These results encourage us to turn to other systems such like rotary AWES.
Looks like we’re almost up to another year having passed since I last dared to ask the now-perennial basic question “So, how is kite-reeling doing?”. I guess it could become an annual ritual. Maybe a worldwide official “green”-energy holiday? (reducing CO2 required by plants is “green”? How? Just cuz it “sounds good”?)
Seems like years have passed since we were told of a “500 kW” kite-reeling system about to enter the market. What ever happened with that? How could any highly-funded and highly-publicized group have developed a truly-workable “500-kW” system, that many years ago, and we still don’t see even one of them out here in daily operation, powering X number of homes?
By the way, I somehow stumbled across this video, which claimed, years ago, to have just such a solution for affordable energy for “remote locations”, “disaster-relief” etc.
The possibly-flawed logic seems to be that the inability to outperform other energy sources, starting with regular wind turbines, extending to solar, gas- and diesel-gen-sets, etc., magically becomes desirable in the middle of nowhere, as though these competing options somehow magically “go away” if you get far enough from civilization. Or is it “far enough from reality”???
“For the first time, affordable energy can be delivered to the most remote locations on Earth” says the video. Oh really? This wouldn’t be just more unwarranted hype, now would it? Who can just sit there and keep believing such self-serving, made-up-from-thin-air, non-factual “facts”?
In my opinion, truly curious, truly interested people need to be able to dissect such statements word-by-word and identify the multiple, compound, hidden falsehoods where every deceptive word contributes to a fictional “story” that “sounds good” as long as long as you do not actually listen closely.
That single sentence, quietly uttered by a very calm and factual-sounding female narrator, was never true. The hidden rationale is that in a sufficiently-remote location, power from a very expensive, difficult-to-deploy device, which barely produces power at all, can suddenly be called “affordable power”. This is nothing but a shell-game - a scam, really, where the “magician” directs your eyes to where the action is not taking place, so you won’t look where the action is taking place, which is powering a grid in a developed area where only power that actually is “affordable”, let alone even real, can compete. By the time you get to “disaster-relief”, most peoples’ eyes glaze over - their minds have become so distracted and confused, imagining, for example, thousands of people living in mud huts, demolished by a mudslide, requiring urgent medical procedures, that there are no brain cells left to question whether some contraption that is less powerful, less dependable, and more difficult to deploy would be the best choice for power production. At that point, who is willing to question “providing assistance for the downtrodden” in a “disaster”? It’s like a mental wrestling match. The imagined “disaster” is just enough of a “distraction” to temporarily remove the usual common-sense analysis of cost and reliability that would, in real life, be applied. So the world of wannabe AWE goes on blithely skipping through a manufactured “world” of compete fantasy, where enough combined illogical statements can be stacked one-upon-the-next, to serve to represent a 100% false, fictional, (non-)reality, that will yet be believed by many, too busy to question the nitty-gritty details.
Let’s review that statement from the video:
“For the first time, affordable energy can be delivered to the most remote locations on Earth”
The reality? There WAS NO new source of “affordable energy”, and it turned out the team could NOT “deliver” the mythical “affordable energy” to their chosen “remote location”, even on a tiny scale that could not even power a single house, even with the whole world supposedly (but not really) watching, despite the cooperation of multiple investors and government agencies, and the slam-dunk minimalist project, that should have been easy to follow through on, assuming the “story” was even close to being true… Yet half-a-decade later, newbie global-warming true-believer pundits are still repeating this completely untrue story from the past, regarding this now-abandoned and largely-disproven configuration, with the journalistic accuracy one might expect from a 5th-grader doing his very first attempt at authoring a “report”.
And of course they seem obligated to also mention the imagined “but wait, there’s more!” uses for their contraption: “expand internet and phone services, weather-monitoring, and so much more”
Like one more “My Pillow” commercial, offering an additional pillow at no cost, for the price of only one, the developers seek to “lock-in” the desirability of their idea by citing further “bonus” solutions “it” allegedly “provides”. But once again. like the magician directs your eyes only where he wants you to look, this video neatly avoids why such services from their helium-supported platform would be better than the normal way: using a tower - maybe a tower also supporting a wind turbine? Do proponents of every proposed tower-mounted wind turbine also feel obligated to cite such auxiliary uses for their elevated platform? Perhaps occasionally, but usually they are content with the fact that real low-cost power can be generated. The “disaster”, “remote location”, and “internet and phone” themes serve to distract and confuse “the story” to the point where few people would notice, and the average person, preoccupied with their own busy life, is overwhelmed with false “facts” and will simply believe or ignore the whole assemblage of false statements, never bothering to think it all through, to realize they are being exposed to what might be termed as simply a “scam”.
Despite Reeling’s known disadvantages, its doing quite well as a stepping-stone architecture, much as the square rigged ship and biplane had their day.
Reeling is working at 500m altitude. Compare with ST driveshaft, not yet exceeding 20m high.
UFSCkite Research Group is a Brazilian company representing the reeling process in animation.
One of the publications (The Betz limit applied to Airborne Wind Energy) has already be discussed.
Thanks Pierre:
I was excited to click on the “live demo” but then I saw a boring computer graphic that looked like it was from a 1980’s video game at 7-11, and remembered:
In Kite-reeling (not to mention Makani) it’s always “next year”, (and always will be?).
I will say on the positive side at least they are willing to develop at a workable scale for developing something that works, rather than thinking their job is to impress people by going too big, too fast. Why say you’re going to power hundreds of houses when you can’t power one? Mass delusion, that’s why. Nice to see something out of Brazil. They have a lot of hang-gliding and paragliding down there.
This nice simulator is not about reeling as such, or working prototypes either.
There have been a few crude kite flight simulators over years presenting an interactive graphical interface. This one shows how much progress has been achieved. Basic AWE parameters are displayed like glass-cockpit instrumentation. The model can be rotated in 3D while it runs.
What really marks this simulator apart is apparent details of tether harmonics and gravity effects. The dynamically varying kite window is great. There are extensive settings to explore. This looks like rigorous physics, not clever game-effects. There must be a paper to read.
I input some values in Settings, but got incomplete results. Its still a work in progress.
Everything in AWE is looking up, including kite simulators, as this fine UFSC example proves.
In your opinion, @dougselsam, are the large power irregularities during reeling operations (even during power phase) prohibitive? By considering a single unit? By considering a farm where these irregularities are mitigated?
Hi Pierre, and thanks for asking my opinion.
I am not going to pretend to have a comprehensive engineering analysis.
My skepticism is based more on the endless hype I see, typical of “trainwreck-in-progress” wannabe wind energy revolutions, starting with seeing Ockels so celebrated for re-inventing and cleverly-naming “laddermill” (which I had first invented as a kid in the 1970’s), then, when my origination of the basic idea was made public, shifting to kite-reeling, while keeping the catchy name. It seemed nobody even noticed he and his minions never even tried to build a single laddermill after all that fanfare.
That was my first big red flag. Using the same name of laddermill, while building something else, seemed typical of the dishonesty that has always characterized wind energy scams.
Other than that, yes I saw the deficiencies you mentioned, but could not rule out that kite-reeling was so cheap to build that these detractive aspects would not be deal-breakers. I did say I thought it weird for so many “teams” to all be jumping into kite-reeling, with nothing ever running on a regular basis, none of the promised grid-feeding to power X hundred homes ever materializing. Same with Makani.
When KPS announced a “500 kW” kite-reeling system, I expressed my acknowledgement that such high output was impressive, and hoped I was wrong about reeling not approaching success. Others, such as Dr. Peter Harrop’s IDTechExec, or whatever they call it, with all that highly-credentialed staff, simply repeated the hype. We were supposed to have some multi-hundred kiloWatt kite-reeling product on the market by what was at that time “next year”: 2019. Well, we know that didn’t happen, right?
All I can tell you is by the time I saw KPS announcing “renting office space” and gaining access to a “test site” where they were not allowed to fly most of the time as major milestones, I just had to stand up and publicly state my opinion that the main thing they produced was a website with a group-selfie.
So then, of course, people protested my observations, but you now have KPS apparently fading into the sunset. Hard to say where reeling could go, but after this many years, it’s up to the promoters to either get something working to power something or not - it really has nothing to do with me or my opinions, but if anyone pays attention they might note I’ve debunked perhaps a billion dollars worth of misguided wind energy promises that are now disproven, so far…
But I would not be here if I did not think AWE is worth pursuing.
The yo-yo mode, also known as pumping or kite-reeling mode, remains by far the method best investigated by universities and companies.
From the point of view of aerospace, this mode remains very advantageous because it makes it possible to reduce the mass in flight and to obtain an excellent power / weight ratio.
On the other hand, from the point of view of wind power production as it is known, the yo-yo mode is a disruptive innovation for at least two reasons; it’s an AWES as for other methods, and production is done in cycles, not continuously.
