Slow Chat

Hi Roddy:
Before the recent artificially-provoked war in the breadbasket of Europe, it is common knowledge that the previous problem of starvation in undeveloped countries had been replaced by ubiquitous obesity. It’s all controlled by huge international conglomerates.
Of course if you have a war in Ukraine and Russia, which had become the defacto food suppliers for much of the third world, a short-term food crisis can result, and people are suddenly, for the first time in decades, worried about starvation. But that artificially created supply crisis does not change the fact that the world has been getting fatter and fatter by consuming the wrong foods. I’m somewhat of a healthy eating fanatic. i do a lot of juicing of carrots, kale, berries and fruits, to get good vitamins, minerals, anti-oxidants, and other good nutrition from plants, and also good meats, butter, whole milk, all the stuff the corporate-controlled government advice warned against. The American Heart Association originally got its funding from Procter and Gamble after they had invented Crisco, a partially-hydrogenated seed oil, which could be substituted for lard, which is what everyone used back then. Their money drove the American Heart Association to recommend everyone replace lard with Crisco, and butter with margarine. Why? Lower cost. So the food conglomerates lobbied congress to influence the “food pyramid” and other “official” dietary recommendations, to the point that even scientists and doctors just assumed it must be true information and even heart surgeons didn’t realized their dietary advice was 100% wrong. Some cardiologists are now rebelling. The American Hear Association has been caught redhanded and has begin changing their advice. Animal fats are no longer taboo.
As real information begins to trickle in, the public is beginning to realize we’ve been bamboozled. But the theme is not restricted to food. It extends to energy, and a lot of other fields. The information is controlled by international conglomerates, and you have a choice to believe everything they say, or to be a bit skeptical.
Now you have been contending that most everything I say lately is BS. You said I was wrong about a previous discussion about energy storage. Well, due to the high frequency of conversations being moved to a different “topic” I could not go back and see which “Professor Crackpot” energy storage method started the conversation, but you might notice a similarity between, say, kite-reeling and that dumb idea of cranes stacking then un-stacking concrete weights to store energy. That company has already switched horses in midstream in response to so many level-headed debunkers (like me) saying how completely idiotic their scheme was. But notice the similarities to current AWE efforts: The “future of energy” being all about wrapping cables around drums, pulling and reeling our way into a future energy utopia. The problem is a lack of clear thinking, and what amounts to “a cover-up” of the lack of workability of these themes. Yes, a coverup. On this forum, for example, the “really smart people” are quick to announce some supposed sale and delivery of an AWE system, announce new “factories” to produce kite-reeling systems, yet never follow up on the story. How are the “AWE systems” that were delivered working? Or is it just one AWE system that was delieved? Well, how is it working? Nobody knows. It is a coverup. How many AWE systems is the factory now producing and delivering, years later? How are they working? silence… crickets… It is a coverup. Based on moeny. How can these companies keep raising more money if they admit they are just telling stories that lead nowhere?

Just as the poster-child AWE companies promise how many hundred homes they are just about to begin powering with their unworkable contraptions, the energy storage promoters are lost in “rendering-land” and in reality couldn’t think their way out of a paper bag.

As you pointed out, time of use arbitrage would be the first place to implement energy storage. That has been true for what, maybe a century or more? Almost forgotten until recently? You’re saying I’m full-of-it with regard to the three (3) steps to stored energy - produce, unproduce, reproduce. And so I challenged you to show us a means of energy storage that doesn’t cost twice as much as the original energy cost. You have not provided any example. So who is really “full-of-it”? :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the challenge @dougselsam
And you’re an OK dude in my book, dinna stress.

Regarding food, you’re right that globally individual diets have been getting richer and slightly more diverse but globally as a collective diets have become far less diverse and fed by cheap, just in time supply chains. And that’s not a safe nor healthy result.

Back to energy
And yes there’s always a wider picture to consider.
Especially as the electrical grid can be considered as the biggest machine humans have ever made.
This interconnection means we can consider a huge range of market demands and forces.
Straight to YouTube for the latest link on batteries and solar… I’m served a calculation on why it makes sense for UK domestic circumstances.
Batteries make sense where the market for them makes sense whether or not the energy they supply costs more than your initial source. It always will.
Even in the off grid case human energy demands peak and trough and don’t smoothly match production.
So some manner of smoothing the supply will be valuable.

Unproduce energy
Hmmmmm
Now, that, I do take great exception to.
I might even resort to using a condescending tone and your Sunday name Douglas
Energy is converted not destroyed Doug
Energy Conversion - was the only class in uni I had to resit

Roddy you are confirming that you cannot meet my challenge to find a form of “energy storage” (electricity storage in our case) that does not cost twice what the original electricity cost to generate. (Meaning your end result will multiply the cost of electricity by a total of 3x). Heck if you want to add in the markup for the provider to make a profit, the price to the end user could be multiplied by 5x! :slight_smile:

Trying to talk your way out of it now by nitpicking word definitions is only digging yourself in deeper. The problem is real. Just wishing it will go away isn’t going to work.

