The title of this topic could be as well “the market Hypothesis”.
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Modern R&D investment is a true exchange of goods and services, which is the criteria of market economics.
Major customers in the AWE R&D market so far include Google, Shell, and SABIC. Google alone has spent ~300M USD for AWE R&D.
No @Kitefreak, a market is defined by a need and customers that want to address that need. Proposing goods and services does not make up the market if nobody buy.
R & D is not a market it is an investment made to find a value proposition to a need in order to create a market based on that need.
AWE R&D is an urgent need, Olivier. That is the value proposition many of us offer that investors have been paying for, and will continue to pay for. Its the starting market for AWE.
No again, investors buy to make money and because they like the tech. It is not a need. You simply don’t understand what a market is
Its an investment market. Look at all the venture marketing. Investment is a need for those sitting on capital seeking profits.
Hi Doug, you ask for a lot. That prototypes produce about 100 kW is not bad. What more can you expect? Do you really think that many people will accept to see hyper-powerful machines flying at full speed at the end of a 1 km whip above their house, at an elevation angle of about 30 degrees, and suspended at the slightest computer fault? Maybe in Antarctica or in other desert places, maybe offshore if ships can slalom between the moving tethers…
Hi Pierre: Well you make a great case against the pursuit of AWE, however I feel I should point out that there are many places that have plenty of room for AWE systems. Here, “the desert” is not some mythical, impossible-to-reach place, but rather comprises thousands and thousands of square miles of empty space all around us. Often with powerlines coming through, for example a half-mile behind my ranch are 50 kV powerlines from the Hoover Dam. AWE promotions often cite “islands” for the exact reason you mention. So I think your concerns over having enough space are addressed. If there were simply no space to run the system said to have been shipped to Mauritius (or Asia, depending on which story you read) then why would it have been purchased? We could assume they had room to run it. But is it being run? No information I could find. There was supposedly a grid-connected system preparing to be run in Germany - what happened to that?
Anyone in wind energy knows that new types of wind energy systems often quickly fail and most never live up to their promises. Things unexpectedly fail and break. Things often do not work as expected. With AWE it is worse since you have to worry about takeoffs and landings, in addition to flight while generating power. I do not think the excuse of no space to run a system is the problem with AWE. I think it is that the systems are not up to the task. I cannot explain the 100kW+ power claims. It’s not up to me to explain them. If true, hard to imagine why they are not in operation. All I know is it appears that there is still nothing running after all these years of big talk. I would love to be wrong and see something working. 
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Asking for people to tell the truth is not unreasonable.
There are not many desert places in Europe. When the risk and severity of failure are combined with the space use required, that does a lot. In a way it is better to try the AWES away from it all, out of sight.
A point that has been little mentioned: how does the electrical network behave with such irregular power curves? Is the idea of compensating for irregularities by multiplying units really feasible?
I wouldn’t say that, but I think the current prototypes are sketches. The right designs are yet to be found.
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-control-042820-124658
Figure 15 (average power 92 kW, with peaks of 300-400 kW, 12 m/s wind speed).
A power of about 100 kW was therefore measured. That said there may be several no market hypotheses. In first you must build a fence of several kilometers to prevent potential walkers from entering the area of operation. I remember in AWECBerlin 2013: order so that nobody under the tether of an only few kW range crosswind yo-yo AWES. Farmers will have to follow a schedule to harvest.
Of course, all this applies if the machine is working properly, which you rightly doubt. Takeoff, landing? Quality of the electricity produced? Reliability? Lifespan of a flexible kite under irregular and enormous stresses? Cost of ground facilities, including a large generator because of the drive speed of only 1/3 of the wind speed, not including irregular power smoothing for AWES with a recovery phase every cycle?
When we know that the same power is obtained with a conventional wind turbine comprising a rotor of only about 15 m in diameter…
But other designs could perhaps unblock all that, provided that the operation is not based only on computerized management (even if it is essential), that we find the objectives of the beginning, to harness the high altitude winds, that we go up the angle of elevation (as for the marketed Kiwee with its 60 degrees elevation angle, not 30 degrees as for the current crosswind kite prototypes) even if it is expensive, that we take into account of the Power to space use ratio.
Trying to even skim that report is agonizing, mostly like reading through the early old forum taking us back to day-one. Flygen? Groundgen? Rather than calling it a
no market" hypothesis, what about a “nobody knows what they’re doing” hypothesis? Of course there is generally “no market” for a more expensive, less reliable system, of any kind. This principle is universal, not restricted to AWE. The stated reason for AWE was lower cost, with higher reliability, or at least availability. And of course higher altitude. Still seems possible. If they can make that much power, seems like they ought to have something to offer.
Good news is…
There’s a new market developing from that report
What an hideous pain it must be, to be an energy systems development investor.
You want to support clean efficient new devices.
You want to invest in research with top rated academic institutions.
You’ve seen what happens with AWES investment.
Imaging reading that stream of self promotional pish from Lorenzo Fagiano and knowing it clashes with the truth.
