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I've always found the ground-generating wind sails appealing, because they basically do what birds have evolved to master. I am not a physicist, but it seems that birds, by adjusting the angle of attack, are able to go up and down, without adding much energy.
If it works in practice you can be the first person to build one and make your fortune. Energy illiterates love stupid ideas like this, and don't forget that car that runs on water.
Having different colored and designed kites could make it a nice tourist attraction too. If our energy production can also be an art installation we can inspire people with a more creative side to get into energy production.
AWWWWWWW! Yeah, when I was a kid in the 60s, the family would go Sundays after lunch to the airport and watch the planes take off and land. I can see this being a great treat!
Congratulations on submitting your Ph.D. thesis! I know what a relief it is to get to that point and past the, "I'm never going to finish this" stage. The bird safety issue with static wind turbines is rather over stated (often by those who advocate for continued fossil fuel burning). The estimate for wind turbine bird deaths in the USA, with 150GW of installed wind capacity, or 9.8% of the country's total power generation, is between 681,000 and 1.4 million. Not small, but compared to the estimated 1 billion birds killed by buildings and the 1.3 to 4 billion killed by cats (again, just in the USA), the number pales in to insignificance. I'd be the first to advocate for action to reduce those wind turbine deaths (for example, painting one blade of a turbine black, to increase visibility, can reduce bird fatalities by more than 70%), but it's really a distraction. If the USA generated ALL of its power using wind turbines and took no action to increase bird safety, it would be responsible for at most 0.6% of the bird deaths in the country. I'm also ignoring that fossil fuel burning is estimated to kill 24 million birds per year.
@@Hamletbls dishonest? I wasn’t talking about eagles. I was talking about all birds because the video didn’t mention eagles. He said birds. Did you watch it? If you want to talk about eagles, yes, poorly sited wind turbines with no measures taken (like blade painting) to protect birds, have killed eagles, and the companies responsible have been fined. A lot more eagles are being killed by lead poisoning, electrocution, illegal shooting and habitat destruction.
@@JonS It is dishonest because you are saying it is insignificant. The birds killed by turbines are not the ones killed by buildings and cats. You know this and you are dishonestly pointing out numbers to make it look like it doesn't matter.
@@Hamletbls try not to ascribe motivation to people writing on the internet. You have pointed out an honest oversight. Your point is that when it comes to large birds, including the apex predators, the impact of turbine deaths is more significant. Good point, and thank you for making it. I’d like to know what the statistics are however, because wind turbines are not listed among the top three causes of bald eagle and golden eagle deaths. If you have a citation, I’d be happy to learn more.
@@عبدالمجيدععع-ش1ظ Possibly not that big a problem. The things are airborne - if it goes bang at altitude, not a huge problem. You just need to fit it with a self-destruct system which will rupture the envelope if it falls below a minimum safe altitude.
@@tbuyus8328 No, too heavy. There aren't many gasses that are significently lighter than air. This is why we use the expensive and finite helium or the somewhat explodey hydrogen: There's nothing else that works.
Thanks for the update. The ground-based wind generator was an Idea I came up with in the 80s while working for Solaron Inc. in Denver, Co. The autonomous system issues were the non-starter. We KNEW it would work, but like auto tracking solar panels, the funding has been fought tooth and nail by the BIG OIL corps.
It has a couple of issues and not just regulation: 1) 18ct / kWh is roughly 3x more expensive than traditional wind turbines 2) Helium is gradually lost due to diffusion, it is expensive and it is a non-renewable rare ressource (that has to be mined in an actual mine since it is fleeting in earths atmosphere). 3) teathers are a problem. What do you do when there is no wind or turbulent wind? 4) high wear on the teathers due to constant movement and friction in the teather-bearing (plain bearings of traditinal turbines have almost no friction in comparison) 5) higher overall complexity of the system means more points of failure and thus lower service life 6) Windenergy is erratic enough as it is, flying figure-8s and reeling it in every now and then doesn't help here. 7) easy target for terrorism, as everything else that only takes only 1 Bullet to destroy. 8) traditinal wind turbines produce 3MW and upwards and take up less overall airspace -> more power per km². 9) This docking manuver will fail constantly, so more service personal will be neede, wich makes it more expensive. 10) It's a cloth! Traditional windturbines already have massive wear on their wings due to erosion thrue dirt, dust, ice etc... in the air. Those kites wont last a year and the upper ends of the teather better be hella thick. 11) you can't put them near any place where a human is likly to reside or come by. When the kite breaks, the teather will fall down and they don't look harmless to me or better yet: this kite comes off-course and clothes-lines everything is a 800m radius. Just built the damn wind-turbines. they are a good-enough solution as is .make 'em foldable in regions where hurricanes might come by if need be.
1) It is not fair to compare highly developed technology with a nascent one. 2) Lifting heavy generators in the air makes little sense. That is why the field is converging to VTOL flying wings a.k.a. drones pulling on a ground based generator. 3) The drone lands and the winch brings in the teather. 4) If this is important plain bearings can also be used for teathers. 5) Wind turbines are plenty complex, tons of engineering went into them, and AWE is hardly more complex, only at the lower level of maturity. 6) No need to make figure 8 in the drone design. 7) As are windmills and substations... 8) And need 20x more material to build. 9) Does not apply to drones. 10) Does not apply to drones. 11) Hardly applies to drones.
@@nikolafischercelanovic4300 1) I'm guessing these 18ct are a generous calculation from the developers, otherwise I wouldn't have brought up this point. 3) ... draging the dorne over rough terrain or through a forrest? plus: how is a drone supposed to land when the wings can't generate lift? Maybe the rotos can create enough lift, don't know, but this is what I mean with "complex" 4) I don't think you got my point here. The teather scapes in all directions on the bearing slipping and sliding over the bearing surface. Plain bearings only roll arround a drive shaft with almost no friction. 5) Needing the same ammount or more sensory, special protocoll, algorithms and AI to controll everything and motor drivers is more complex. 6) but they did in the video. 7) nah dude. You need to bring at least an RPG to make a dent in them. 8) And yet, they are more cost-effective. 10) "to a lesser degree" at best, because it's the rotos bearing the brunt of it. And don't forget: Planes have to get inspected all the time. This is one of the main reasons why. Winturbines can take it, because there is way more material to erode in comparison. 11) Nope. To the same degree, since in both cases, the load and lift is generated passively by an fluctuating force. Unless you want to talk about complexity again. But the one thing I wanna ask you is: Why are you defending this technology so adamant? What problem does it solve? Engineers not having jobs? Maybe those same engineers should work on large-scale infrastructure solutions for Hydrogen storage or upscaling battery- wind- and solar-production. But I guess it's not as sexy as AI-powered drone-gizmos.
to add to your list here is the density of air. As you go higher up the density reduces. This means the overall energy behind it is also far lower. As an extreme example you could build the most efficient, strongest, most durable wind turbine ever and place it on mars. The wind there is constantly above 100Mph, easily hurricane speeds. But the density is so low, no matter how you build, what you make it of, that turbine will never generate any usable power. The air is just too thin. Now on earth its not so extreme but that lower density does present large losses in power reclaimed from the wind. From a power perspective, it's far better to use the heat from the sun to boil water and convert that steam into power. The efficiency is far greater, and the cost is astronomically lower.
Modern kite designs are efficient and capture powerful, smooth air from higher altitudes. Launching and tweaking the kite's figure 8's optimally requires visual and hand sense, plus a sense of what the wind is doing. Wind velocity and direction changes, so different kite sizes are used in kitesurfing for optimal performance. Errant gusts would be tough for computers to deal with IMHO but they are less common once a few meters above the water. One needs a big radius to cover all the wind directions and protect from kites crashing to the ground. The kite and cables wear out from variable tension, vibrations, salt, silt, UV light, pollution, etc.
I'm pretty sure it's because helium is impossible to contain, so it's requiring bouyancy to keep it flying was the issue. there's no way you can keep the helium from escaping. It'll literally leak out of a solid metal pressure vessel though the metal walls.
