"High-altitude winds between 1,640 and 3,281 feet (500 and 10,000 meters) above the ground are stronger and steadier than surface winds. These winds are abundant, widely available, and carbon-free.
"The physics of wind power makes this resource extremely valuable. “When wind speed doubles, the energy it carries increases eightfold, triple the speed, and you have 27 times the energy,” explained Gong Zeqi "
I like how everyone conveniently leaves out the part that this is an emergency backup not actual full time scalable tool.
This one in particular: maybe.
The approach in gerenal: not so much.
Have a look here: https://skysails-power.com/systems/venyo/The one you posted is not for scaling either. I just dont see how this maintenance overhead could ever scale for mass use.
I don’t know what you mean by mass use. It’s pretty clear that these approaches are meant to add to existing solutions or provide off-grid energy at remote locations.
If you can bring a standard 30 foot container there, you can consider such a kite installation, if other requirements are met.How does an ideal site look like?
Q3: How does an ideal site look like?
The ideal site has a flat topography with no large obstacles in the prevailing wind direction, making agricultural or unused land the ideal choice. However, certain obstacles, like trees, solar power plants, or industrial facilities, are acceptable within the operating area, but specific approval may be required. We are happy to support you in identifying the perfect site for your airborne wind energy project.I don’t see, you can’t use multiple installations at different locations aka scale it.
Basically every other option will almost always be better, no? I guess we’ll see as someone actually brings some of these to the market but my guess would be that this is not going to go anywhere.
I can see those kites being used at remote locations, islands, remote villages, etc.
Add some battery to it and you have a quite reliable source of electric energy.
What option would be better in these cases in your opinion?I live in remote locations as a digital nomad and this would never really work. The maintenance overhead of even normal ground wind turbines is too much for remote areas. Solar and battery storage is really unbeatable.
Some new generation wind turbines can be decent ive heard but there are also small novel solutions like mini water turbines can be surprisingly useful.
Neither the kite based solution nor the blimp based solution is fit for the purpose of serving single or few people with electrical energy.
For that scenario some kWp based on solar can be had for cheap and some kWh battery on top doesn’t cost a fortune either.
I never insinuated that the kite or blimp are the perfect solution for every scenario - rather that it may be a match for situation that couldn’t be served well by the available means.
Ha! Watch us burn some liquid dinosaurs!
- USA
Fossil fuels are from shit the dinos ate, like plants and other dumb crap. The belief that coal-rollers are cool enough to burn liquid dinosaurs is easily the single biggest lie of the oil industry.
Closely followed by -gestures wildly-
Isnt all feces by definition dumb because of lack of advanced functioning brain?
Maybe yours is. Mine isn’t because I’m a smartass
Lol, got your new advert campaign… Gasoline is vegan
That might actually stop the conservatives from using it.
I mean, they already rebranded some shitty vinyl as “vegan leather”.
I mean some small part of it is dino. But yeah by biomass it’s mostly plant.
Fun fact , oil is mostly from carboniferous period , so its alot older than dinos … few hunder million years older
The whole term fossil fuel is wrong.
Oil is solar power with extra steps.
Just cut out the 300 million year old middle man
And Africa, and South America, and the middle east, and Europe. Don’t pretend the rest of the world isn’t still burning fossil fuels it’s not just the US
USA is pretty much the biggest country actively fighting against better methods in favor of fossil fuels, so I’d say it’s an accurate statement
Meanwhile, large chunks of the world still use coal as their primary power source. Hell, Germany’s coal share is higher than the US’.
USA is pretty much the biggest country actively fighting against better methods in favor of fossil fuels, so I’d say it’s an accurate statement
From how darkly colored the countries are, the countries actively fighting against better methods are China, India, and South Africa, among others. Unless of course you don’t consider running coal as your primary power source ‘actively fighting against better methods’.
I don’t consider that, indeed. Bonus points for reading comprehension.
USA is the only country where I hear the president say that green needs to go and fossil fuels are the way to go.
Showing a snapshot of coal usage also makes no sense in this context. A country cannot just drop fossil fuel from one day to the next. If you check relevant data, you’ll see that the share of green fuel is actually rising in China.
Sadly, the industry is still very corrupt, where USA is he prime example, with the president is pretty much admitting to it publicly.
Showing a snapshot of coal usage also makes no sense in this context.
It’s the most tangible way to show who and who is not taking this seriously. Power generation used to be heavily coal in every country. The countries who have replaced it with better power generation sources are taking things much more seriously than the others.
USA is the only country where I hear the president say that green needs to go and fossil fuels are the way to go.
Meanwhile, Germany’s on-lining coal plants. Actions >>>>> words
You know who is taking things seriously? France. They are kicking fucking ass. And it’s because they went nuclear, where they get 70% of their power.
you’ll see that the share of green fuel is actually rising in China
Praising China for green fuel while their primary power generation is coal is fucking wild. It’s certainly better they are improving things, but until they do, everyone else with a better shade deserves more praise than you are giving China. Give that praise to France, Sweden, Norway, and Finland.
adding over 1tw of solar per year deserves a lot of praise. That they make everything for the world requires more power. Focusing on this is usually a pretext for doing much less energy transition work than China does.
Focusing on this is usually a pretext for doing much less energy transition work than China does.
Please redirect praise from China to countries who actually deserve it; like France, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. It’s just fucking wild to praise China, a country that gets most of their power from coal, for doing well on power generation while shitting on a country that has done more than them.
1,640 and 3,281 feet (500 and 10,000 meters)
I feel like this needs a second look.
They used different people’s feet.
Chinese feet are smaller.
The zero key got stuck.
As a European… Are feet logarithmic? Wouldn’t even surprise me that much.
Only when viewed from the north.
And on Tuesdays.
