I agree. The permanent energy production should be a main concern.
The intermittency and the low capacity factor (20% onshore, 30 % offshore, 40 or 50 % far offshore on floating platforms) of traditional windmills are big concerns.
As example the German wind-coal mix produces a lot Co² emissions that the wind doesn’t decrease. Generally one knows more and more that any mix with renewables don’t work well. One reason is that the thermal plants should work regularly. And there is no available clean and cheap storage nor a world smart grid.
With AWES a higher capacity factor could be reached in high altitude wind, particularly using Low Level Jets (LLJ) (Abstract: The Low Level Jet and Wind Energy (21st Symposium on Boundary Layers and Turbulence)).
As LLJ are changing, a mobile AWES on a truck could be suitable to follow it, realizing a near full capacity factor. This is perhaps another irrealistic idea as it would work if energy distribution or a grid connection is possible in each step.
Please see the “Radeau des cimes” from Francis Hallé: The Treetop Raft | Opération Canopée. Replacing it with a fixed AWES take-off/landing station then connecting it to the ground generator with a second belt. Probably it is difficult and expensive but not impossible.
As the tether is very long and the AWE system becomes very powerful the uninhabited zones (seas, deserts, forests) are preferable, and even more so for crosswind AWES where the tether goes fast with huge tension.
No. Eg for a camping trip it could be realistic to launch the kite in an opening [between trees], perhaps even eunning slightly to get the kite into good wind. Id agree its not for the average consumer though
Also you need to solve that pilot kites with limited L/D have a pretty restricted max altitude. If you want jets Im thinking altitudes of km+. I think you could expect a decent powerup at 2-300 m altitude. Im not sure if its very relevant for the kitewinder though. Getting th kite down is going to be a real hassle with 500 m tether / 250 m altitude
What people don’t understand is the engineering finesse to create a wind energy system that can even survive, at any cost, let alone be an economical energy solution. Here’s a TV clip about some French turbines (Vergnet) installed in New York State, costing millions of dollars, and even though they are still almost new, they don’t even run. https://www.wgrz.com/article/news/local/thruway-windmills-not-working/71-540578438
Imagine the amount of talent hired to create and sell machines that don’t even work. Meanwhile we sit here hypothesizing about increasing capacity factors by increasing the operating height while we struggle to even show a workable concept, wondering if there’s a market. Of course there’s a market. You just need to have something worthy of purchase and someone will buy it.
Lots of interesting talk here. Good to have you around Doug. That’s money time, don’t you told me you would take a kiwee. Go for it !
You know it is not just about having something that works, it is also about making your stuff easily useable for users, usefull, competitive regarding others product. Last point is really important, you compete with product sold hundreds of thousands pieces a year with fully optimized industrialisation process and thus low cost on production line. Product that already have ten years of customers feedback.
That is why at first you have to have the early’s, guys that believe in you at first sight. then they will talk to their friends and so on and so on…
About tether impact on the price of the product, it’s funny to see that depending architecture, cost and impact are different for every project. In kiwee’s case, the longer the belt, the longer the tether lifespan (fatigue mainly from cable passing trhough the pulleys, double the length,you double the life duration). So if I sell you a longer belt, I will charge you but for that you will get longer lifespan …
A way to bring the price down is to sell the things you expect to wear out and lease the ones you don’t. You’d have to see if you or the bank or the insurance company or the leasing facilitator(?) can afford that.
AWE ultimately aims at higher wind than towers can reach, a new resource that requires aviation safety-reliability, not the same reliability as a conventional wind tower. For example, aviation avoids storms and aviation design requires minimal mass structure (max power-to-weight), while conventional wind endures storms by sufficient added structural mass that would not be suitable for flying.
The ultimate AWES market is to replace fossil fuels. The energy novelty market is hoped to be a stepping stone.
After years nobody is even able to predict if some AWES can be viable, and what AWE method could be successful. The discussions are the same about Makani and others. In my opinion there is progress in AWE R&D, comprising Makani, Kitemill and so on. But the time of utility-scale market is not still came. A lot of parameters shall be considered outside purely technical parameters.
Testing is a good thing, but trying all architectures with variants can take years and years. And now a lot of AWES are tested. So a finer analysis is required.
There is significant and growing data comprising tests and theoretic scientific studies. So modelling, using artificial intelligence (AI), could be a mean to define the outlines of a viable AWES.