The Hindenburg was massive and carried people, along with running ICE engines. A balloon igniting at altitude isn't as big of a deal and is less likely with this application.
On the Aerostats. I used to work with them a bit and we eventually stopped using them because the price of helium had gone up so much it just wasn't profitable for our application anymore. I bet that had a part to play in the ones you mentioned. As well as taking a 4 man crew to launch and dock it, someone had to monitor it at all times because it wasn't rated to fly in high wind speeds. Scary as hell landing one when its windy!
@@christophvonwaldhuf - hard to contain (diffuses through most lightweight materials), is a green house effect multiplier, only offers 8% higher lifting capacity than helium, requires extensive safety measures to prevent/surpress ignition, and hydrogen is energy intensive to generate.
Congratulations with submitting your thesis!🎉 Great video! As you point out at the end, many things were deemed impossible, turned out to be possible, and in this case these companies have already proven that the principle is feasible. I would see these as another piece in the puzzle.
most studies on cats and bird populations are bad science making inane extrapolations (as you have done here). people draw the conclusions they want, and make the data fit their bias.
I came up with this idea independently in the late 1980s. I had 2 designs. One was like that airplane and flew figure 8s. The other also generated the energy in the air, but was more like a helicopter with counter rotating blades.
Not to mix metaphors here, but bird deaths by wind energy is a red herring. Studies have proved that between 681,000 and 1.17 million bords ate killed by wind energy annually in the US. Compare that to between 89 million and 340 million bird deaths by vehicle collision, and 2.4 billion bird deaths by domestic cats for a proper perspective.
The issue with bird deaths and wind turbines is that it is concentrated in large breed birds that are not as plentiful as those killed by cats and by cars. Birds of prey, owls, stuff like that.
It's also worth noting that there are 200 million cars driving around and the electrical grid hasn't been fully deployed yet in wind. It's not a nun issue.
@@FreedomTalkMedia I beg to differ. Bird deaths by wind turbines is literally a rounding error, less than 0.05%. You're not going to put spinning blades in the air and not have birds strike them! It's just not going to happen. Do you have any idea how many birds are killed in the US every year by striking building? How about over a billion! Again, comparing that to the upper range of turbine strike fatalities, that's just 1.17% of birds killed by building strikes. So, do we do anything to mitigate bird deaths by domestic cats? No. Vehicles? No. Building? No. Then why should wind turbines be the exception? They shouldn't.
When you covered wind kites that produce electricity, the natural next thing would be to cover Minesto tidal kites that produce electricity cost effectively because of them beeng very lite and small (12m, 28 tonnes, 1,2MW) and able to operate in slow currents which other tidal turbines can't.
Beautifully Done. No need to hang in there and wait. You start inventing! I liked the lighter than air blimp with the internal turbine.. Vast potential and simplicity. What's not to like? Peace out and Thanks again!
Congrats on the Phd thesis submission ... whew! Weight of the shoulders for sure! Regarding this video, airborne wind turbines seem like an exercise in frustration for its developers though I wish them well. That said, I wonder if wave or tidal energy systems might be a quicker path to more reliable/economical electricity generation. Thanks for covering this topic and thanks for the wind turbines in your background shot. Nice touch! lol
I see these as an amazing solution for. 1) Military. 2) Survival/Remote places. 3) Emeregency workers after a disaster. Being able to produce energy for cheaper in some remote location seems great. Lots of barren places on earth with free sky above! For infrastructure purposes? I sort of doubt it unless these get incredibly big, or fly higher. I mean the whole advantage is to take advantage of high altitude winds right? Yet none of em seem to do it. Nor do generators of any sort seem to be able to handle those high turbulent winds! So even if they could get higher. Could they actually take advantage of it? Dunno. Tidal also has a long way to go. The issue there is simply the cost of installing then more importantly maintaining. The ocean is brutal on equipment. Now that pervoskites and batteries are coming online. Going to be tough for some of the other technologies to get cheap enough to compete. I do hope millimeter wave drilling takes off along with those enclosed loop systems so we aren't spreading toxic shyte already in the ground into the water table.
@@dianapennepacker6854 Yeah.. I get that (I'm certainly not a subject matter expert lol). Whereas for more 'mainstream' alternative energy I was curious about tidal/wave energy other, etc., airborne wind seems it may pose as a solution for very unique remote solutions.
A couple ideas regarding this: it seems ideal for near offshore winds that are less visibly disruptive (and may even look nice). Secondly these kites will have small 'spot' shadows compared to the large shadows of turbine blades and therefore along with their suitability for building on rough terrain where solar farms can also be built, this seems like a good way to harvest more energy from the same land area while producing little to no shading on solar panels. I also thought of another idea: building these booms on top of bladed wind turbines to take advantage of even higher winds or get access to better winds with even less startup speed required. Obviously you would need to construct your kite and cable in such a way that it can never hit the turbine blades. But it seems like starting off with a 300m advantage from a turbine mast designed to support a nacelle and blades magnitudes heavier than these systems would let you potentially get at the energy more cheaply.
The "O" flying air craft is the most-reasonable situation as the wings fly the craft, while the fan inside the turbine, like an aircraft jet turbine, is able to spin at enormous wind velocities (at higher elevations).
@@rogerphelps9939 Many of the other tethered airfoil wing designs with the scaffolded wind turbine below the wings is not proper, and removes the aerodynamic lift under the wing of the craft itself.
On the topic of birds killed by wind turbines.... the number is so low even with standard wind turbines, to the point that glass windows kill more birds a year than turbines, and coal and other pollutants even more than that, its really almost a non issue thats being used as a roadblock by oil companies
The regulatory challanges (whatever they may be in detail) are obviously orders os magnitude smaller than with wind turbines in the ground. In Germany there are few locations left where you could (legally) put up a wind turbine because house owners do not want them in their vicinity. Then there is the problem that they kill a lot of birds. So if there are rare, protected birds in an area, that's the end of all plans to put a wind turbine on the ground there. Both problems disappear with airborne wind energy. The next problem is that the good locations (a lot of strong wind) were used first, obviously. So each new (not: replacement) wind turbine is worse than those before. The main challange of the transition to renewable energy is to always have enough energy available. Those who can offer that to a smaller extent will be paid less. A very important advantage of the airborne wind power is that the winds are not only stronger at higher altitudes, they are more reliable, too. In the future most of the solar power will go to some kind of storage (additional cost, less efficient). The airborne wind power can "always" be sold directly and at higher prices. While I am writing this, an interesting question comes to my mind: How close to each other can airborne power elements be put? On the ground you need quite some distance between them due to the effect they have on the wind behind them. But the kites are so small and can fly at different hights that it mighte be possible to let them fly quite close. Making sure they fly in parallel should not be that difficult. And maybe they could even be mechanically connected on the ground so that less generators are needed. That may be something worth talking to the macufacturers about.
Some variants have been proven well enough for over a decade even (some of the flying wing or gyrocopters work quite well and are reliable enough to implement), but the main issue is bureaucratic and regulatory. Basically it's hard to get an airspace restriction put in place that isn't temporary due to the flight hazard such systems would pose to any aircraft.
My understanding is that any cowling deceases the flow through the turbine when mounted in free space. Many models incorrectly impose boundary conditions that are more appropriate for a turbine in a cowling in a tube.
I have an idea for an electric flying glider that charges its batteries while in the air when in excess lift/thermals, and or on the ground in sufficiently strong winds! Similar to airborne wind turbines but just has to make enough power for itself to remain airborne with its dual purpose motors/generators.
Bird is a bird is a bird... Pigeon or a sparrow is not a golden eagle or a buzzard. Birds of prey and large carrion birds look at the ground and are at higher risk of flying into wind turbines and their powerlines. Also its not a defense to do a whataboutism because you have some romantic feelings towards wind scams and solar grifts.