But as you know, AWES, especially kite-reeling, can produce for almost nothing, using only 1/10 or 1/100 material of regular wind turbines, in the future of course. With storage, three times almost nothing, it doesn’t cost much. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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There is no cost to the owner after buying the battery.
They get the convenience.
They make money from having these devices available for grid smoothing in scale cases.
I’m on a ferry right now. Low bandwidth and it was rough. Pulling into Kirkwall, Orkney.
I’ll get you some details soon enough

Roddy, maybe take a course in economics 101, or a business course, or maybe accounting 101. The idea that you can just talk about any investment and say it’s free once its paid for is not reflective of real life, or real economics. In most cases storage would require credit which would have to be repaid over time. And if someone could fully pay ahead of time, there is what is called “lost opportunity cost”. In other words there is a cost for using money. If this is the level of the conversaion here, it is childish. Just goes to show once again, why waste my time here?
Let’s bypass hypotheticals for a moment, and look at off-grid living today: I have friends who live off-grid in Tehachapi, California, ground-zero for wind energy, with plenty of sunshine as well.
It’s well-understood by these off-gridders that their largest electricity expense, by far, is buying, then maintaining, batteries. They usually have a special room or storage shed for the batteries. The initial purchase price is huge, then they slowly go bad, losing capacity with their limited number of charging cycles. In ten years they need all new batteries. It is never free. It is always a huge expense. And the word is, if you have grid power, it is always cheaper than your own self-produced renewable electricity, especially if you are talking about battery storage versus real-time use.
What you are suggesting is one more example of “All ya gotta do is” thinking:
“All ya gotta do is pay for it then it’s free!” Wheee! Maybe you can find a way to steal the money from someone else! At gunpoint! Everything can be “free”! Yeah, that’s it!

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Wow Doug, don’t you just ask mum to pay for everything so it doesn’t count? Of course you have to pay up front and divi the lifetime energy cost. Just as any other renewables device. And opportunity cost yep that’s a real thing too. You’re argument isn’t based on anything real though.

Renewables in the UK come waaay cheaper than grid energy. I believe you get a free pint of gasoline delivered with each kWh (probably some arcane unit of measure) in the US.

As for your double accounting on the cost of energy from a battery - it’s nonsense
You have to think about the system in the whole.
The battery is complementary to the system.

The only reason to charge batteries is when you have overcapacity of energy supply or cheaper grid energy available than when you will use it. This oversupply energy is going to waste otherwise. Essentially its money you can store which you don’t have to pay a grid supply company for.

Here, the economics make sense and the systems pay for themselves in around 5 years.

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AWEIA International holds that an independent technical body such as
Fraunhofer Society engineers Alumni
a European world-leading applied research organization should moderate an AWE competitive fly-off. I consider this option better than having an industry association like AWEurope with competing industry members sit as judges in a yet emerging industry wherein the privileged most funded teams have failed to deliver on their own promises while less privileged teams that opposed the failed concepts much earlier languish and are excluded from the industry association leveraged opportunities.
Association forums should accommodate all comers and let individual members judge for themselves the merit or otherwise of proffered information. This also implies that members must be respectful of others’ opinions no matter how ‘foolish’, ‘non-feasible’, or even ‘irrelevant’.

There’s nothing new here.except obviously DaveS posts appearing under John O’s name.
John mentions religion and issues the occasional “lift”-based slogan. From DaveS we have the usual references to “Einstein”, “Wright Brothers”, UHMPE, graphene, things that “wiggle”, and idle threats of imminent TeraWatts, against a backdrop of excuses why his projects should not have to ever show any actual power on a meter, but instead serve as theoretical guidance whereby others should prove the great genius of the ideas revealed. Contrast the threats of greater power generation than anyone has ever contemplated, let alone accomplished, with zero actual power generated in 14 years of big talk. Basically. there is nothing new here, just the same empty. leading nowhere talk, 14 years ago in Oroville.

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W&I have been working on designing Giant Kite structures and the most massive component of those kite structures which will ever be used has now been completed, The component has been developed in stealth mode. Most remarkably you have probably already seen a part of it used in a test without even noticing.
Here at W&I we have been working on the most massive kite structure that will ever be made, on Earth.

Enough cheesy marketing - The giant component - That’s the Earth itself.
The vital 6,371 km radius part holding the bottom of kite lines against aerodynamic forces. Without that component - nothing. No kitey.

But we are missing some tricks here.
The earth isn’t just one massively oversized 5.972 × 10²⁴ kg anchor point to one kite. It’s all the anchor mass to all kites.

If we need to anchor a giant network of kites, with multiple anchors across a field, or across a whole farm or even across a district… That anchor mass is already there. Waiting to be used, doing not much but sustaining an eco system as best it can.
This giant anchor mass holds individual anchors fixed rigidly in place relative to the other anchor points.
Not only that, but it is massive and rigid enough to hold all of these anchors against any movement in any direction away from the point where they are fixed.
2 anchors pulling toward each other - they are stuck fixed.
2 anchors pulling away from each other -stuck fixed.
200 random anchors - stuck fixed.