No, but feet are analogue. Hands are digital.
So that “10,000 meters” didn’t scale right, clearly. But you also can’t possibly call those “high altitudes”. Small planes like cessnas fly at low altitudes, like 2,000 - 5000 ft, a 747 flys at a high altitude, 40,000 ft; 1600 ft is nothing, that’s lower than some buildings.
Agreed. I had the same thought and then saw the numbers and was like wait, “which part of this is the fucked up part?”
they’re talking about the extra 0 on 10,000
I did catch that, I was just pointing out there are additional problems with the statement as well. But I’ve edited my statement to make that more clear.
Cities are going to start looking like San Fransokyo (Big Hero 6) soon. Seems like an excellent idea though. If it really gets pursued, I wonder how it will interact with air travel, since I would imagine you would need no fly zones around these, at least at a certain height.
Very interesting development. Especially that it can be deployed in disaster zones to provide energy - if there is a strong foundation to anchor it, probably.
Wouldn’t the heavy transmission line itself act as the anchor like the chain on a cruise ship?
You are aware that a ship lays several times the depth in chain on the ground as weight. And the chain is much heavier as the tether will be, or it would not really get up high. And the distance between ship and ground is rather fixed, while the windmill blimp is in a rather floating position.
No, I think a bunch of heavy duty ground anchoring is necessary here.
On the other hand, as the Chinese are rather good at planning important things like that, I could imagine them to set up some anchor points ahead: Bury a large lump of concrete somewhere in the city. Maybe use it as an open place in a park, where nobody would notice that instead of a layer of stones it is actually going a few meters deep. Have a metal trapdor in the center where you can hook up a blimp to a connection below, and have a way to plug the power into the local grid. If catastrophy happens, drop off the blimp, blow it up and send it skywards. The park should give more than enough space to set it up.
It looks like a boss bloon from BTD6 lol
It’s a novel approach, but the Chinese aren’t the only ones trying to harvest energy from high winds: https://skysails-power.com/how-power-kites-work/
That looks complicated and frankly kind of stupid. Imagine trying to get something like that working without having an engineer standing by that can get everything fixed once it crashes down or something else like that happens.
Fair, but please name one single way to generate that kind of electrical power that can be fixed by a layperson in case something crashes.
At least the Chinese version doesn’t rely on as many moving parts to keep it aloft. And a complicated mechanical system to produce a flight path. The blimp itself is complicated, but it’s not a kite.
In the end the TCO (per kWh) will play a major role, especially for big installations and for smaller ones the price floor.
I suppose a helium filled blimp with 12 turbines will be more pricey than a kite with a generator. If the kite fills your need, pick that.
IDK, the benefit to the goofy kite design is that the aerial portion is far simpler - and there’s no massive energized cable hanging in the air. It’s a little… non-conventional, but it’s a great deal less complicated than floating a massive generator like the chinese solution. Downside is presumably lower energy density per unit, but the reduction in operational footprint might make the two designs competitive. It’s good people are exploring both options!
The simpler design might lead to lower prices per kWh, which will in the end play a role together with reliability, e.g min/avg power output, durability, outages.
I find it impressive how creative engineers get. Let’s hope for a third option ;)
Promising concept too, but this is 250-500x the scale of that.
How so, when skysails talks about “Venyo harnesses the power of high-altitude winds with speeds of 13 m/s and a continuous output of up to 200 kW.” while the S1500 is featured with “Inside this duct are 12 turbine-generator sets, each rated at 100 kW.”?
It’s more like factor 5-6.Their v2 product produces about 5kw at much lower altitude (weaker 9m/s winds). 13m/s is a big ask. They don’t go as high as 1000m. I was comparing to their v2 product instead of the 200w theoretical max of their v1 product. But the blimp may not produce 1.2mw all the time either.
Yah, we need to have them running to get real numbers.
I find both approaches promising.
Ways to make electric energy available without burning fossil fuel are good.
What matters is scalability and how much material and cost you need to produce per energy unit. Kites (either parasails or fixed wing) are much simpler, can be scaled up too, and you only need a simple cable that pulls the generator’s winch. Overall kites seem much more efficient to scale up.
Very cool, and definitely worth switching too where it makes sense.
But there is no mention of cost, so it probably won’t be cost competitive with regular wind for a while, which sucks.
But the silver lining is that this is among the first of this type of power generation, and it will only get better and more efficient as the tech is built upon.
They did mention 30% cost savings. (these claims are easy to exaggerate though) While already useful scale, the advantages would grow with higher scale and high volume automated production.
Saw this in Big Hero Six. It’s a crazy concept. Hopefully it works.
Am I crazy or didn’t we see these in Big Hero 6?
Yes but, you see, that was an animated film aka a work of fiction. This is happening in reality.
Yeah and it’s amazing that they took this crazy idea from a kids cartoon and made it work!
a l a l a l a l h a BKinda.
Shira, get me my god damned tea!
That looks like a giant…
Austin Powers sketch
I assume they have designed these in a way that doesn’t adversely impact migratory birds
Birds don’t fly at 3,000 feet.
The tether / power transmission line does pass through potential flight paths, tho.
Still, I imagine the impact to be even less than ground-based turbines.
Some very few do, not sure if they’re in China though.
“Windfarms hurt birds” is 90+% fossil fuel propaganda though. Yes birds run into windmills, they also run into skyscrapers and houses and antennas and planes.
We should of course look for ways to mitigate that. We should not just pretend smokestacks do no harm and not develop renewable energy projects.
Just vultures, cranes, geese, ducks, kites, swans, condors…
They’ll hire Anna Paquin, she’ll sort something out.
And her cousin, Anna penguin, the avian consultant.
Finally the stupid floating jet engine looking turbines from Big Hero 6, except IRL they actually look good.
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