These airborne systems appear to have rather small swept areas when compared with big ground based turbines. In order to compensate for lack of area you need a much greater wind speed. fortunately a doubling of wind speed compensates for a factor of 8 reduction in the swept area so the maths might actually be in favour of large aerial systems.
All these solutions are still subject to Betz's law: Not more than 16/27 of the wind energy passing through the crossection of the acuator (be it a kite, or a small floating turbine mount) can ever be harnessed, for reasons based in fundamental physics of gas flows. In a nutshell: if you have to increase the crossection, then the kites might be scalable, whereas Helium-filled blimps or airfoils with rows of smallish rotors attached to them will likely not be.
Seeing one after another renewable technology research die on arrival because of commercial viability really worries me. It makes me wonder if we are missing out on major innovation because of investor's natutal risk aversion. Are we too focused on measuring profitability as a means to judge new research instead of its objective improvement on established tech?
ideally these should be publicly funded projects run by non-profit or governmental organizations, because the stakeholders are the entire population of the planet, not just the shareholders of a startup. then these projects wouldn't be abandoned, because the point would no longer be short-term profit, but rather long-term social benefit.
@@classicmax794 Beautifully put, I agree completely. These engineers and businessmen ARE to focused designing for monetary profit when the need for clean energy has become way more important than that. I think we will see real progress when we learn that climate change is not merely an engineering problem, but a political one.
Seems like an inflatable, airborne wind turbine could be a great, portable option for generating power for temporary or mobile installations as a supplement to solar.
Cool idea, but I do see a problem. Obviously, we would need fields of these. In order to avoid tangling two tethers together, they would have to be spaced twice the tethers length apart. At 800m, that’s 1.6km between towers. Meanwhile, that space below its entire circumference must be kept clear and basically unused. Maybe offshore, from a drone boat or something?
@@Scissors69 There was a brief mention of a tether being as strong as, but 1/7th the weight of, steel. Kevlar perhaps. Probably if one had a yet lighter tether one could go higher, which is apparently always better (modulo regulatory issues).
@@ecogreen123 it could be both but the space elevator stuff doesn't seem to be materialising anytime soon. looks like we'll get something like this first.
I wonder if the SkySail system could use massive coil springs to draw it back in instead. Then it could use a simple standard wind turbine to slowly wind it back up on the roof of the structure. Wait, actually, it could probably use its roof for a couple of smaller wind turbines to charge enough power for the reeling in...
Nice to see the Vestas Turbine, im working for the company, and been putting up the one you showed, as well as others. Many more will come during 2025 and onwards ! Great video though interesting to see alternatives.
Wind power has stuff all energy because of the area square rule. You need a massive surface area for any reasonable energy generation. Solar stomps wind energy per metre square.
Problem is that solar panels require a cap load of carbon, including oil/petroleum products. They have a life cycle limit and tend to be very low on the recycability index so contribute to waste and c02csimilar to the unrecycable wind turbine blades that need to be replaced. I liked the "potential" of a lot of these ideas because they didn't have the short falls that solar panels and wind turbines have (neither of which are close to pure green energy or carbon neutral solutions). But these aren't solutions either
Wind won't ever be able to replace Nuclear, it's inconsistent and requires a field of towers with moving parts ready to be damaged by birds and storms. Uranium heats up as it decays naturally inside the Earth, it might as well boil water for our benefit.
As an engineer that works in the power sector I see 2 major issues. One, density. Those kites look like they need A LOT of space between each unit, how much land are these going to take? Wind and solar already take an enormous amount of land compared to nuclear power for example, and a bigger footprint means less trees, less biodiversity, and also less land for people, agriculture, etc. If the goal is green energy I still have a hard time hitting the "I believe" button when step one is clearing tens of thousands of acres of natural spaces. Second is maintenance and safety. The kites would be the preferred solution for this I think, how on earth do you safely perform maintenance on those flying generators? High voltage tethers waving in the wind seems pretty sketchy, and then to perform maintenance you'd have to land this giant flying generator and then how does the technician reach anything to service it? The one advantage is it would put the tech on the ground instead of in 200 feet in the air for maintenance, but it still seems overall pretty difficult, and how long does it extend even simple maintenance tasks if you have to land and then relaunch the thing? Seems to me launching a generator into the air every time it needs maintenance wouldn't be trivial from an energy or time perspective.
Congrats! Been a joy to watch this channel grow and I can't imagine accomplishing what you have academically on top of it all. Bravo. To many more years!
I’m curious where these people get the energy from. Just doing basic chores and obligations takes it out of me. School and creating material and everything else on top? Unreal
The general advantages of the ground-gen kite generators are that you (a) don't need a heavy foundation of concrete, (b) no big tower and (c) the generator is on the ground for maintenance. But the enormous potential of these systems is the fact that they can simply be delivered by truck, placed on the ground, and are ready to work and if conditions are bad, they can be put somewhere else or be sold. Small and medium enterprises can therefore just order them and set them up -- with a far lower risk of failure as "failure" just means resell. It's almost plug-and-play. This is a quantum leap compared to classical wind turbines. There are one million fracking sides in the US alone, so why not 10 million kites ...
Scientists: "sir nuclear energy plants no longer go critical and there is enough thorium t power the earth until the sun goes out" Politicians: "release the kites!"
9:24 Seven f-ing years to develop a Control Software when the obvious answer was right there: A Human Operator. Flying kites is a fun activity anyways, flying one all day, learning the winds in the area, would be a rewarding and even relaxing activity
Firstly congratulations on submitting thesis and free time. Secondly awesome video and concept Just wondering could they consider using a tube which is shrouded in Kevlar or something with high tensile strength, this can then be used to supply gas to lift and deflate or slowly pump up water to act as ballast to make sail heavier and come down. Even if it had two lite weight tubes one higher in foil the other lower so the lower one for buoyant gas the higher one for denser air, when you need to lower it switch valve so the heavier air coming in at the bottom will displace lite gas which is removed by displacement back down the tube into a reservoir this will represent the cyclic lift and lower of foil. As for water yes I know there would be issues using public supply because the height local pressure wouldn't e high enough but a little pump connected to solar should do it whether it's air or water being pumped they are both fluids. Take care m8, keep being awesome, from some random Kiwi in New Zealand "Kia Kaha" - "Stay Strong".
A design uses the cable rotating to the ground or tower support to transfer energy from the helium filed turbine to the generator. Everything non metallic and non conducting. Easy to recover before high potentially damaging winds.
My idea is to use a spring loaded ratchet mechanism with a flywheel on the ground based generator to pulse the tether. Similar to how a rowing exerciser works. Makes the kite very simple as it doesn't have to fly around in figure eights etc. Just stays up in the air and repetitively yanks on the tether....
To optimize the function, the spring action would need to be dynamically adjustable, and the kite needs to pulse its pull to resonate with the ratchet spring ...
The big question for these systems is, if they will ever be able to catch up to traditional wind and solar. Ot would be huge, because of the great potential of energy generation. The reliability at a 24/7 operation for several years seems really to be the hard part.
Just a heads up, you missed one crucial aspect of these approaches: they significantly increase the projected area that the kites can sweep out relative to their size (ignoring the balloon one of course). also there is a tidal version of this.
I can see them working in some areas. As a native floridan who just went through a second hurricane, I'd say tropical places prone to such weather are not it's market.
Seems overly complicated for what it tries to achieve. Not even having a constant energy transformation as wind turbines. In my opinion it's all a bit of a wet startup inventor dream, like the HYPELOOP
Great video. The Kite generators seem on the surface to be such a simple idea but as you have made clear are through Environmental and operational requirements in fact very complex . Hey and "CONGRATULATIONS" 👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓
May i suggest to make a live counter of your 100k sub frame. In the background So each video of yours will be uploaded and updated as we can see the prograss of how far you do your reseuch. Take esp32 and a oled pcb screen and make a live preview of your sub count that will show us how long the uploads are. Apart from. Its the little things that matter the most. And you can also fall back on your sub count to video ratio Like "Oh yeah that video i made 100k ago yeah i remember that one. And the viewer will than give you your sub count to reference to a video of what you said. It keeps you honest.
One of my favourite ever episodes in the sadly-missed omegataupodcast was on this subject. Note sure if I'm allowed to link to it here, but it's in their online archive, episode 98
Great video! Thanks for sharing. One of my pet peeves though are statements like x-times lighter/smaller/shorter/etc. At least to me, 7 times lighter means x-7x (or -6x), not x/7 as I assume is what you meant. I'd very much prefer "but at a seventh of the weight." Sorry, I just had to get that off my chest, I'm weird like this. lol 😅 Whether or not this will work remains to be seen, but I believe effortslike this and other green power generation and storage is needed if our species is going to survive the next millennia, if not century.
I'd say it needs to be notably more efficient and cost effective before it can out pace standard wind turbines. my main concern is generator density, namely how many can we fit in a given area. most standard turbines require about 3-4 rotor diameters between each turbine (at most 220m x 4 = 880m). the kites need to reach altitudes of 800m so that's nearly as much just to operate one. Taking that into consideration the efficiency of these things needs to offset the the numbers of standard turbines by quite a large margin to become more viable.
WICKID!! well done mate, fascinating stuff, will keep in touch. here's something to ponder, extracting energy from the movement of tectonic plates. spk zoon.
For power generation during kite deployment a two kite system would be better. One cable with a kite on either end of the cable. Power is generated when Kite # 1 is deployed. Then a regulator restricts the expansion of Kite #1. Kite #2 now, fully expanded deploys which generates powers while pulling in the restricted Kite #1. Once deployed Kite #2 is restricted and the process is repeated over and over. Energy is generated continuously and not expended to retrieve a kite.
I wonder if they have any potential for emergency responses and shipping. Launching a light system into the sky to power the ship, at least partially. I still feel kinda skeptical, but it would be neat. International waters are also not a regulatory issue here.
Can we just have two kites connected through a pulley, so when one goes up, it pulls the other one down, and vice versa? So we have a constant generation by alternately switching the roles?
I have been wondering about the possibility of using the Cody War Kite design, which could lift humans up as observation posts, and instead fix onto it a wind turbine. Im sure there are many impracticalities that I dont know, but the idea intrigues me.
is there any reason you couldnt integrate baloons to keep the thing in the air easier for low wind days other than not wanting to add more and waste gas
When you are at Aruba please visit the lake Maracaibo. Another possible power generation place. But with little bit more umph to it ;-) It might just be the most stormy place on the planet. Now how do we make really big capacitor to collect lightnings.
One way to keep kite farms from tangling is to do the retraction in a wave so that kites that are nearest always have one that is retracting and another that is unfurling.
If it’s of interest to you, I fly both paragliders and power paragliders AND in both respects, I have had meetings mid-air with birds, large and small! I have had birds land on me or my harness or frame in both paraglider and power paraglider situations. I have been attacked by an eagle in paraglider situation but not in power paraglider. I’ve never seen a bird injured in either activity.
The one in the thumbnail reminds me of the wind turbines they had in the Divergent movies. I honestly think doing something similar in real life would be a smarter idea. I’m sue many people have experienced strong wind gusts walking between office buildings in a city. Imagine downtown L.A. or NYC with dozens of wind turbines scattered across the city’s. With the right optimizations each 50 story building could power themselves.
The main issue I see is space. One of these kite systems produces far less energy than a standard turbine. That wouldn't be an issue if you could pack more into the same space. However, the kite systems would have to be spaced at practically the same distance apart as standard turbines in a field. Although they have a far smaller footprint, the max extension of their cables places them in danger of constantly tangling with other tethers at any closer distance. Same space, less power generated, with more power input to make it all work day to day. Although an interesting and potentially promising idea, it doesn't look to be practical for meaningful energy production at this time.
Compare the infastructure cost per KwHr, and I would be pretty sure the foundations for any tether system eg mass to restrain a variable (snatching) load would be compable to a traditional wind turbine. Then, there are the cost and durability requirements of the tether. I'm guessing that over a 20+ year system life, this would require multiple replacement cycles along with constant monitoring and maintainence. Now airspace, go to your local winch launching gliding club. A wire going up to 2000+ feet presents a catastrophic air traffic hazard, so any implementation would require a no-fly zone around the total systems 3d area of operation. Food for thought.
here is a problem with each unit needing to be roughly 2 km apart from the next unit and if they generate 400kw you are going to need an area of clear land 10 kilometre long 2 kilometres wide the same area covered with solar panel would produce a lot more power and mooring them off shore introduces a whole new level of complexity
Do you think airborne wind will take off? Thanks to SurfShark for making this video possible. Go to surfshark.com/ziroth for an extra 4 months Surfshark.
I've always found the ground-generating wind sails appealing, because they basically do what birds have evolved to master. I am not a physicist, but it seems that birds, by adjusting the angle of attack, are able to go up and down, without adding much energy.
It's just so dumb
How do the braindead like this twit, ever get their hands on a computer?
Does this fool actually have a living brain cell?
I'm Ryan Innes and I'm in this with you
The German Engineer joke: "that's all fine and good in practice... but how does it work in theory?!?" 😂😂😂
These airborne wind turbines were in big hero six.
True
@@borntoclimb7116 Just testing to see if my keyboard doesn't hate me any more. Let me see if it will let me type poiu.
@@submersedsword4949 okay
If it works in practice you can be the first person to build one and make your fortune.
Energy illiterates love stupid ideas like this, and don't forget that car that runs on water.
Having different colored and designed kites could make it a nice tourist attraction too. If our energy production can also be an art installation we can inspire people with a more creative side to get into energy production.
That could be a good marketing point also, they could be made the same color as a company's color.
AWWWWWWW! Yeah, when I was a kid in the 60s, the family would go Sundays after lunch to the airport and watch the planes take off and land. I can see this being a great treat!
If you have more than one deployed too close I think the cords are bound to tangle
Thats a solarpunk art genre main signifier
Now that's some out the box thinking that engineers sometimes need! Good work!
Congratulations on handing in your thesis! Writing these can be intense and I hope you're happy with the outcome!
Thank you, it was pretty all consuming at the end, but proud of what I achieved! I'll definitely make a video about it after the viva.
Congratulations on submitting your Ph.D. thesis! I know what a relief it is to get to that point and past the, "I'm never going to finish this" stage.
The bird safety issue with static wind turbines is rather over stated (often by those who advocate for continued fossil fuel burning). The estimate for wind turbine bird deaths in the USA, with 150GW of installed wind capacity, or 9.8% of the country's total power generation, is between 681,000 and 1.4 million. Not small, but compared to the estimated 1 billion birds killed by buildings and the 1.3 to 4 billion killed by cats (again, just in the USA), the number pales in to insignificance. I'd be the first to advocate for action to reduce those wind turbine deaths (for example, painting one blade of a turbine black, to increase visibility, can reduce bird fatalities by more than 70%), but it's really a distraction. If the USA generated ALL of its power using wind turbines and took no action to increase bird safety, it would be responsible for at most 0.6% of the bird deaths in the country. I'm also ignoring that fossil fuel burning is estimated to kill 24 million birds per year.
AND............ what the hell is all this BS about them causing cancer???
This is very dishonest. Cats and buildings don't kill eagles and the other large birds that wind turbines kill.
@@Hamletbls dishonest? I wasn’t talking about eagles. I was talking about all birds because the video didn’t mention eagles. He said birds. Did you watch it?
If you want to talk about eagles, yes, poorly sited wind turbines with no measures taken (like blade painting) to protect birds, have killed eagles, and the companies responsible have been fined. A lot more eagles are being killed by lead poisoning, electrocution, illegal shooting and habitat destruction.
@@JonS It is dishonest because you are saying it is insignificant. The birds killed by turbines are not the ones killed by buildings and cats. You know this and you are dishonestly pointing out numbers to make it look like it doesn't matter.
@@Hamletbls try not to ascribe motivation to people writing on the internet. You have pointed out an honest oversight. Your point is that when it comes to large birds, including the apex predators, the impact of turbine deaths is more significant. Good point, and thank you for making it. I’d like to know what the statistics are however, because wind turbines are not listed among the top three causes of bald eagle and golden eagle deaths. If you have a citation, I’d be happy to learn more.
Since there is no one on board they should use hydrogen for lift. It’s cheaper, renewable and more buoyant.
Yeah and it may catch fire also !!
@@عبدالمجيدععع-ش1ظ Possibly not that big a problem. The things are airborne - if it goes bang at altitude, not a huge problem. You just need to fit it with a self-destruct system which will rupture the envelope if it falls below a minimum safe altitude.
Wonder if natural gas or ammonia might work.
@@vylbird8014 A couple pressurized blow out valves or a plasma field to cause an implosion instead of an explosion.
@@tbuyus8328 No, too heavy. There aren't many gasses that are significently lighter than air. This is why we use the expensive and finite helium or the somewhat explodey hydrogen: There's nothing else that works.
Thanks for the update. The ground-based wind generator was an Idea I came up with in the 80s while working for Solaron Inc. in Denver, Co. The autonomous system issues were the non-starter. We KNEW it would work, but like auto tracking solar panels, the funding has been fought tooth and nail by the BIG OIL corps.
It has a couple of issues and not just regulation:
1) 18ct / kWh is roughly 3x more expensive than traditional wind turbines
2) Helium is gradually lost due to diffusion, it is expensive and it is a non-renewable rare ressource (that has to be mined in an actual mine since it is fleeting in earths atmosphere).
3) teathers are a problem. What do you do when there is no wind or turbulent wind?
4) high wear on the teathers due to constant movement and friction in the teather-bearing (plain bearings of traditinal turbines have almost no friction in comparison)
5) higher overall complexity of the system means more points of failure and thus lower service life
6) Windenergy is erratic enough as it is, flying figure-8s and reeling it in every now and then doesn't help here.
7) easy target for terrorism, as everything else that only takes only 1 Bullet to destroy.
8) traditinal wind turbines produce 3MW and upwards and take up less overall airspace -> more power per km².
9) This docking manuver will fail constantly, so more service personal will be neede, wich makes it more expensive.
10) It's a cloth! Traditional windturbines already have massive wear on their wings due to erosion thrue dirt, dust, ice etc... in the air. Those kites wont last a year and the upper ends of the teather better be hella thick.
11) you can't put them near any place where a human is likly to reside or come by. When the kite breaks, the teather will fall down and they don't look harmless to me or better yet: this kite comes off-course and clothes-lines everything is a 800m radius.
Just built the damn wind-turbines. they are a good-enough solution as is .make 'em foldable in regions where hurricanes might come by if need be.
wind turbines just are not the future. they are just not good, and never were.
1) It is not fair to compare highly developed technology with a nascent one.
2) Lifting heavy generators in the air makes little sense. That is why the field is converging to VTOL flying wings a.k.a. drones pulling on a ground based generator.
3) The drone lands and the winch brings in the teather.
4) If this is important plain bearings can also be used for teathers.
5) Wind turbines are plenty complex, tons of engineering went into them, and AWE is hardly more complex, only at the lower level of maturity.
6) No need to make figure 8 in the drone design.
7) As are windmills and substations...
8) And need 20x more material to build.
9) Does not apply to drones.
10) Does not apply to drones.
11) Hardly applies to drones.
@@nikolafischercelanovic4300
1) I'm guessing these 18ct are a generous calculation from the developers, otherwise I wouldn't have brought up this point.
3) ... draging the dorne over rough terrain or through a forrest? plus: how is a drone supposed to land when the wings can't generate lift? Maybe the rotos can create enough lift, don't know, but this is what I mean with "complex"
4) I don't think you got my point here. The teather scapes in all directions on the bearing slipping and sliding over the bearing surface. Plain bearings only roll arround a drive shaft with almost no friction.
5) Needing the same ammount or more sensory, special protocoll, algorithms and AI to controll everything and motor drivers is more complex.
6) but they did in the video.
7) nah dude. You need to bring at least an RPG to make a dent in them.
8) And yet, they are more cost-effective.
10) "to a lesser degree" at best, because it's the rotos bearing the brunt of it. And don't forget: Planes have to get inspected all the time. This is one of the main reasons why. Winturbines can take it, because there is way more material to erode in comparison.
11) Nope. To the same degree, since in both cases, the load and lift is generated passively by an fluctuating force. Unless you want to talk about complexity again.
But the one thing I wanna ask you is: Why are you defending this technology so adamant? What problem does it solve? Engineers not having jobs? Maybe those same engineers should work on large-scale infrastructure solutions for Hydrogen storage or upscaling battery- wind- and solar-production. But I guess it's not as sexy as AI-powered drone-gizmos.
Thanks for trying to educate these fruit loops, but doubt they will listen.
to add to your list here is the density of air. As you go higher up the density reduces. This means the overall energy behind it is also far lower.
As an extreme example you could build the most efficient, strongest, most durable wind turbine ever and place it on mars. The wind there is constantly above 100Mph, easily hurricane speeds. But the density is so low, no matter how you build, what you make it of, that turbine will never generate any usable power. The air is just too thin.
Now on earth its not so extreme but that lower density does present large losses in power reclaimed from the wind.
From a power perspective, it's far better to use the heat from the sun to boil water and convert that steam into power. The efficiency is far greater, and the cost is astronomically lower.
Didn't this pop up in Big Hero 6?
Sure did! Came here to make the same comment. 👍
@@seanhoudesame
Ya
@@seanhoude lol me too
Lol just did then saw this
Modern kite designs are efficient and capture powerful, smooth air from higher altitudes. Launching and tweaking the kite's figure 8's optimally requires visual and hand sense, plus a sense of what the wind is doing. Wind velocity and direction changes, so different kite sizes are used in kitesurfing for optimal performance. Errant gusts would be tough for computers to deal with IMHO but they are less common once a few meters above the water.
One needs a big radius to cover all the wind directions and protect from kites crashing to the ground. The kite and cables wear out from variable tension, vibrations, salt, silt, UV light, pollution, etc.
I'm pretty sure it's because helium is impossible to contain, so it's requiring bouyancy to keep it flying was the issue. there's no way you can keep the helium from escaping. It'll literally leak out of a solid metal pressure vessel though the metal walls.
Like someone else commented. Hydrogen is the way to go. Not helium. Helium is basically a finite resource. We should save it.
@@dianapennepacker6854 That's exactly what they said about the Hindenburg.
@@Critical-Thinker895Thermite.
The Hindenburg was massive and carried people, along with running ICE engines. A balloon igniting at altitude isn't as big of a deal and is less likely with this application.
@@nomms tell that to the forest below... and in a windy day...
On the Aerostats. I used to work with them a bit and we eventually stopped using them because the price of helium had gone up so much it just wasn't profitable for our application anymore. I bet that had a part to play in the ones you mentioned.
As well as taking a 4 man crew to launch and dock it, someone had to monitor it at all times because it wasn't rated to fly in high wind speeds.
Scary as hell landing one when its windy!
Why not use hydrogen?
@@christophvonwaldhuf Google 'Hindenburg'😬
@@christophvonwaldhuf Google 'Hindenburg'😬
@@christophvonwaldhuf - hard to contain (diffuses through most lightweight materials), is a green house effect multiplier, only offers 8% higher lifting capacity than helium, requires extensive safety measures to prevent/surpress ignition, and hydrogen is energy intensive to generate.
I suppose a hot air balloon solution isn't viable? Like an electric heater within using some of the energy generated to operate.
Congratulations with submitting your thesis!🎉 Great video! As you point out at the end, many things were deemed impossible, turned out to be possible, and in this case these companies have already proven that the principle is feasible. I would see these as another piece in the puzzle.
about the birds reduce the cat population by 0.1 % and it will avoid less bird losses then all wind based energy systems currently available
Exactly, car strikes, cats/ foxes etc are way more dangerous
People need to stop letting cats free roam
@@ConstantChaos1 cats are an invasive species change my mind.
Don't you mean more?
most studies on cats and bird populations are bad science making inane extrapolations (as you have done here). people draw the conclusions they want, and make the data fit their bias.
Congratulations making your thesis submission! All the best!
Oh the quality improved drastically in this video - cheeky from u Ryan
Congratulations on starting your PHD!
Your channel produces great content - you're going to do great!!
Thank you, exciting times ahead!
Really interesting. Thank you, Ryan!
I came up with this idea independently in the late 1980s. I had 2 designs. One was like that airplane and flew figure 8s. The other also generated the energy in the air, but was more like a helicopter with counter rotating blades.
"There were lots of designs FLOATING around"... I see what you did there.
This is the first video of yours I’ve seen and I loved it. Definitely going to check out your other videos
Not to mix metaphors here, but bird deaths by wind energy is a red herring. Studies have proved that between 681,000 and 1.17 million bords ate killed by wind energy annually in the US. Compare that to between 89 million and 340 million bird deaths by vehicle collision, and 2.4 billion bird deaths by domestic cats for a proper perspective.
The issue with bird deaths and wind turbines is that it is concentrated in large breed birds that are not as plentiful as those killed by cats and by cars. Birds of prey, owls, stuff like that.
It's also worth noting that there are 200 million cars driving around and the electrical grid hasn't been fully deployed yet in wind. It's not a nun issue.
@@FreedomTalkMedia I beg to differ. Bird deaths by wind turbines is literally a rounding error, less than 0.05%. You're not going to put spinning blades in the air and not have birds strike them! It's just not going to happen. Do you have any idea how many birds are killed in the US every year by striking building? How about over a billion! Again, comparing that to the upper range of turbine strike fatalities, that's just 1.17% of birds killed by building strikes.
So, do we do anything to mitigate bird deaths by domestic cats? No. Vehicles? No. Building? No. Then why should wind turbines be the exception? They shouldn't.
@@FreedomTalkMedia Your claims are simply not supported by evidence.
@@ARepublicIfYouCanKeepIt Your comment doesn't address what I said, whatsoever .
When you covered wind kites that produce electricity, the natural next thing would be to cover Minesto tidal kites that produce electricity cost effectively because of them beeng very lite and small (12m, 28 tonnes, 1,2MW) and able to operate in slow currents which other tidal turbines can't.
Beautifully Done. No need to hang in there and wait. You start inventing! I liked the lighter than air blimp with the internal turbine.. Vast potential and simplicity. What's not to like? Peace out and Thanks again!
Congrats on the Phd thesis submission ... whew! Weight of the shoulders for sure!
Regarding this video, airborne wind turbines seem like an exercise in frustration for its developers though I wish them well. That said, I wonder if wave or tidal energy systems might be a quicker path to more reliable/economical electricity generation. Thanks for covering this topic and thanks for the wind turbines in your background shot. Nice touch! lol
Thank you, I'm excited top get out 'in the wild' more often! I have a few tidal projects I want to cover soon too, I think it's an awesome sector.
I see these as an amazing solution for.
1) Military.
2) Survival/Remote places.
3) Emeregency workers after a disaster.
Being able to produce energy for cheaper in some remote location seems great. Lots of barren places on earth with free sky above!
For infrastructure purposes? I sort of doubt it unless these get incredibly big, or fly higher. I mean the whole advantage is to take advantage of high altitude winds right? Yet none of em seem to do it. Nor do generators of any sort seem to be able to handle those high turbulent winds!
So even if they could get higher. Could they actually take advantage of it? Dunno.
Tidal also has a long way to go. The issue there is simply the cost of installing then more importantly maintaining. The ocean is brutal on equipment.
Now that pervoskites and batteries are coming online. Going to be tough for some of the other technologies to get cheap enough to compete.
I do hope millimeter wave drilling takes off along with those enclosed loop systems so we aren't spreading toxic shyte already in the ground into the water table.
@@dianapennepacker6854 Yeah.. I get that (I'm certainly not a subject matter expert lol). Whereas for more 'mainstream' alternative energy I was curious about tidal/wave energy other, etc., airborne wind seems it may pose as a solution for very unique remote solutions.
A couple ideas regarding this: it seems ideal for near offshore winds that are less visibly disruptive (and may even look nice). Secondly these kites will have small 'spot' shadows compared to the large shadows of turbine blades and therefore along with their suitability for building on rough terrain where solar farms can also be built, this seems like a good way to harvest more energy from the same land area while producing little to no shading on solar panels.
I also thought of another idea: building these booms on top of bladed wind turbines to take advantage of even higher winds or get access to better winds with even less startup speed required. Obviously you would need to construct your kite and cable in such a way that it can never hit the turbine blades. But it seems like starting off with a 300m advantage from a turbine mast designed to support a nacelle and blades magnitudes heavier than these systems would let you potentially get at the energy more cheaply.
The "O" flying air craft is the most-reasonable situation as the wings fly the craft, while the fan inside the turbine, like an aircraft jet turbine, is able to spin at enormous wind velocities (at higher elevations).
That rather restricts the swept area which is bad.
@@rogerphelps9939 Many of the other tethered airfoil wing designs with the scaffolded wind turbine below the wings is not proper, and removes the aerodynamic lift under the wing of the craft itself.
Congrats on your phd thesis submission. Good luck.
On the topic of birds killed by wind turbines.... the number is so low even with standard wind turbines, to the point that glass windows kill more birds a year than turbines, and coal and other pollutants even more than that, its really almost a non issue thats being used as a roadblock by oil companies
Surely when retreiving the kite, it would be best if it changed shape to decrease its lift
Congrats on the thesis!! Super cool video and promising technology (though the tangled windfarms sound like a nightmare!)
The regulatory challanges (whatever they may be in detail) are obviously orders os magnitude smaller than with wind turbines in the ground. In Germany there are few locations left where you could (legally) put up a wind turbine because house owners do not want them in their vicinity. Then there is the problem that they kill a lot of birds. So if there are rare, protected birds in an area, that's the end of all plans to put a wind turbine on the ground there. Both problems disappear with airborne wind energy. The next problem is that the good locations (a lot of strong wind) were used first, obviously. So each new (not: replacement) wind turbine is worse than those before.
The main challange of the transition to renewable energy is to always have enough energy available. Those who can offer that to a smaller extent will be paid less. A very important advantage of the airborne wind power is that the winds are not only stronger at higher altitudes, they are more reliable, too. In the future most of the solar power will go to some kind of storage (additional cost, less efficient). The airborne wind power can "always" be sold directly and at higher prices.
While I am writing this, an interesting question comes to my mind: How close to each other can airborne power elements be put? On the ground you need quite some distance between them due to the effect they have on the wind behind them. But the kites are so small and can fly at different hights that it mighte be possible to let them fly quite close. Making sure they fly in parallel should not be that difficult. And maybe they could even be mechanically connected on the ground so that less generators are needed. That may be something worth talking to the macufacturers about.
Some variants have been proven well enough for over a decade even (some of the flying wing or gyrocopters work quite well and are reliable enough to implement), but the main issue is bureaucratic and regulatory. Basically it's hard to get an airspace restriction put in place that isn't temporary due to the flight hazard such systems would pose to any aircraft.
My understanding is that any cowling deceases the flow through the turbine when mounted in free space.
Many models incorrectly impose boundary conditions that are more appropriate for a turbine in a cowling in a tube.
I have an idea for an electric flying glider that charges its batteries while in the air when in excess lift/thermals, and or on the ground in sufficiently strong winds! Similar to airborne wind turbines but just has to make enough power for itself to remain airborne with its dual purpose motors/generators.
Lot's of people bring up the bird thing without realizing skyscrapers is the one man made structure that kills the most birds
Bird is a bird is a bird... Pigeon or a sparrow is not a golden eagle or a buzzard. Birds of prey and large carrion birds look at the ground and are at higher risk of flying into wind turbines and their powerlines. Also its not a defense to do a whataboutism because you have some romantic feelings towards wind scams and solar grifts.
These airborne systems appear to have rather small swept areas when compared with big ground based turbines. In order to compensate for lack of area you need a much greater wind speed. fortunately a doubling of wind speed compensates for a factor of 8 reduction in the swept area so the maths might actually be in favour of large aerial systems.
French brothers Bruno and Dominique Legaignoux invented the efficient kite design in the 1980s. Great potential for niche applications.
All these solutions are still subject to Betz's law:
Not more than 16/27 of the wind energy passing through the crossection of the acuator (be it a kite, or a small floating turbine mount) can ever be harnessed, for reasons based in fundamental physics of gas flows. In a nutshell: if you have to increase the crossection, then the kites might be scalable, whereas Helium-filled blimps or airfoils with rows of smallish rotors attached to them will likely not be.
A really fascinating video that could help inform the background to one of our stories
Seeing one after another renewable technology research die on arrival because of commercial viability really worries me. It makes me wonder if we are missing out on major innovation because of investor's natutal risk aversion. Are we too focused on measuring profitability as a means to judge new research instead of its objective improvement on established tech?
ideally these should be publicly funded projects run by non-profit or governmental organizations, because the stakeholders are the entire population of the planet, not just the shareholders of a startup. then these projects wouldn't be abandoned, because the point would no longer be short-term profit, but rather long-term social benefit.
@@classicmax794 Beautifully put, I agree completely. These engineers and businessmen ARE to focused designing for monetary profit when the need for clean energy has become way more important than that. I think we will see real progress when we learn that climate change is not merely an engineering problem, but a political one.
Seems like an inflatable, airborne wind turbine could be a great, portable option for generating power for temporary or mobile installations as a supplement to solar.
Cool idea, but I do see a problem. Obviously, we would need fields of these. In order to avoid tangling two tethers together, they would have to be spaced twice the tethers length apart. At 800m, that’s 1.6km between towers. Meanwhile, that space below its entire circumference must be kept clear and basically unused.
Maybe offshore, from a drone boat or something?
maybe instead of space elevators , carbon nanotubes would be used to build the tether for one of these instead.
Dont think the tether was mentioned as a problem
@@Scissors69 for stormy places
@@Scissors69 There was a brief mention of a tether being as strong as, but 1/7th the weight of, steel. Kevlar perhaps. Probably if one had a yet lighter tether one could go higher, which is apparently always better (modulo regulatory issues).
why not both?
@@ecogreen123 it could be both but the space elevator stuff doesn't seem to be materialising anytime soon. looks like we'll get something like this first.
I wonder if the SkySail system could use massive coil springs to draw it back in instead. Then it could use a simple standard wind turbine to slowly wind it back up on the roof of the structure.
Wait, actually, it could probably use its roof for a couple of smaller wind turbines to charge enough power for the reeling in...
Congratz on the PhD submission. It is a great channel bud. Ty.
Nice to see the Vestas Turbine, im working for the company, and been putting up the one you showed, as well as others. Many more will come during 2025 and onwards !
Great video though interesting to see alternatives.
I'm glad you addressed the legal challenge. I expect that this will be far and away the largest obstacle to deployment.
What exactly is the material in the tether? Me guessing that there's a materials/cost limit that's nixing these startups
Wind power has stuff all energy because of the area square rule. You need a massive surface area for any reasonable energy generation. Solar stomps wind energy per metre square.
Problem is that solar panels require a cap load of carbon, including oil/petroleum products. They have a life cycle limit and tend to be very low on the recycability index so contribute to waste and c02csimilar to the unrecycable wind turbine blades that need to be replaced. I liked the "potential" of a lot of these ideas because they didn't have the short falls that solar panels and wind turbines have (neither of which are close to pure green energy or carbon neutral solutions). But these aren't solutions either
The obnoxiously absurd heights energy companies go to inorder to not just use nearly free, cheap, and easy nuclear energy never ceases to amaze me lol
Some would say the buoercracy is the problem.
Nuclear energy is anything but cheap and that's without factoring in the longterm cost of dealing with the nuclear waste.
@@Mradii1905it’s 2x to 6x the LCOE of wind and solar plus it needs insane amounts of cooling water
Wind won't ever be able to replace Nuclear, it's inconsistent and requires a field of towers with moving parts ready to be damaged by birds and storms.
Uranium heats up as it decays naturally inside the Earth, it might as well boil water for our benefit.
The nuclear energy party in Germany is historically hideously corrupt, no one likes them to the point they'd rather burn coal than listen to them.
Oooh, congratulations on submitting your thesis! May your defence be mighty, and your challengers too short of sleep to make a strong resistance :)
Great to see a new take on an old idea .😎
This generator on the ground system seems terrific. I never heard of it before your video. Enough to make me be a subscriber
As an engineer that works in the power sector I see 2 major issues. One, density. Those kites look like they need A LOT of space between each unit, how much land are these going to take? Wind and solar already take an enormous amount of land compared to nuclear power for example, and a bigger footprint means less trees, less biodiversity, and also less land for people, agriculture, etc. If the goal is green energy I still have a hard time hitting the "I believe" button when step one is clearing tens of thousands of acres of natural spaces.
Second is maintenance and safety. The kites would be the preferred solution for this I think, how on earth do you safely perform maintenance on those flying generators? High voltage tethers waving in the wind seems pretty sketchy, and then to perform maintenance you'd have to land this giant flying generator and then how does the technician reach anything to service it? The one advantage is it would put the tech on the ground instead of in 200 feet in the air for maintenance, but it still seems overall pretty difficult, and how long does it extend even simple maintenance tasks if you have to land and then relaunch the thing? Seems to me launching a generator into the air every time it needs maintenance wouldn't be trivial from an energy or time perspective.
Congrats! Been a joy to watch this channel grow and I can't imagine accomplishing what you have academically on top of it all. Bravo. To many more years!
Thank you! Exciting times ahead :D
I’m curious where these people get the energy from. Just doing basic chores and obligations takes it out of me. School and creating material and everything else on top? Unreal
The general advantages of the ground-gen kite generators are that you (a) don't need a heavy foundation of concrete, (b) no big tower and (c) the generator is on the ground for maintenance. But the enormous potential of these systems is the fact that they can simply be delivered by truck, placed on the ground, and are ready to work and if conditions are bad, they can be put somewhere else or be sold. Small and medium enterprises can therefore just order them and set them up -- with a far lower risk of failure as "failure" just means resell. It's almost plug-and-play. This is a quantum leap compared to classical wind turbines. There are one million fracking sides in the US alone, so why not 10 million kites ...
Scientists:
"sir nuclear energy plants no longer go critical and there is enough thorium t power the earth until the sun goes out"
Politicians: "release the kites!"
9:24 Seven f-ing years to develop a Control Software when the obvious answer was right there: A Human Operator.
Flying kites is a fun activity anyways, flying one all day, learning the winds in the area, would be a rewarding and even relaxing activity
actual ad after your in video ad is diabolical.
Firstly congratulations on submitting thesis and free time.
Secondly awesome video and concept
Just wondering could they consider using a tube which is shrouded in Kevlar or something with high tensile strength, this can then be used to supply gas to lift and deflate or slowly pump up water to act as ballast to make sail heavier and come down. Even if it had two lite weight tubes one higher in foil the other lower so the lower one for buoyant gas the higher one for denser air, when you need to lower it switch valve so the heavier air coming in at the bottom will displace lite gas which is removed by displacement back down the tube into a reservoir this will represent the cyclic lift and lower of foil. As for water yes I know there would be issues using public supply because the height local pressure wouldn't e high enough but a little pump connected to solar should do it whether it's air or water being pumped they are both fluids.