That creates a strong call for a new AWES investment market - right there
Thanks LF
Coincidentally, I was just spoon-fed these three videos on organic semiconductor and superconductor research published in “Science” and “Nature” 20 years ago, almost leading to a Nobel Prize, until discrepancies were noticed and it turned out the data had been fabricated. The perpetrator, a German researcher at Bell Labs, even had his PhD revoked. You may remember hearing hype about high-temp organic superconductors 20 years ago. Turned out the whole thing was faked.
Interesting set of three videos - try adding subtitles and increasing the speed to 1.5x for faster viewing:
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfDoml-Db64
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Riio1eKOSKg
Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsSuhP60qnI
Next spoon-fed Youtube video also covering research fraud (they’re on a roll now!):
The space problem occurs from the first AWES installed, regardless of the space between the units, which further aggravates the problem. No cart, no horse.
It is an individual product.
If and when any useful AWE product emerges, it will find a place in the world, since, as a useful product, someone will find a use for it. Over time, with further development, solutions to the spacing issue could emerge, starting with whether the “useful” configuration even needs to be in a “windfarm” to be effective. KiWee is an example. Nobody is trying to place them in windfarms, yet some are being sold. What if someone actually develops a kite towing a boat with a generator turned by a propeller? Is anyone going to try to squeeze it into a windfarm?
Yes, some niche markets (I think about individual use) can perhaps occur, such like “a kite towing a boat with a generator turned by a propeller” and charging a battery to load the personal electric car.
But large-scale use is another story. I see a possibility if giant systems are feasible, in the aim to maximize the power/space use ratio, with a minimum chance of success, and a maximum risk of losing a lot of money. One way to attempt this would be to work like for the space conquest because of the complexity of an AWES within the parameters required for eventual commercial exploitation. Do you remember David Lang who worked on the tether simulation for Apolo?
Well Pierre, if you want to give up on AWE due to spacing issues for windfarms, I’m not sure if you’re asking me to talk you out of it?
I still think, as I have for the entire 14 years, this whole field is delusional, and after all this time, there still does not seem to be a single system in daily operation.
That is in direct conflict with the forward-looking promises made by so many highly-funded projects employing large numbers of supposedly highly-skilled and very intelligent people. Just to pick an example, let’s look at the highest-profile case of Makani, if the people are so intelligent and skilled, why couldn’t they tell on their computer screens that their systems would barely even work at all, and how could they go on for 12 years without developing a product? Every armchair genius thinks wind energy must just be so easy. It is funny to people in wind energy. Like an entertainment feature where you watch one person after another try to walk across a flimsy covering of a deep pit, and, one after another, they fall through the flimsy covering into the pit and go “Heyyyy - what happened?” The funny part is that we warn them all, saying “Wait - you do realize that is a well-known trap, that the flimsy covering won’t support you, and you will fall through like the thousand people before you, right?” And they always say the same thing: “No, not us, we have SOME REALLY SMART PEOPLE working on OUR project”. And so we laugh. Like the last thousand people didn’t say the same exact thing.
Oh and by the way, I do remember my best friend, a PhD Chemist, told me many years ago that his friend named Bob Forward (Another PhD I think, in a space-related field) told him to watch and see the future will involve a lot of tethers (he was talking about in space). So I kind of heard about the space tether stuff before it was generally publicized.
Still I think all this talk about spacing in windfarms may have some truth to it, but it seems misguided to worry about it at this stage. As long as there is no AWE system trying to be installed at a windfarm, it is just a talking point. Depending on the configuration of some emerging AWE system, it might not even be relevant. Let me give you an example: Let’s say before the airplane was invented, people were discussing high-altitude transportation systems. If someone kept protesting the expense of building elevated railroad tracks a mile in the sky, they would have been correct, yet their concern would have turned out to be irrelevant. Until someone has an AWE system that is useful in any way, lamenting the spacing ahead of the fact might not even be relevant or make any sense.
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Hi Doug, I thought about land and space use issue, assuming the device was working properly. But by reading the rare power curves (or by noting their absence) I saw that this was not even always the case.
Already on my sheet of paper I did not see how such machines could be sold, knowing that a wind turbine only takes the place of its location (area of the mast which is low on the ground) while for a supposedly identical production you must prohibit quite a lot of activities over a considerable area.
But I had not imagined that these machines could also produce nothing. This may be their only chance: if they produce nothing, there is no need to install any; suddenly spacing issue flies away…
AWES is like your airplane, but being a tethered aircraft. In your example the tower would be your “elevated railroad tracks”. The tether is intended to replace the tower of a regular wind turbine: it uses less material but, being long, imposes a gigantic area covering all directions, moves fast in crosswind use, and prevents secondary use, whether for a single unit or for a farm.
The space and land use is a major part of “an AWE system that is useful any way”, as notified below by an AWE company.
And in the circumstance a small stationary AWES like Kiwee is concerned. Let us imagine the problem with large (and here efficient, producing 100 kW) crosswind AWES…
Who would want a crosswind kite or even a stationary kite operating above your home?
The solution is in the root: for utility-scale, going towards giant designs to maximize power/ space use ratio; for individual scales perhaps Unlock the market by shortening the tether.
Now as the tether length is really a problem for powerful systems, you could also remove the tether by using Untethered airborne wind energy systems with still no guaranty about their efficiency.