The question may be: how the equipment (generator, electric installations, kite …) react to these cycles. Is it possible to have an economic system with this type of generation? If not, what are the possible improvements? I am thinking, for example, of the separation of the generator with its specific winch and the recovery winch, in order to obtain continuous operation via a smoothing device.
In Sebastian Rapp’s PhD defence he makes clear that you can rapidly predict trouble ahead and avoid it in systems with known flight behaviours… and from the work of @ufechner Yo-Yo can release / reel-out the winch faster in generation as a protective measure against overloading the blades or tether during a gust (as well as flying higher elevation closer to to the edge / zenith)
This flying faster outward slows the apparent wind
Some remaining control questions seems to be
how to make sure you can’t outrun the total tether length (sounds easy enough)
how to avoid shock loading in transitions especially with larger tethers (not easy)
how to account for tether wear & frame fatigue (think that’s quite well looked at)
how to use multiple kites on 1 Yo-Yo system
are large scale single kite Y-Yo flights even viable
… add your questions
I was just wondering, what’s the latest with the Skysails system shipped to Mauritius this past winter. How is it working? Has anyone heard anything?
I noticed several years ago, AWE “news” seems to always consist of something that is “just about to happen”, very seldom about something that “has happened” or "is happening?.
Remember Makani announcing a future project to power X hundred homes in Hawaii, then Altaeros’ announcing their BAT would be powering the grid in a remote town in Alaska? Seems like a pattern - announce an AWE system just about to power the grid in a remote location such as an island, then…
These announcements got a lot of press coverage, but what was missing was any followup information. “News of the future” got us all excited, but never matured into “news” period.
It reminded me of the old Charlie Brown cartoons where every fall (football season) Lucy would promise to hold the football so Charlie Brown could kick it, but then pull it away at the last moment, then laugh that Charlie Brown had fallen for the same trick yet again.
Anyway, it’s getting close to summertime, I guess there has been enough time for the AWE system to get to Mauritius, and we’ve all been excited to learn AWE was finally “going mainstream”, at least in a small way, so I’d be interested to know the latest news on AWE in Mauritius. You’d think there would be some coverage of such an exciting development in AWE, but I haven’t found any information. Anybody heard anything?
Wish I could help out. Maybe next year…
Like Lucy! 
At least Charlie Brown enjoyed followup coverage in “the press”. His annual defeat reliably made the newspapers every autumn. (Today’s “coverage” would just show Charlie Brown running up to the ball, as the last frame, and never cover Lucy pulling the ball away!)
Back then, “the press” still had at least a few real “reporters” or what we think of as “journalists” who could sniff out and track down a “story”, and follow up on it. Today, newspapers, magazines, TV and radio shows, and their online successors, simply publish whatever prefabricated “press-releases” are handed to them. The “journalists” seldom go beyond promoting some agenda. Nobody ever seems to follow up on any of the press-releases they are handed. If they do, their “research” consists largely of finding other second-hand “press-release” type material to re-regurgitate.
The image we have of a classic “reporter”, stubbornly producing page after page on their manual “typewriter”, relentlessly chasing down every possible “clue” to “get to the bottom” of a “story” doesn’t exist. The “Sherlock Holmes” or “Clark Kent” detective-reporter-type personality who travel to the ends of the earth to get us “the real story” barely exists, if at all.
The closest thing there is to real “reporting” or “analysis” in AWE is these forums, and even here, who ever asks such basic questions as “OK press-release A 6 months ago told us that event B was going to happen by now, so what is the situation today? Is event B really happening?” Or did the promoters of the previous “press-release-masquerading-as-news” simply give up?
Today, we are not expected to ever express even the least curiosity over whether the “press-release-masquerading-as-news” was accurate. Nope, we’re just supposed to conveniently come down with a case of “amnesia”, with our minds conveniently “going blank”, wide-open to blindly “believe” the next press-release, ad-infinitum, to the point we are reduced to mindless, obedient zombies, never questioning a single aspect of whatever information or disinformation is conveniently funneled into our innocent, unquestioning craniums. (cranii?)
But don’t worry. To ease any disturbance in our sleeping zombie-like questionable consciousness, we have some more entertainment:
Charlie Brown takes a crack at AWE. He seems to be the only one who can’t get anything going!
There are, as we know, many well-funded “companies” out there, supposedly pursuing AWE. Many even with people participating in this forum. And this forum has now been in place for years. Seems like there isn’t much actually happening with most of these companies though, wouldn’t you say? I mean, what;s the latest news on any of our favorite projects? They all seem to mostly be in the same “holding pattern” they were in when the forum started? I mean, what’s actually new in AWE at this point? Is there any real news on anything?
