A video with lots of details https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7u2lAqH6EQ
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Wow, mixing a personal transport quadcopter with an AWES function for recharging.
That’s ambitious and so cool.
reminded
My first kite turbine electric output was regen mode on an e-bike. I had to use the power up cycling or boiling water, so as I could test again
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SkyWindPower was one of the early, original players in the HAWP space. It started with a patent by Shepard, out of Australia. I remember being simultaneously intrigued by this patent, while also seeing it as a “Professor Crackpot” implementation of what seemed to be an otherwise possibly valid concept overall, a typical example of “the good professor” ruining a perfectly good concept by adding an unnecessary extra “inventive” aspect that pretty much ruined the idea as a whole.
Nonetheless, when the first HAWP conference was being planned, I began hearing from Shepard’s daughter, P.J. Shepard, about arrangements for attending that initial conference.
Within a couple of years or so, It seemed that the team experimenting with the Shepard concept did a pretty decent job of testing the idea, (dispensing with the “crackpot” feature) but it also never seemed to lead anywhere, and I surmised that, given the reasonable quality of the prototypes, if the effort fizzled out so easily, it might be an indication that it really wasn’t bearing fruit as far as actual output per unit effort.
The company seemed to slowly sublimate away, leaving the image above, once ubiquitous like the images of Magenn, Makani, Altaeros, and Skysails, which all similarly fizzled out in the same general timeframe.
Last I heard from P.J. Shepard was over a decade ago, when every fact I presented online was being endlessly argued with, by a single, highly-insistent, self-described “domain expert” with a track record of zero power production.
P.J.’s last message to me was advising me not to waste my time arguing back with this person, saying “If you wrestle in the mud with pigs, people might mistake you for another pig”. That’s the last I remember from SkyWIndPower, but that impressive rendering will live on forever.
If you look up the term Sky Wind Power today, you’re likely to find a different image though, of a tower-mount two-blade turbine for home use, claiming to be the most reliable and best-selling turbine in Europe, with a two-blade rotor made from stamped sheet metal or something like that.
I had never heard of this turbine before recently looking up the name. It looks very robust, with a big, heavy generator, which is a good sign, but the fact that it’s rotor only has two blades is not a good sign regarding longevity. And you can see from the picture that “The Good Professor” (Crackpot, that is) had a hand it its design, with at least one added, unnecessary yet typical-for-newbies, “inventive” feature… 
Well, that was cool anyway. I like the two rotor variant most. We see the four rotor one evolved into a configuration with wider distance between rear propellers to place them away from the wake of front propellers.
The issues with these are achieving a sufficient low density (AUW / rotor swept area) and the main weight penalty (I guess) were the generator&gear and the power transmission cable.
The least realistic goal they stated was they planned to harvest the jet stream. I don’t even know how high is that, 6000m?
Back then, the naive, empty talk was all about “the jet stream”, before all the “really smart people” bothered to calculate basic aspects like tether weight, not to mention actual length and sag, for a “kite” flying 6 miles high. That’s why it was originally called “high altitude wind power” (HAWP). These know-nothing newbies were also treated to simple facts like the tip speed of wind turbine blades was at least 6 times the wind speed, meaning a turbine in the jet stream might go supersonic, which can even happen on a tower. They slowly realized it might be better to just consider being “airborne” than targeting the jet stream, so they changed the abbreviation to merely “AWE”, but that has also proven to be too difficult.
From Googlw:
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Typical Altitude: The polar jet stream is usually between 30,000 and 40,000 feet, while the subtropical jet stream is somewhat higher.
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Variable Height: The altitude can vary depending on the season and location.
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Thickness: The jet stream is a broad, relatively narrow band of wind that can be thousands of miles long, hundreds of miles wide, and thousands of feet thick.