Do not negate the significance of the massive component available to your kite designs.
It gives AWES designers a lot of freedom to design using the Earth as a component.

Thank you for reminding us planet Earth exists, Rod.

Just as long as everyone knows I invented it.

Seriously though - it’s an important point.
Earth :earth_africa: exists, and
It’s massive, and
What happens on one side can influence what happens the other side.
Why don’t >90% of AWES designs use that idea?

A house doesn’t suddenly move 1km West when the wind changes. Neither should a whole village. Nor a wind turbine. Neither should an AWES. We just ain’t that special folks.

ps. I didn’t actually invent the world.

I realise the comic framing isn’t going to be to everyone’s liking…
But I think the concept is big enough to deserve its own thread. Not get buried here in slow chat.

Please feel free to suggest a new way to frame the importance of spread anchor system, fixed operating zone, low deviation AWES

Maybe the easiest way would have been to shift the post to the topic of Network Kites instead @Windy_Skies
Or maybe just ask around before shifting folks posts.
We are a community

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I don’t have a database of where people’s posts should go so it goes here most often. Too much trouble and time to ask beforehand. We need more and more patient moderators for that.

Then try again. Use a descriptive title, which this didn’t have, and try to lay out the benefits [1] of what you want to discuss, which you didn’t seem to do. It looks like a thing that has been talked about before so maybe there are previous threads or studies you can find to link to, or attach the new post to.

[1] Ideally also drawbacks as a balanced discussion is better and has less chance of looking like propaganda.

Wow slow chat exploded! Venn diagram eat your heart out. Gone for a day or two. And it went mad. Any oh!

Was going to ask if awes had its own version of heliostats?
With a ground based focal point? More a pint of curiosity Than anything else. I’ve been hearing lot about molten driving steam production. wondering if anyone had heard something similar? Considering mirrors prism and lenses have been around for generations. most the optics is fairly advanced. Even fibre optics could come into somewhere? Didn’t know if that was something being explored in awes? I know by my reckoning it would be zero emissions. Once installed. But have no idea how it would get there? Just going to throw it out there and see what comes back with the boomerang.

I don’t know if you allude to Advanced Kite Networks, but this method is based on multi-anchored rig, where earth works like a spar and could allow to scale more, by stiffening the AWES but at ground level, without having to bear a heavy weight at altitude.

I have in reserve some patterns using the earth and multi-anchoring.

I suggest you remake this interesting topic by beginning with Earth (with the funny shape you given), pursuing with earth (without capital letter) to go towards technical features.

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Yes this whole topic sounds like daveS, once again revealing his genius for the elucidation of the rest of us unthinking peons… Nobody had previously ever thought of multiple anchors. Nobody knew the Earth existed. Amazing how the level of thinking in AWE has evolved over 15 years. Gosh - Earth… makes me want to just go out and take a walk! :slight_smile:

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I just saw “People will die if AWE R&D continues to delay optimal research design by not planning a Technically Knowledgable Experts-moderated “Fraunhofer” Fly-Off.” on a closed topic.
OK so now of we don;t have “a flyoff”, people are going to die.
Nevermind that I’ve been saying for 14 years of this “flyoff” talk that we ALREADY HAVE A FLYOFF that has been going on for 14 years and all you have to do is show us your device on video with a power meter and you can enter the flyoff! But the same person who has insisted on a flyoff for 14 years refuses to produce or measure any electrical output or output of any measurable kind. So this is just more posturing, more pretending to have a power-producing device, more nonsense.

That is precisely where you miss it, @dougselsam
In a competition, there must be some level playing ground, rules, and competent, impartial referees or jurors. Funding is a key advantage in proving the merits or demerits of any chosen course. We have seen funded concepts fail miserably while those who had opposed those concepts and even walked away from them out of conviction never got funded. AWE today is looking at the MW scale to be certain and it will be nice to know of any willing funder of some contest of sorts amongst competing firms. For example how much would a 5MW AWE Power Station cost or should cost for maximum efficiency and safety? Can this be guaranteed for entrants or eventual winners and what percentage would be availed prior to the contest as a minimum participating allowance itself to help fund preparations?
Who prepares the broad terms of reference and specific terms for different archetypes?

Hi John: A biblical reference, and a slogan about “lift” - par for the course.
Remember, in AWE, all achievements are in the future - and always will be!
We’ll be watching for the electrical output numbers - a week huh? Let’s all hold our breath!

Dear @dougselsam
I took some literature lessons in high school. There’s something called figurative speech if my memory serves me right. Not all speeches are literal, nor writings either.
Thanks, DougS; for your warm welcome in a truly peculiar style.
Ever read Daniel9:27 - "And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make [it] desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate. "(KJV)