up other articles that anyone can see contain fraudulent or at least incorrect information.

And I gave you an example of even a friend of mine who, after meetings with Google and at least one other large potential customer, believed he “had sold 7 trucks”.

You have to realize, when pressured for a success story, people are often inclined to jump the gun a little bit, and cite something like “sales” as having already happened, when in reality, they have some “interest” that they think, or hope, will translate to actual sales soon.

“Fake it 'til you make it.” is the slogan often repeated in the language of Silicon Valley, etc.

It’s one more case of “All AWE progress remains perpetually in the future”

Do you think nobody from Skysails ever checks out this forum?
They are probably prohibited from posting here.
Why? Because they have investors, and thereby wish to control the flow of information, restricting any available info to what sounds favorable to their business case.

Otherwise, don’t you think they would be on here by now, “correcting” this very conversation?
Wouldn’t you want the truth to come out if it were you and you had sold 5 units?
Why the radio silence?

Anyway, seen this movie too many times before. And you’ve already seen it with Skysails in particular, when they “just gave up” on everything they had been saying for a decade, and sold off their ship-pulling effort, as though it had just been some minor side-project the whole time.

“Now we’re about generating electricity!”
OK, sure, one more wannabe wind energy innovator. The La Brea Tar Pits - where are all the rest of them today? Fossilized. Get a clue! :slight_smile:

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This is an unfounded assumption. Basically, we cannot deny that SkySails made progress a few years ago with one of its prototypes approaching 100 kW. It was able to sell a few units. We wait for the rest.

I think we are in a particularly difficult field, and commercial success is not for tomorrow, nor is definitive failure.

Everything can stagnate then fly away
, or shrivel up, or between them. We remain in a zone with 50 shades of gray.

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Hi Guys! Here’s today’s “press-release breakthrough”: A solar-powered drone that “can fly forever” - well, until the sun goes down anyway. Well, the video shows it barely able to lift itself off a table, but anyway, maybe it can catalyze an idea for AWE or something


World’s tiniest solar drone can fly forever with high lift efficiency (interestingengineering.com)

Here’s my take on this one:

  1. It seems to be exaggerated, saying it can fly forever, but then it can’t keep flying without sunlight. I’m guessing it might not be able to fly when the sun is not straight overhead, or whichever way the solar cells are pointing.
  2. It seems like a “Professor Crackpot” combination of at least two (2) separate ideas.
    a) A helicopter-style drone
    b) a static electricity motor.

Not sure if either idea is new, and not so sure the static electricity drive is in any way superior to more conventional motors. I mean, after all, weren’t the very first electric motors operated by static electricity? Maybe that’s just my imagination, but the idea is certainly not new, and one might assume the reason we seldom see one is they don’t work as well as regular motors.

The average reader might not think through whether the helicopter drone rationalizes the static electric drive, since their mind has already been directed to fixate on “it can fly forever” or whatever nonsense they writer interjects or claims the source makes. Nope, it just looks like “a breakthrough”, despite the video only showing it lifting off a table or lab bench. (ground-effect?)

Oh well, at least we have a press-release breakthrough, even if it turns out not to be a real breakthrough, it makes for interesting entertainment. :slight_smile:

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Hi Guys!
OK here’s another “article” from “Interesting Engineering” (which you’ll probably see repeated in Popular Science and all the rest of the usual suspects within a few days:)

Massive 40-MW floating wind turbine array wins major tick of approval (newatlas.com)

So here we are, with the latest version of the original “Windship” concept from the original “Father of Wind Energy” (whose posthumous offshore wind patent cited mine as prior art).

Hopefully this one doesn’t place the floatation at the bottom of the base like heronemus, which would cause the whole thing to capsize.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m always dreaming of ideas like this for even land turbines. Not to hard to build when you think about it. Order a few turbines and build a frame to hold them. I think the idea of multiple small turbines potentially solves the cube-square problem.

But multi-turbine arrays have been tried by the big manufacturers already, and they haven’t caught on due to oscillation and vibration issues, as well as the probability that the entire structure ends up using more material than just making a huge turbine, despite the cube-square laws, since some structure sufficient to support all that wind energy capacity must be included.

Nonetheless, multi-turbine arrays offer possibly the best chance to undercut the cost of larger, single-unit turbines, even at household scale. Which is why any serious promoter of the concept should have a working example at a smaller scale, since it is at a level that could be built by a high school shop class.

But no, these sorts of people are stuck on their computers and talk-talk-talking up their ideas to investors, and why would they want to muck that up with an actual prototype that might show the problems with their “great ideas”?

Now let me tell you why I am skeptical of this effort, and this is probably gonna sound really stupid, but nonetheless, as I say, I’ve seen this movie before too many times, and I can tell you the signs, just like a doctor can tell you that red spots on your skin might be chickenpox:

The name 'Windcatcher" is like that swirly logo from Makani:

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Various versions of hat logo, as I’ve pointed out, have been used from day-one by future-failing wind turbine companies. For some reason, beginners always gravitate toward it, probably because the last thing they can envision is the actual production of power from the wind, and are so full of hot air that they are actually imagining their own breath as they speak, which would swirl like that as it hit the still air of the room, as opposed to real wind, which keeps flowing as a large mass, without the swirls that would happen when your blown breath encounters still air.

Same with the name “Windcatch”. A wind turbine doesn’t “catch” any wind, but rather, it catches power from the wind, as the wind blows through it. Any company using “windcatch” or “windcatcher” in the name has always failed.

So, the signs are there for all to see. Few recognize the signs, but I’m giving you a free preview. Such signs are subtle, but unmistakable. Enjoy the movie! :slight_smile:

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Does this include this company?

The Wind Catcher

Ultra low noise wind turbine for your off-grid location or trip

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Thats «Wind Catching» not catcher. Maybe think more like «Wind, Ka-Ching».

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Hi Pierre:
I’d say it is not a good sign. Never has been. I’ve seen many more over the years that I did not find on my first google search, but I think the first logo that used both the Makani swirl AND the name Windcatch says it all. I guess I had forgotten about that instance you mentioned, probably because I like Kite-X. Part of the well-worn and predictable pattern I guess, but I do like many aspects of their turbine.
Isn’t that Elon’s company? Kidding. you know - the “X factor”

At least they have a real wind energy system that actually works, with overspeed protection no less (amazing for AWE people) and may be said to have some limited use case, unlike most every other AWE effort. I sincerely doubt it could withstand permanent placement in a productive wind resource though


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Very clever Tallak! :slight_smile: