TEM#102 web meeting on September 23-24, 2020

News
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https://community.ieawind.org/tem102/introductory-note. Some quotes:

Introductory Note

AIRBORNE WIND ENERGY

BACKGROUND

Airborne wind energy (AWE) has the potential to give access to stronger and more stable high-altitude wind resources, including in remote areas and floating offshore, and thus play an important part in the future energy mix. It also reduces material consumption which leads – in combination with a higher capacity factor – to potentially very low LCOEs and lower carbon and environmental impacts. Furthermore, it may be modified to provide propulsion and power for the maritime shipping sector [1].

There are currently over 60 organisations working on AWE, thereof about half from industry developing AWE systems and half from academia and government research (see Figure 1 in the annex).

AWE is progressing towards commercial demonstration. A recent road mapping exercise among Airborne Wind Europe members concluded that AWE system deployment can be expected to be in the Gigawatt-range by 2030. By 2050 several hundreds of Gigawatts will be potentially installed providing a significant share of the power supply.

However, there are various questions that need to be answered before it achieves widespread commercial adoption. The challenges concern safety standards and technical guidelines, resource and deployment potentials, markets, engineering issues, environmental impacts and social acceptance, regulatory as well as financial and policy challenges.

The TEM has been initially proposed by the University of Stuttgart (Germany), and is supported among others by

  • IFP Energies Nouvelles (France),
  • Kyushu University (Japan)
  • NC State University (US)
  • NREL (US),
  • PtJ / BMWi (Germany),
  • SEAI (Ireland),
  • TU Delft (Netherlands),
  • Wind Energy Research Cluster (Germany)
  • and the leading AWE companies which are members of Airborne Wind Europe.

The TEM is intended as a virtual online meeting on 23-24 September. It is the clear intention to establish a specific Task on AWE within the IEA Wind TCP.

TENTATIVE PROGRAM

The TEM is being planned for 23-24 September 2020. The initial idea was to hold the meeting back-to-back with Wind Energy Hamburg conference and fair, but as this event has been postponed to December 2020 an online meeting on 23-24 September is proposed (4 hours each day).

  • Introduction [AWEurope, IEA Task 11]
  • Current state the AWE sector: Short presentation for newcomers
  • Discussion of topics [based on the list above; depending on the number of topics some 30 min. per topic] with contributions from around the globe
    • Short presentation and then Q&A, discussion
  1. Scenarios for 2030 to 2050
  2. Resource Potential: Wind Study and Power Curves
  3. Safety aspects
  4. Airspace Regulation
  5. Environmental and social impacts
  6. AWE-specific support policies
  7. Need for common design tools
  8. …

Get more information on https://community.ieawind.org/tem102/home.

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A word to the wise: I was just having a discussion with the former head of anemometry at GE Wind. He was lamenting the fun of the good ole’ days of small wind. We agreed that getting sucked into this sort of bureaucracy instead of just selling their product was what killed the small-wind industry. Perfectly viable companies with perfectly viable products got sucked into endless “meetings”, “conferences”, “rules”, “certifications”, etc. It took their eye off the ball and made the whole thing one overweight-for-its-small-size government-funded program, which quickly snuffed it out. Like throwing a wet blanket on a nice bonfire. Millionaires in the making now back to working as employees with other firms. Today there is basically one surviving company with a bad, way-over-priced product subject to many failure modes that yet (barely) survives through endless bureaucracy ass-kissing. Probably only a matter of time til they also bite-the-dust, except many bureaucratic jobs for milquetoast do-nothings now depend on them staying in business, so who knows. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

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I tend to agree. A few people can only cope with so much. If part of that is regulations, then getting the technical side working is only getting less resources. Anyways regulations are moot until you know what the AWE you are dealing with will look like

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