Seems like they’ve got a big flygen bird. Does anyone know if they are actually flying it?
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Its huge. And hit has a high lift dual foil wing it seems. What sets it apart from Makani?
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They’ve built the thing but we don’t know if and how reliably they can fly it.
Makani have done a lot of testing and they’ve scaled much further.
Anyway windlift have built a magnificent looking bird.
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What a design! A question is if and why they could make what Makani cannot.
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Windlift started with a flexible kite in pumping mode and now progresses with a rigid flygen wing.
Pierre, Makani made Wing7 “work”, but Google does not care for a small-scale high-price AWE market. RobC at WindLift saw a match to his forward military market and copied the pattern. Rob’s technical background is as a molecular biologist, not an aerospace engineer or kite expert, so Wing7 must have seemed like obvious the way to go after futzing inexpertly with LEI kites. If soft kites win, “progresses” here means like “madness progresses”.
WindLift’s reliability will have to match war-making timeframe, if not Makani’s five-year payback estimation. On the other hand, enemies will be bringing the kite down, and the kite itself could kill friendlies, or at least the loud racket will keep them awake until they go mad. Children could kill it with a SquarePants Bob kite, if allowed ;^)
Let the US Military do anything but master classic kite warfare, like the Chinese invented over 2000yrs ago. Let them instead buy WindLift’s “magnificent looking bird”.
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Windlift progresses as they don’t make any “premature downselect” by Dave’s words. They tested a soft pumping kite then their current rigid flygen kite.
Cloning Wing7 for US military use is obviously a premature down-select IF saving the world from fossil fuel is the greater goal.
It was the late great Corwin Hardham who first invoked “down-select” in AWES R&D, in the context of Makani’s architecture. KiteLab, in 2007, started with a rigid turbine (KiteMotor1), and “progressed” to soft power-kites. The directions of early testing, back and forth in many engineering dimensions, is not a reliable basis to draw firm conclusions. A fly-off is wanted but, without Wubbo, EU leadership for such a decisive approach is lacking.
katieschaef noted recently:
that’s Windlift out of North Carolina. They had worked with the military but are no longer.
Windlift’s website front page still mentions support of soldiers. And the site still has a “Military” folder. https://windlift.com/industries/#military
So, is Windlift working anymore with the military or not?
I have a question apart from makani (fly generation device) has any other company with any other technology have tried to scale up power like producing more than 500kw from a single kite?
No. Kitepower are talking about 100kW in Q4 2020.
SkySails systems is doing more work: 
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The Windlift prototype referenced in the April 30, 2019 post above, does not fly. As far as them still engaged with the military remains to be seen. Quantico has shown some interest in eWinds system and we’re looking forward to further discussion with them.
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I mean more like trying I guess 
Hi @CADFather I just got a paywall
What’s the synopsis of the article?
Hi Rod: i did not encounter a paywall from here. I tried to cut-paste the article below.
Article is just over 1 year old.
Synopsis:
Every test site since 2006 has had something wrong with it, so they’re still working on that…
Over $20 million in government funding for military use, and “disaster relief” (!)
1000 per year to be produced - just none right now.
Further progress predicted for 2024.
(Sounds like all the rest… - stay tuned?)
[
ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIAL AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE
](https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/feature/environmental-social-and-corporate-governance)
HARVESTING WIND THROUGH ‘DEEP TECH’
Durham-based Windlift has set out to augment and disrupt the fledgling offshore wind industry with its autonomous tethered drones
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Rob Creighton and Sean Meyer of Windlift
MEHMET DEMIRCI
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By Connie Gentry – Freelance Writer, Triangle Business Journal
May 19, 2023
Listen to this article7 min
About this project: The Earth + Equity project explores the growing awareness, actions and accountability of businesses and leaders who face opportunities and challenges relating to environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. The 52-week project will highlight what selected companies and Triangle executives are doing to address climate change, diversity, equity, inclusion, and ways to maneuver the new world of corporate responsibilities.
The potential of renewable energy is about to be unleashed by an autonomous tethered drone that harvests electricity from the wind.
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Durham-based Windlift has developed drones that are lightweight, mobile and expedient – the antithesis of traditional wind turbines, which require massive steel structures grounded on concrete bases. Its 25-pound drone can be lifted with one hand and set up in a matter of minutes not months.
“The set-up and take-down time are probably less than 30 minutes, and we think we can get it down to like 10 minutes,” said Rob Creighton, founder and CEO.
Within five seconds of flying in a high-wind setting such as islands, deserts or the plains, the drone is generating power that can be pulled into the grid or stored in the battery. “Once it’s in the airstream, you generate power immediately,” he said.
