Very astute post. What’s going on here is a bunch of people who have never even run a workable wind energy system, let alone built one, let alone designed one, seizing on the opportunity to apply whatever first-grade-level knowledge they might have acquired in the endless debunking of their own flawed projects, and feign expertise in the face of what they can now identify as a typical beginner who got a typical wind energy beginner patent issued, and thinks it is significant.
When I saw the first post in this topic, I just saw the typical know-nothing statement that the problem with existing wind turbines is they don’t start working in very light winds, like saying the problem with solar is it doesn’t work at twilight, when the fact is, there is not enough energy in sunlight at twilight to be worth chasing after! Real wind energy people know all this without skipping a beat, but well-intentioned beginners with no knowledge or experience are clueless.
The next symptom of ignorance is the retreat to Savonius turbines, with all their mistargeted talking points of “responding better to low wind speeds”, “more suitable for urban environments”, etc., even though if these talking points were valid, we would see Savonius turbines littering every crowded city by now, but we see none.
With just those two mistargeted talking points, we have the two most common symptoms of a beginner who has assumed they knew what they were doing, but who instead falls into a typical well-worn syndrome that I alternately call “The Professor Crackpot Syndrome” or “The La Brea Tar Pits of Wind Energy” where you can find the dead carcasses of most new wannabe wind energy companies and most AWE efforts.
Now, Pierre and I have a lot of discussions offline from this venue, where we are allowed to simply discuss facts, without having our posts deleted. I placed some text from the first post into Google with their AI interface, along with the name of the person posting, and got back a PDF of a Chinese patent, which I forwarded on to Pierre, who then found some English version I guess, and went on to start a discussion of so many details the original poster was not providing, and now we have a typical “fact-fest”, where the would-be “innovator” is being peppered with the simple facts that disassemble all of his original talking points.
This is all very typical stuff, and trying to stop the endless profusion of crackpots is, as I told Pierre offline, like holding your hand out thinking you can stop an avalanche. “Inventors” without the requisite knowledge are everywhere, and always will be. Many wind energy crackpots even have PhD’s and high positions in academia! They put Savonius turbines in wind tunnels and try to fine-tune them and write papers about how they solve the “problems” of low wind speeds and “urban” environments…(yet again)
As I told Pierre, in a group of “real wind people” this discussion would never take place to this extent. Everyone in wind energy knows all these facts as the basic ABC’s of their craft, which scarely bear mentioning for the thousandth time, such as the cubic nature of power with wind speed. Wind veterans could just be told the two talking points, and never need to see the rest of the patent, and everyone has a good laugh.
It reminds me of an old story where some people kept telling the same jokes over and over, and eventually just gave each joke a number, and rather than saying the whole joke again they just say the number of the joke, and everyone laughs.
In my case, rather than give the same old joke a number, I just call it “The Professor Crackpot Syndrome”. Always good for a laugh. No need to dissect it to death. it is what it is, it’s always the same, and there is no point drowning in details over it - its a waste of time. Good debunking experience for the perpetual newbies here, but in a group of real wind people, this discussion would have been over long ago.
The frustrating thing is, as you point out, it’s almost impossible to explain all this in a few words to the perpetual newbies here - you have to go through the whole thing from beginnning to end, writing a multipage paper to make the simplest point to the endless know-nothings, rather than just saying the number of the joke. And it never changes. Oh well, time to move on and have an otherwise productive day! 