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It seems things went a bit quiet after Makani was shut down. Also for my own part things are a bit quiet because I believe I have got a few things sorted out in my head, but also a clearer picture of the difficulty of even producing decent amount of energy. I think this is normal and to be expected.
I think the only issue here, if there is one, is your impatience to either hear some real AWE news (like 24/7 with decent power curve), or your desire to call your win in guessing that everyone in AWE were clueless.
I think if you are not clueless you realize the amount of effort progress in AWE takes. So I dont really think you would be expecting lots of results. Are you just directing hostility at those who are promising stuff without any ability to deliver? There are for sure some of those in this industry, but there are also quite a few who dont go around promising lots of progress in short term…
Hello Tallak:
Well you make a good point in that not every Group or person pursuing AWE is making outrageous claims or promises. And I think you also are accurate in noting a bit of impatience, without any expectations, on my part.
Please let me explain: After years in wind energy research and developing and even manufacturing small wind turbines, I found myself adopting the attitude of the experienced wind energy veterans, who often knew so much about wind turbines that in one case I was able to point a colleague in Europe to a video with sound, ask him for advice, and by just the sound of my turbine running in a video, he suggested a possible aspect to improve the blades. Others, such as Paul Gipe, a famous wind energy author, and some former GE technical people, were willing to run and test my turbines and in some cases, confirm they were the most powerful the had ever tested, or even the most powerful ever tested, by anyone, ever, for their size.
These veterans were very skeptical people when it came to wind energy, and I got to know most of the people who knew what they were doing and am still friends with many of them.
Really, the word skeptical doesn’t begin to describe the disgust they express for people who pretend to have innovations, but “don’t know what they don’t know”, which is that most “new” ideas are really long-disproven ideas, and that the wind itself is SO punishing, SO cruel and uncaring, that the wind itself will just KILL anything you can put together, ESPECIALLY if it actually extracts a decent proportion of the energy in the wind, whereby that immense power usually DESTROYS whatever machine was able to harness it. SO essentially you had a barbell configuration of two types of wind turbines, plus one more:
- Ones that made little or no power;
- Ones that DID make lots of power, and thereby were quickly destroyed.
I guess there is one other kind of turbine especially popular since the internet: - The all-talk turbine. All-talk turbines make as much power as a promoter can describe! Well at least in a fantasy-world. Since many wannabe wind energy innovators never build a decent version of their ideas, they are free to just imagine “the most powerful turbine in the world” or whatever, and who can say if it is really built, it won’t do as they say?
As I often point out, “The wind is invisible so people tend to imagine it doing whatever they want.” The problem is the wind does what IT wants, not what you want it to do.
Anyway the key thing the wind veterans know that most people don’t, especially wannabe wind energy innovators is:
WIND ENERGY IS REALLY DIFFICULT!
Almost nobody gets it right, ever.
Almost every wind turbine company goes out of business!
No whacky design has EVER succeeded as a product, and for good reason: WIND ENERGY IS REALLY DIFFICULT! It makes a fool out of almost EVERYONE who tries! It’s like trying to get rich by gambling at a casino!
And the new people?
THEY KNOW NOTHING OF THIS!
And (shhhh) you can’t tell them any of this.
Why?
Because they know everything!
You can’t tell them anything, because they are “really smart”!
And they will always tell you so.
So they don;t need to listen to facts.
And if you ask them for facts they get really hostile a lot of the time.
Ignorance and arrogance.
When the latest hype-cycle over AWE Started, I had already not only invented some of the main ideas as a kid, but was years into wind energy research, and I knew how difficult it is, how nobody ever gets even a regular turbine to work right without going through probably 30 or 40 prototypes being destroyed by the wind, every time thinking you must have it right, until the next storm.
The two things the veterans insist on are energy capture over time, and demonstrated reliability. In the end those are mandatory.
But you can’t even have the conversation with people who already know everything. If their turbine has left the all-talk stage, maybe it doesn’t even have a generator! They don’t care, all they know is they are changing the world with their superior concept! And if you ask for any results at all, they get hostile. Anyway after I had a few turbines running on various continents, I guess I became a veteran too, and after a lot of hostility from all-talk wind energy people, became so familiar with the whole syndrome that I could tell you what they would say before they even said it.
I realized wind energy was a magnet for crackpots, because of that “invisibility” factor. Wind is invisible, so people imagine it doing whatever they want, but it does what it wants.