Mobility, ease of installation and speed to service are compelling incentives for military applications, and the reason Windlift has garnered roughly $24 million in government contracts – even before production of drones has begun. The latest drone system design, completed at the end of 2021, passed a preliminary Navy design review in June 2022 and is ready to roll into production. The expectation is that 1,000 drones can be built annually at their Durham facility – as soon as the bottlenecks in government administration are ironed out and Department of Defense contracts are put into motion.
This latest design model was a long time coming for the biologist turned passionate ecologist and visionary of renewable energy solutions. More than 20 years ago, Creighton was working on a human genome project but became increasingly interested in climate change, ecosystems and impending threats to genetic diversity.
“Instead of mapping genomes of species going extinct, I’d rather have my career be creating new energy systems that will allow humanity to live in harmony with nature,” Creighton said. And that’s how he found himself testing the first attempt at tethered drones on the plains of Wisconsin, in five-degree temperatures and 30-mile-per-hour winds.
“The machine could go all day, but I couldn’t.”Next stop: North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where winds and warmer temperatures were ideal, but experimenting on the coast was short-lived due to repeated citations from officials that the technology could not be tested there. Eastern North Carolina farmlands seemed like fertile testing fields, but the fabric wings on those early drones were easily damaged by gnarly roots and prickly cotton crops and that, coupled with a post-hurricane “explosion of mosquitoes,” led Creighton and his company to the Triangle, circa 2008. It was a fortuitous move since fundamentally Windlift is a “deep tech company” grounded in digital engineering.
“We’ve pioneered a unique engineering process where we basically make a digital twin of what we know about reality and test everything against that before we do anything in hardware,” Creighton said. “It’s machine learning; we’re writing iterative algorithms that allow the machine to get better optimization” of the design.
Not to be confused with AI, the machine learning is “guided by actual human intelligence,” explains Chief Operating Officer Sean Meyer. “AI could not replace a human in our process right now,” but the digital tools enable one engineer to do the work of hundreds of engineers in a compressed timeframe.
Using the lightest-weight materials feasible (think carbon fiber and fiberglass), the current model uses 95 percent less material than traditional wind turbines, is modeled to handle 100 mph winds and follows a figure-eight flight pattern, effectively eliminating the need for a slip ring component that is commonly used in rotating devices but is expensive and failure-prone. Flying in circles would also cause the 400-foot Kevlar tether to become twisted.
In addition to working with the Navy on a ship-based system, Windlift also designed a system for the Marine Corps that would deploy to remote locations.
“It provides power for communications, computers, water purification systems, everything they need to operate on a beach for months,” Creighton said. “And it could be an important piece of strategic deterrence in the South Pacific. Solar is a great source of renewable energy – but if the solar panel can see the sun, anything in space can see the panel.”
Tethered drones are not visible to satellites and anyone close enough to see the drone can also be seen by the drone system, he adds. “If China decides to become aggressive in the IndoPaCom theater, this technology could be a great way to support our allies.”
There are applications for disaster recovery as well, and, working through the same government channels, Windlift connects into the Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA. They are also talking with international partners that face similar defense and disaster recovery challenges, including the U.K. Royal Marines, Australia’s Marines, Indonesia and the Philippines.
In recent weeks, Meyer said, they’ve been exploring how this technology could “transform, augment and disrupt the offshore wind business. There are multiple applications in existing [offshore] leases that go unused because the [ocean] bottom conditions aren’t right, or they couldn’t fit as many turbines as needed in a particular area – our systems could supplement these projects.”
Currently, less than half a percent of North Carolina’s electric grid is powered by renewable wind energy, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Wind Exchange resources, with only 105 traditional onshore wind turbines generating roughly 208 megawatts annually. Plans are underway for two offshore wind projects that are slated to bring more than 3.5 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2030, with capacity to serve more than one million homes along the coast from Virginia to South Carolina.
At a National Renewable Energy Laboratory conference in Colorado earlier this month, Windlift’s executive team had an opportunity to connect with other emerging clean-tech leaders and potential investors. “Our strategy was well-received,” Meyer said.
Windlift
Executives: Rob Creighton, founder and CEO; Sean Meyer, COO
Location: 2445 S. Alston Ave., Durham
Website: windlift.com
Email: sean@windlift.com
Started: 2006 (while Creighton was studying at University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Established in North Carolina: 2008
Employees: 13 (87% employee owned)
Hiring: Employee count projected to double within a year
Funding: $1 million seed round underway and is anticipating Series A funding in 2024; firm has attracted $27 million in government contracts and total financing
An excerpt:
One of the reasons the company chose to concentrate on drones with a 40-foot wingspan, and not ones of greater length, is the square-cube law of physics, which states that as an object scales up in size, its volume increases proportionally to the cube of its length, while its surface area only increases proportionally to the square of its length. This means that, because of their greater weight in proportion to their size, drones with wingspans of longer than 40 feet would be less efficient for power generation.
