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For the network fans, this looks nice: Fred Again.. , Jamie T - Lights Burn Dimmer (USB002 Apple Music Live, Dublin 1st Nov 2025)
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nice link thanks
Fred Again has good connections with Lewis and Harris (where I live)
Here’s another… But maybe more depressing
Is this why we build tethered drones?
Or will someone drive it to the roof of the warehouse at night and turn it into an AWES?
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Thanks Rod. Very interesting.
The introduction begins like this:
Airborne wind energy systems (AWES) are an emerging technology for electricity generation using tethered flying devices. Compared to traditional wind turbines, AWES are easy to transport and use less material over their lifetime. This means AWES can provide clean energy in areas where construction of wind turbines is not feasible. Research into AWES has grown significantly in the past two decades, with research groups and startups proposing increasingly innovative designs.
I’m just wondering if the optimistic statements, of the type which we sort of take for granted, in this introduction are accurate. Is AWE in general, and kite-reeling more specifically. an “emerging” technology, or might it actually be more like fading away? Seems like ten years ago there were so many kite-reeling companies, with all the press-releases, “H.R. Departments”, and group-selfies, but now most of them seem to have gone silent at best, and maybe just disappeared(?)
Next, we’re used to hearing optimistic statements like “AWES can provide clean energy in areas where construction of wind turbines is not feasible.” but is this an accurate statement today, or more of a “hope” or a “wish”? As in “We HOPE someday AWES can provide clean energy”… Is AWES as envisioned in this paper actually even able to reliably provide clean energy at all today? Or is it still “on the shelf”, relegated to the occasional brief demo flight? If so, besides the occasional demo, where is any significant amount of energy of any kind, clean or dirty, being generated by AWES today?
And then, regarding the last sentence, above, maybe it is technically accurate to say that research into AWES “has grown significantly in the past two decades”, since there was pretty much zero research into AWES two decades ago, so any current activity whatsoever would make this statement true, but let’s just look at the last decade: Is there more, or less, research into AWES today than ten years ago?
I would also ask the question of whether the questions posed about circle radius, reel-out speed, etc., might not be coming a bit late? With all the years of kite-reeling research, by so many companies, would we not expect such basic questions would have been addressed, and maybe answered, by now?
Not to seem negative, because I remain positive about AWE as a concept, but if such basic operating parameters have not been solved by now, what have the thousand or so people involved in kite-reeling been doing for all these years? Is there a single AWES in regular operation after all these years? And if the technology still has not developed to the point of having a system in regular operation by now, could concern over such details at this point be like the proverbial “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”, or worrying about the paint color of a “revolutionary” new type of car that is for some reason not actually ready for daily driving? 
Hi Doug, as you are asking about any kind of energy, I would reply that kitesurfers are using airborne wind energy. A few boats pulled by kites are also still in operation like the Seakite (test vessel), Deo Juvante (leisure vessel) or more recently Cap Kersaint (fishing vessel).
Best regards
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Hi Battlebot:
Yes I remember almost 2 decades ago, when we had the first High Altitude Wind Power (HAWP) Conference here in California, when the theme was “replacing hardware with software” and using kites to extract energy “from the jetstream”, and putting it on the grid as electricity, replacing those dreaded “Windtowers” (which was daveS’ attempt to redefine “Wind Turbine”). The term “AWE” was quickly thereafter substituted for “HAWP” as sounder minds began to run the numbers on tether weight and sag to reach the jetstream.