And when AWE came along, I quickly noticed that it was a neodymium supermagnet for crackpots.
I mean, in regular wind energy, you could tell someone they should have a generator, and they might protest or say they will soon and eventually they do, and they realize their design sucks, they might still sell a few for a short time, and they seem unreasonable, but still within some semblance of reason.
In AWE, you get people who claim to be the the top researcher in the world, while mocking even the idea that they should ever use a generator. People who have a thousand completely unworkable ideas, zero ever built or run, and yet they are still convinced they are a wind energy expert, or even a genius!
AWE as an art form seems to believe no normal standards should apply to it - not just no normal standards of engineering, or of power production, but ANY standards - of honesty, of integrity, or following through, of completing a task, and often, of even understanding the basics of the art to which they purport to practice.
So when each new pronouncement is made of either a project underway, or of some future, intimidating-sounding success-that-will-never happen, I just ask “Well, so what are the results?” I mean if you want to just sit there listening to one outrageous statement after another, and never ask for any followup information, have at it! I’m saying let;s just act like normal people.
So I ask for what’s really happening. I still get excited when a company says they have a sexy new energy revolution in the works, and I get real disappointed when it never comes through.
Anyway, I do not think it;s out of line to ask for some followup after great pronouncements are made. I mean what are people afraid of, that a little truth will “pop the bubble”? Hey I’m still waiting for all these breakthroughs to break through. So where is all the progress? This has been going on for like 15 years now - what is running regularly now, anything? I realize the way the world is going lately, a lot of people would like to make normal seem abnormal, and abnormal seem normal, but I’m gonna stick with normal. That means whoever makes impressive promises should not balk when someone asks the status of progress regarding those promises. And really, you have to be able to appreciate the humor. I mean in wind energy, how much opportunity for humor do you really have? When your turbine explodes again? No, it’s the constant parade of new people who have no idea that they have no idea what they are doing! That they don;t know what they don’t know. And especially that you can’t tell them anything because they already know everything! At some point it is just funny, and you have to at least get a laugh out of it.
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Seems like the wee guy already sorted offshore kite power 50 years ago
I do like the idea of cruising submarine regen harvest devices
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You can see Ampyx are putting in a power of work to really get detail on the system parameters which will make or break kite reeling.
The tether testing they are doing here is essential.
I really wish we could see the Ampyx presentation on the robustness of their software and design methodology from AWEC2019… Definitiely one of the best presentations there… but still not uploaded.
I notice that the ground stations of the yo-yo kites are particularly heavy. Let us compare a regular wind turbine and Ampyx system for an equivalent expected power:
General data
- Manufacturer: Bonus (Danemark)
- Model: B23/150
- Rated power: 150 kW
- Rotor diameter: 23 m
- No more available
- Offshore model: no
- Swept area: 416 m²
- Specific area: 2.77 m²/kW
- Number of blades: 3
- Power control: Stall
Weights
- Nacelle: 8,7 tons
- Tower: 15 tons
- Rotor + hub: 2 tons
- Total: 25,7 tons
For Ampyx (see the link above):
The result of this platform design is a unit which is 28 metres long, 5 metres wide, weighing approximately 24 tonnes. Ropes up to 40 millimetres can be tested. The main winch itself weighs 4.5 tonnes and has a drum that is 3 metres in diameter producing rope speeds of 12 metres per second.
https://www.ampyxpower.com/technology/demonstrator-ap3/
150 kW
Rated Power
This is due among other things to the huge winches, as well as to the generator at low rpm because of the relatively low reel-out tether speed (1/3 wind speed).
So as a result the mass of this AWES is not 10% of the weight of a regular wind turbine as often claimed for some AWES, but is about 100%.
Make It Work Make It Right Make It Fast
I think a lot of AWE companies are sinning towards this simple principle.
Before we have good power curves at small scale, why go >100 kW? Things only get harder due to cube mass scaling. If you believe otherwise, you are probably doomed anyways.
To transfer this principle to AWE I would say:
- make net positive power at the smallest practical scale
- then make landing/launch/handling etc
- then scale, to reduce LCOE
It seems most companies should still be at the first step, but at going for all three at the same time
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Ampyx already tested a small scale wing in 2013, obtaining 3 kW for a 3 m² plane at 13 m/s wind speed. See also beside it, the Makani report, 10 kW for a 4 m² plane wing at 8 m/s wind speed (see the video below I already posted, 3’ 10" from the start):
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