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? 