After that, without even a reliably self-launching kite, the desperation of word substitution had clearly entered the picture. For example, Joe Faust was promoting the idea of kites providing shade from the sun as Airborne Wind “ENERGY”, since it might reduce the need for air-conditioning. When I expressed my impression that this was a ridiculous case of “mission creep”, Joe replied that he had, in fact, “taken a nap under a kite” in his backyard. When pressed for details, Joe recounted finding a sheet of graphics from a sign on the side of the road, hanging it as a tarp in his backyard, then falling asleep under it. He said that piece of trash “was really” a kite, because there was some air movement, and it wiggled. Ok so we’re back to the “look, it wiggles!” symptom of “The Professor Crackpot Syndrome” in wind energy, combined with the urge to avoid ever using a generator. Mmmm Hmmm…
Anyway, what I learned from all the years of JoeF And daveS making what were, to me, absurd statements, presented in all seriousness, was the technique of REDEFING WORDS to make previous false statements seem true. Once I realized this technique of merely redefining words to seemingly “win” pretty much any “debate”, I recognized it in politics - this was exactly how politicians endlessly lie to us, while we struggle to “prove: what we can all feel - they use language and words as weapons.by pretending to “redefine” the very meanings of the words they use.
So anyway “HAWP” was originally promoted mostly by kitesurfers, saying that if kites could work so well for pulling watercraft, they could also solve our need for generating electricity from the jetstream! Once it was realized that reachnig the Jetstream was going to be too difficult, the term “HAWP” was watered down to “AWE”. In other words, “High Altutude” was changed to just “Airborne”, and the race was on to show the word how “kites” were going to outperform all other methods of generating electricity for the grid.
Well, as time went on, and all the group-selfies, “renting office space”, and “H.R. Departments” turned out to be just a whole lot of silliness, we’re still at square-1: How can we redefine words to make our previous watered-down claims of merely “airborne” wind energy from kites, that too slowly fell apart when after so many years, nobody even had a reliably self-launching kite, let alon a true electricty solution, it was realized that the precursor to it all, kite-surfing, could be neatly “redefined” as being “AWE” all by itself, dispensing with the need for generators, inverters, cabling, and all that complicated engineering, and that just going back to the original motivating factor, that lites could pull watercraft, “was really” “AWE”. The only problem is, it ignores the original meaning of “AWE” and just points back to kite-surfing. SSo if you want to call kite-surfing, at whatever scale, as “AWE”, it is just more of what Joe Faust and daveS beat to death: redefining words rather than advancing technology as originally stated.
And so it goes in the feld of “Crackpot” wannabe wind energy, definitely NOT restricted to airborne comcepts, but long-established before the “AWE” era: Rather than proving, physically, how good a wind energy concept is, by showing how much electricity one can generate in a reliable manner, the new skill set was “debate” and trying to redefine words if necessary, to “win” such “debates”. only thing is, going back for thousand of years of wind turbines, mrely presenting a “debate” or “argument” about how effective a given wind energy concept is, does NOT actually substitute for making it work. So, “watering down" the terminology that originally meant using what had been learned from kites pulling watercraft, to produce grid power, to just refer back to using kites to pull watercraft, is actually a dishoinest approach to fulfilling the original goal, by siamply redefining terms once again to merely refer to kites pulling watercraft, just conveniently dispensing with the need to ever learn how to do what is known as “wind energy” these days, referring to a means of providing electricty, usually to the grid. The lesson here is that redefining words is not tchnological progress, but really, just desperation in the face of abject failure.
Upon further thought, I’ll go a step further to flesh out my point. 20 years ago or so, as windsurfing was being largely superseded by kite-surfing, and the term “wind energy” was well-understood to refer to the growing industry of producing utility-scale electricity from the wind, the modifier “airborne” was attached to the term “wind energy” to denote the growing goal of using kites as the next step in producing electricity from the wind, with the goal of eliminating the dreaded towers, by using kites to elevate wind energy systems instead of using towers.
So “the race” was on! The race was defined by the new term “Airborne Wind Energy”
The starting line was kite surfing.
The finish line was somehow powering the electric grid with airborne wind energy systems.
To now call kites pulling watercraft “AWE” is just substituting the starting line for the finish line.
It’s one more case of “moving the goalpost.”
Changing word definitions to make a previous false statement seem true.