Take care m8, keep being awesome, from some random Kiwi in New Zealand "Kia Kaha" - "Stay Strong".
A design uses the cable rotating to the ground or tower support to transfer energy from the helium filed turbine to the generator. Everything non metallic and non conducting. Easy to recover before high potentially damaging winds.
Congrats Dr. Ziroth!
My idea is to use a spring loaded ratchet mechanism with a flywheel on the ground based generator to pulse the tether. Similar to how a rowing exerciser works. Makes the kite very simple as it doesn't have to fly around in figure eights etc. Just stays up in the air and repetitively yanks on the tether....
how does it yank on the tether? What design you have in mind? Wing ? What about spring force being different at different heights?
To optimize the function, the spring action would need to be dynamically adjustable, and the kite needs to pulse its pull to resonate with the ratchet spring ...
As a sport kite flyer I can say definitely that figure eights provide much more pull and are inherently stable
The big question for these systems is, if they will ever be able to catch up to traditional wind and solar.
Ot would be huge, because of the great potential of energy generation.
The reliability at a 24/7 operation for several years seems really to be the hard part.
Just a heads up, you missed one crucial aspect of these approaches: they significantly increase the projected area that the kites can sweep out relative to their size (ignoring the balloon one of course). also there is a tidal version of this.
I can see them working in some areas.
As a native floridan who just went through a second hurricane, I'd say tropical places prone to such weather are not it's market.
Seems overly complicated for what it tries to achieve. Not even having a constant energy transformation as wind turbines.
In my opinion it's all a bit of a wet startup inventor dream, like the HYPELOOP
Congratulations on submitting your thesis!!’
Great video.
The Kite generators seem on the surface to be such a simple idea but as you have made clear are through Environmental and operational requirements in fact very complex .
Hey and
"CONGRATULATIONS"
👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓
This is of the same quality as The B1M. I'm loving this new look.
You should cover Minesto - and read up on their story.
May i suggest to make a live counter of your 100k sub frame. In the background So each video of yours will be uploaded and updated as we can see the prograss of how far you do your reseuch. Take esp32 and a oled pcb screen and make a live preview of your sub count that will show us how long the uploads are. Apart from. Its the little things that matter the most. And you can also fall back on your sub count to video ratio Like "Oh yeah that video i made 100k ago yeah i remember that one. And the viewer will than give you your sub count to reference to a video of what you said. It keeps you honest.
Thanks for the update!
One of my favourite ever episodes in the sadly-missed omegataupodcast was on this subject. Note sure if I'm allowed to link to it here, but it's in their online archive, episode 98
Great video! Thanks for sharing.
One of my pet peeves though are statements like x-times lighter/smaller/shorter/etc. At least to me, 7 times lighter means x-7x (or -6x), not x/7 as I assume is what you meant. I'd very much prefer "but at a seventh of the weight." Sorry, I just had to get that off my chest, I'm weird like this. lol 😅
Whether or not this will work remains to be seen, but I believe effortslike this and other green power generation and storage is needed if our species is going to survive the next millennia, if not century.
I'd say it needs to be notably more efficient and cost effective before it can out pace standard wind turbines. my main concern is generator density, namely how many can we fit in a given area.
most standard turbines require about 3-4 rotor diameters between each turbine (at most 220m x 4 = 880m). the kites need to reach altitudes of 800m so that's nearly as much just to operate one.
Taking that into consideration the efficiency of these things needs to offset the the numbers of standard turbines by quite a large margin to become more viable.
Congratulations on the Phd submission 👍😊 hope to see more fascinating content soon 😊
WICKID!! well done mate, fascinating stuff, will keep in touch. here's something to ponder, extracting energy from the movement of tectonic plates. spk zoon.
For power generation during kite deployment a two kite system would be better. One cable with a kite on either end of the cable. Power is generated when Kite # 1 is deployed. Then a regulator restricts the expansion of Kite #1. Kite #2 now, fully expanded deploys which generates powers while pulling in the restricted Kite #1. Once deployed Kite #2 is restricted and the process is repeated over and over. Energy is generated continuously and not expended to retrieve a kite.
I wonder if they have any potential for emergency responses and shipping. Launching a light system into the sky to power the ship, at least partially. I still feel kinda skeptical, but it would be neat.
International waters are also not a regulatory issue here.
I remember hearing about this idea in 2008 when I was going to school for engineering. Almost 20 years later and nothing came from it. Sad.
Just want to know how they handle when there is a launch or landing failure on these kites
Can we just have two kites connected through a pulley, so when one goes up, it pulls the other one down, and vice versa? So we have a constant generation by alternately switching the roles?
I'm upset you didn't mention KiteGen, in my opinion one of the best company to explore such a technology
I have been wondering about the possibility of using the Cody War Kite design, which could lift humans up as observation posts, and instead fix onto it a wind turbine.
Im sure there are many impracticalities that I dont know, but the idea intrigues me.
is there any reason you couldnt integrate baloons to keep the thing in the air easier for low wind days other than not wanting to add more and waste gas
When you are at Aruba please visit the lake Maracaibo. Another possible power generation place. But with little bit more umph to it ;-)
It might just be the most stormy place on the planet. Now how do we make really big capacitor to collect lightnings.
One way to keep kite farms from tangling is to do the retraction in a wave so that kites that are nearest always have one that is retracting and another that is unfurling.
If it’s of interest to you, I fly both paragliders and power paragliders AND in both respects, I have had meetings mid-air with birds, large and small! I have had birds land on me or my harness or frame in both paraglider and power paraglider situations. I have been attacked by an eagle in paraglider situation but not in power paraglider. I’ve never seen a bird injured in either activity.
you missed enerkite, ready to preorder and my absolute favourite they can start without much wind at ground.
The one in the thumbnail reminds me of the wind turbines they had in the Divergent movies. I honestly think doing something similar in real life would be a smarter idea. I’m sue many people have experienced strong wind gusts walking between office buildings in a city. Imagine downtown L.A. or NYC with dozens of wind turbines scattered across the city’s. With the right optimizations each 50 story building could power themselves.
The main issue I see is space. One of these kite systems produces far less energy than a standard turbine. That wouldn't be an issue if you could pack more into the same space. However, the kite systems would have to be spaced at practically the same distance apart as standard turbines in a field. Although they have a far smaller footprint, the max extension of their cables places them in danger of constantly tangling with other tethers at any closer distance. Same space, less power generated, with more power input to make it all work day to day. Although an interesting and potentially promising idea, it doesn't look to be practical for meaningful energy production at this time.
Compare the infastructure cost per KwHr, and I would be pretty sure the foundations for any tether system eg mass to restrain a variable (snatching) load would be compable to a traditional wind turbine. Then, there are the cost and durability requirements of the tether. I'm guessing that over a 20+ year system life, this would require multiple replacement cycles along with constant monitoring and maintainence. Now airspace, go to your local winch launching gliding club. A wire going up to 2000+ feet presents a catastrophic air traffic hazard, so any implementation would require a no-fly zone around the total systems 3d area of operation. Food for thought.
have you thought about the potential electrical difference between ground ( 0 volt ) and high altitude ( 24 volt ) can that be extracted ?
i am a little confused, why don't they have kites meant to spin and twist the cable to turn a motor back at the ground?
"We were Wrong" - will be repeated for Airborne Wind Turbines when they pull the plug on commercialization..
Any update on power generation for the kites?
congrats all getting through the phd! is your defense finished, or did you have to do that pre-submission?
here is a problem with each unit needing to be roughly 2 km apart from the next unit and if they generate 400kw you are going to need an area of clear land 10 kilometre long 2 kilometres wide the same area covered with solar panel would produce a lot more power and mooring them off shore introduces a whole new level of complexity