OK when two identical cars traveling the same speed crash head-on, the point of impact does not move. Same as a car hitting a completely (theoretical) unmovable object, usually said to be “a wall” when this question is entertained. Contrast this with two cars of varying mass or speed, where the point of impact moves, and one car or the other has an “advantage”. I did not read that whole post - too much to read - just noticed one sentence that jumped out at me as incorrect and difficult to comprehend.
Now this may sound harsh, but you have to understand, as I’ve explained many times in the last 14 years of AWE popularity, my experience in debunking “windsanity” goes back much longer than that. How? Well, please pay attention to this because I’ve had to spell it out several times in that 14 years:
- Wind Energy has always been a magnet for crackpots, because the wind is invisible, so people can (and do!) imagine it behaving however they want. But wind doesn’t necessarily do what you want. It does what IT wants…
- Airborne Wind Energy is a Neodymium Supermagnet for crackpots. Why? Because with the introduction of a true unknown, seemingly “anything goes” - in many peoples’ minds, “there are no rules” and a certain highly-insistent personality type believes this lack of standards makes their prolific-yet-unorganized thoughts suddenly valid and accurate, without any actual validation. Typically, believing they are undiscovered geniuses of the highest order, these people tend to repeatedly bring up “Einstein”, “The Wright Brothers”, and really ANY and EVERY passing “genius” thought coursing through their highly-active-yet-even-more-highly-disorganized brains.
OK I am not the one running this site. But if it were a building, with a sign on the front, that sign would say “Airborne Wind Energy”. What it would NOT say is “Welcome to the Happy Valley Mental Hospital.”
There is a saying: “It is good to have an open mind, just not so open that everything falls out”.
Now before you say the analogy of a mental hospital is farfetched, please consider, This “discussion” has been going on since 2008. In that time, we’ve had many companies come along declaring that they “will” develop airborne wind energy, often giving dates by which they “will” power X hundred or thousand homes, usually in a remote place. The people running these companies give all sorts of details about how wonderful their wind energy systems “will” be, but in the end, none of it comes true.
Similarly, take a guy walking down the street talking to himself. OK not unusual, you might say, we all occasionally talk to ourselves. But this guy is actually talking to imaginary people. And not just to rehearse a speech or something, he actually THINKS the “people” he is “talking to” are really there! He is “out of touch with reality”… Some people would just say “crazy”.
Now take a guy who convinces a large group of people he can re-imagine and improve the art of wind energy with his proposed flying contraption. Is what he is saying for real? Or is it imaginary? And if it proves to be imaginary, not real, aren’t the key personnel almost as “crazy” as the guy walking down the street talking to imaginary people?
In both cases, it is delusional people with a wrong idea in their heads, acting as though the wrong ideas are right, when they are not.
People with experience in wind energy, especially those of us who have seen the pattern over a couple of decades of all the typical things the newbies think and say, can immediately flag most of these people as legitimately “crazy”, yet, like the guy walking down the street gibbering to himself, they can’t understand the reality we see. They just say we are “closed-minded” or “mean”, etc.
We know, they don’t.
It is that simple.
We’re familiar with the “mental disorder” from which they suffer, having seen all the “symptoms” many times over, long before “airborne” entered the fray of “improved approaches to wind energy”. We know all the symptoms, we’ve heard all the “arguments”. We know what they are going to say before they say it.
They “are the next Einstein”,
They “will disprove the Betz coefficient”…
etc.
Now why would someone enter the world of wind energy and immediately declare their first order of business is to invalidate the main, longstanding rule of the Betz coefficient? As though they are already making SO MUCH POWER that exceeding the amount of power possible to extract from a continuous flow is all they have left? Why? Because they are out of touch with reality. They don’t know how to make ANY power, yet they think Betz is what is “holding them back”
But they “are like Einstein”, so they will “rewrite the rules”. At no point do they ever just make lots of power within the Betz coefficient. No, that would make too much sense. Remember, they are “crazy”, so don’t expect them to suddenly start making sense! If you tell them they have never made a Watt, they will try to come up with a wise-ass answer, like they once connected a car battery, flicked on a light switch, or turned a generator by hand.
No, we are talking within the context of wind energy, but in the end, the crazy people just want an excuse to go on with more crazy talk. The last big example we had in AWE was one of the people running “the old forum”. Ironically, that in itself seems to occasionally be one more “symptom” of “the craziness”. A way to “feel like” they are at the cutting edge of wind energy, without having to prove it.
His strategy worked in that case, because it allowed him to keep going on ad infinitum, and when anyone protested he could just have the “correct” post deleted, and pretend his “incorrect” posts were the new way of thinking, even though he never really ever got anything worthwhile running at all, let alone enough to make a difference.
When I say someone “has never made a Watt” in a wind energy discussion, I am talking about a Watt in wind energy.
Meanwhile all Betz says is you have to leave enough energy in the wind for it to exit the area, or you won’t be able to have any new wind enter the area. Now that sounds pretty logical, doesn’t it? New air has to enter, therefore old air has to leave, therefore old air needs to still have kinetic energy left, for it to move out. Actually it is extremely simple, and not arguable, yet people still do. Why? Because from that standpoint, they are verifiably “crazy”. We know it. They don’t.
If one person says “We are developing airborne wind energy and will power X-hundred homes in location Y by date Z.” (which is usually “next year”) we can say they were “mistaken” when it doesn’t happen.
But then when ANOTHER guy comes along and says THE EXACT SAME THING, we might start to notice “Hey, didn’t the last guy, who turned out to be crazy, say that exact same thing?”.
By the time you have hundreds of people ALL saying they WILL power X hundred homes at location Y by date Z, (next year) you MIGHT see it as a bona-fide mental illness, with specific symptoms, just like the guy walking down the street angrily arguing with imaginary people.
At some point you can see this is “a syndrome” with long-recognized and well-defined “symptoms”, which never seem to change much. This was going on in wind energy before Airborne Wind Energy became a popular topic, and continues on in spite of the accumulating evidence that it actually amounts to a common mental disorder, always with the same symptoms.
So I would just say, noting that there IS NO sign here saying “Welcome to Happy Valley Mental Hospital”, if someone has a contribution or question related to the serious topic of airborne wind energy, which is now PROVEN to exist, this is the place for it. If, on the other hand, their mind is so open that “everything is falling out”, maybe they should consider actually DEVELOPING an AWE solution THEN hitting us with it, rather than just using this place as a dumping ground for all the stuff “falling out” of their “open mind”.