“However, a Durham, North Carolina start-up company is developing a system that employs a tethered-drone with a 12-foot wing span, capable of generating enough electricity to power an average size house by flying in a series of continuous figure 8 loops.”
"Under a $30 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense, Windlift is conducting test flights at two airfields in North Carolina. Once the technology is proved out, company officials hope to begin securing contracts to enable the launch of commercial applications, using much larger drones, Sean Meyer, Windlift’s chief operating officer, said in an interview.
“What we have is a tethered autonomous drone that flies in patterns extracting energy from the wind. We fly crosswind and the rotors alternate between thrust and drag depending on their needs within the pattern,” Meyer said."
“Under the DOD contract, a single 12-foot-wingspan drone is designed to be part of a 3-kilowatt rated system to be used as a portable source of power generation for forward operating positions.”
This all “sounds great” - doing what Makani tried, at a smaller scale. These guys at least admit their aircraft USES power on part of its figure-8 trajectory. So, on the one hand, hat’s-off to these folks who have the wherewithal to actually build and fly stuff.
On the other hand, it sounds so much like “more of the same”:
After all, Makani DID give up on this basic concept. Meanwhile, the story SAYS they’ve been in business for 19 years, yet they’re still “developing” a 12-foot “drone” capable of a supposed 3 kW.
While they SAY it’s capable of powering a single house, sure, at full capacity, it could power a house, but experience shows wind powered homes require a 10 kW turbine, located specifically in a high-wind environment
And in that high-wind location, the capacity factor one might expect is arguably, perhaps 30%. That’s why you need a 10 kW turbine to power a single home. So why is this effort not powering a home now? With all that money and talent and all that time to develop their small system?
It looks like one more case of the AWE version of “Back To The Future”, where no matter how the years roll on, all accomplishments remain perpetually in the future.
OK and if they’ve been doing this for 19 years, or even half that, WHERE is the single house powered by one of their drones. Oh wait - they’re still “developing” the 12-foot drone - forget about the 40-footer for now, I guess.
Well, what I’ve been saying all along is, why do all these supposed AWE companies always say they will power X hundred homes by date Y at location Z, when they can’t power even just one single home today?
And how could you reasonably use a kite to power a military “forward position”, without giving away your exact location? Hmmm…
Something tells me that as the paradigm of wasting government money shifts, this supposed 30 million dollars will be reduced or eliminated from a sensible military budget. It may have all sounded fine to a certain box-checking segment of the government, a few years ago, but how much taxpayer-funded capital can they continue to throw around recklessly, when they’ve reached the point of no return with regard to drowning in debt?
Now I’m just gonna throw this out there: This effort is almost two decades old, relying on the diving portion of a figure-8 pattern to generate power, like the Makani effort turned out to be limited to. And after almost two decades, they still don’t have a working system powering a single home.
I love and admire the gadget-centric urge to build and develop sexy new technological toys, and all the fun it brings, but I have to say, we’ve seen this movie, or several similar movies, before. I hope fpr the best for tis effort, but if I had to place a bet on it, well…
Still, I appreciate and enjoy keepin up on everyones’ AWE efforts, from meaningful experiments using common household objects on a low budget, to these multi-million dollar projects, but we have to remember the La Brea Tar Pits aspect of it all… - “No one gets out alive!” 
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Update: Looking back at the previous messages in this “topic”, with all the 5-year-old citations of tens of millions of dollars in defense spending on it, “disaster-relief”, blah blah blah. I’m just guessing that the article currently under discussion, is one more example of some over-eager “journalist” (A.I.?) regurgitating old news from maybe 5 years ago or more, such as we often read in AWE-related articles.
How about this message in this topic, from 2020:
JoeFaust
The Windlift prototype referenced in the April 30, 2019 post above, does not fly. As far as them still engaged with the military remains to be seen. Quantico has shown some interest in eWinds system and we’re looking forward to further discussion with them.
Remember the “recent” articles that discuss Altaeros as though it actually exists, even though it never went into sustained operation, and folded maybe what, ten years ago?
So Katie Schaef was questioning Windlift’s claim of government funding 5 years ago, saying it “remains to be seen”, and their drone “does not fly”, while citing Quantico’s interest in eWinds, saying eWinds is “looking forward to further discussions” - once again, for AWE, it’s always “Back To The Future”…
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