Pierre, do you really think there is still something going on with makani? I confess being really skeptical about that. Except from a poor inspirationnal videos sent a year ago showing almost nothing, there is no clear evidence that the project is really going forward.
This project is a good example to enlight my topic : No market hypothesis. Every player shall ask himself that question from start: did my product has a market , who is gonna buy that. When did makani ask themselves about that ? Even with a working product , it seems that this machine could be really deadly to people around.
An optimized (power/space use ratio) Y (dancing kites to fill the swept area) version could maybe work in decades, with no people around and under, so offshore or in deserts or above forests. It can be the same for other crosswind AWES, all preventing any secondary use in a very large used space. Beside it in years to come and in the case of no viable and massive storage means, the market of current ground-based wind turbines may have disappeared or be off-grid due to the intermittency of wind power, knowing that the energy mix of the wind-fossil type produce a lot of pollution and CO² emissions (see Germany as example).
Let us remember the Dieppe Kite Festival; a place for (even huge) static kites which were stacked without risk of serious collisions; another place for (even small) manually controlled crosswind kites of which mine, that in order to avoid collisions in high speed…
On the video the sound varies according to the position of the wing in the circle and the resultant cosine: the power is not regular, apart from changes in wind intensity. I don’t know if it is a significant disadvantage.
Crosswind kites have a higher power/weight ratio. But their power/space use ratio can be lower.
The logical target market (hypothesis) for AWE is the existing 100 trillion dollar global energy market; especially replacing fossil and nuclear fuels with abundant cheaper cleaner electricity. Look at the R&D progress in just ten years. Its simply a matter of time and hard work for AWE to win global market share.
AWE R&D itself has been a billion dollar market already. Hundreds of jobs, and many more to come, with lots of fresh funding in pipeline. We have peers in AWE R&D who have already retired as millionaires. The major R&D phase has not even started.
A developing global market is to mitigate climate change. How much is it worth for power kites to build up levees to fight sea-level rise worldwide, as just one idea?
My favorite new market idea is Aerotecture. We can pay to live in the sky, as the yachting community pays to live on the sea. Someday, this may be the best and cheapest way to live. The sky is much bigger and emptier, and therefore cheaper, than precious surface real estate, which Nature needs to recover.
Nothing will stop us. The upper wind resource is just waiting for us, right over our heads.
It is a “No Product” hypothesis. The “market” is alive and well.
This “question” seems like a dodge to avoid examining whether anyone has, in over a decade, developed a useful AWE system, or any AWE system showing promise to be useful. Of course there is a market. To start, there is the energy market most early AWE promoters cited from the beginning: The electrical grid. A comparatively unlimited market. Beyond that, there are abundant small-grid and off-grid applications. Many houses, boats, islands, outposts, etc. are off-grid. What do you have for them? Talk? Hot air?
To me, it makes no sense to question whether there is “a market”. The market(s) started as a “given”, as everyone began imagining how they were about to conquer these well-known and almost universally-used “markets”. Endless derisive talk of those darned “wind towers”, etc. (blame the victim)
I think this “no market” (fake) question emerges only due to the simple fact that the earlier pronouncements of slam-dunk “future-news” solutions have not materialized. Most were given up on long ago. I think the real issue is nobody has a product to address the ample markets originally cited.
Yes I guess it IS technically true that if you have only crap to offer, the “market” is limited or nonexistent, but how delusional do you have to be to stand there helpless, with nothing to offer, trying to blame it on what, some mythical disappearance of the previously-cited “market”? It’s like, what are you even talking about? Yeah there is no market if you can’t come up with anything good. The idea was to come up with something good. The market(s) have always been there, and have not gone away. The question is can you provide a solution? So many said “yes”. How many were right?
Well of course Doug there is a energy market. But that is not the point. Question here is : is there a place for AWE in that market ? That means adapting tech to the need. So you could rephrase the questions like: Is the tech available today fit enough / mature enough for that market ? for SuperTurbine for example , tech is great but who would want to have a 6 hours setup time + helium consuption in order to benefit from that energy ?
Same for kiwee and all others of course.
today we perform sales (taking into acccount we still don’t have delivered) . I think product will be mature enough. but maybe customers will say : it’s great but too long to setup so I just leave it in my garage…
AWE R&D is not a market because market means customers @kitefreak.
AWE will eventually start on small device then gain power and reliability with time. We will see where it will end but presuming AWE will replace traditional large wind turbine is an error to me. That might never happen at all