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Makani’s time as an “other bet” comes to an end
- musicale 7y agoDoes that mean they are shutting down? Too bad, it was an interesting company developing an interesting kite-based alternative to traditional wind turbines. Although Alphabet apparently wasn't a great match, is Shell any better - are they really going to be an effective advocate for developing wind power as an effective competitor against their primary fossil fuel business?
- tehlike 7y agoThat's probably a corp speak, to be honest. They'll almost certainly shut it down after few months/quarters.
- marcinzm 7y agoFossil companies are trying to diversify against both short and long term oil price drops: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-04/shell-leads-big-oil-in-the-race-to-invest-in-clean-energy-tech https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-04/shell-lea...
- beering 7y agoRe: Shell, I think there's something similar playing out with automobile manufacturers and "mobility". They will honestly give it an effort, but perhaps without the clarity, expertise, or strategy that's actually needed to make it succeed in the long run. And then once it doesn't grow huge, they'll sell it, spin it off, or shut it down, because it was only ever a diversification bet, not their ambition at heart. See: GM with Maven, Ford with Chariot, BMW with Parkmobile.
- tytso 7y agoThe FT article makes it much more clear: "But Alphabet decided the opportunity to greatly disrupt to energy sector had begun to dwindle. While Makani at first felt it could provide a competitive advantage by using its technology on land and in shallow water — as well as deep water — advancements in competing technologies meant that was likely no longer the case. “That’s very sad for Makani,” Mr Teller said. “But it’s really great for the world.” An EU report published in 2018 concurred with Alphabet’s assessment. “The technology still has a long way to go before it can reach commercialisation,” it read, noting that challenges remained in demonstrating the reliable, autonomous operation that would make the concept viable." Shell is going to have to decide whether they think the risk/reward calculation is worth investing in the technology and the current staff. This sounds like it's not really different from a VC deciding not to continue with the next round of funding. Perhaps some other VC will be willing to throw in more money. Who knows, maybe the "Vision Fund II" will be willing to put more money in. :-)
- lovemenot 7y agoSpeculation: Perhaps they will eventually adorn offshore oil rigs. 600kw is not large, but could help supplement power systems offshore. It looks good for their image and seems a good fit for local conditions. In particular rigs stand-alone, so less concern with tether coming down on someone else.
- taneq 7y agoI’d imagine an oil rig is the least likely place on the planet to need complicated wind power. They flare off natural gas constantly, sticking a turbine (or indeed just a thermoelectric stack ) in there would be trivial.
- melling 7y agoI submitted the ft story a couple hours ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361216 In case you pay for ft and not Medium, like myself. Direct link: https://www.ft.com/content/56582032-528e-11ea-8841-482eed0038b1 https://www.ft.com/content/56582032-528e-11ea-8841-482eed003...
- marcinzm 7y agoMedium is free except for some premium articles although you may get a scary popup.
- CaliforniaKarl 7y agoThe FT story was much more readable and direct than the Medium post. Thanks!
- dredmorbius 7y agohttp://archive.is/zNJtq http://archive.is/zNJtq
- PeterisP 7y agoThey somehow managed to spend a bunch of pages and a lot of words, and still did not say what exactly are they announcing and what will the outcome be. Are they shutting down? Are they getting acquired by Shell? Something else?
- blackearl 7y agoNo longer part of Alphabet >Shell is exploring options to continue developing Makani’s technology. Vague enough to be shopping around perhaps
- 1024core 7y agoFTA: so from today Makani’s time at Alphabet is coming to an end. This doesn’t mean the end of the road for the technology Makani developed, but it does mean that Makani will no longer be an Alphabet company. Shell is exploring options to continue developing Makani’s technology.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y agoMy read is that Alphabet is selling the assets to Shell, and Shell is thinking about what to do with them.
- jacquesm 7y agoIt would be interesting to know how much it sold for. I'm guessing not a whole lot, is there a public filing where Google / Alphabet will have to disclose this?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y agoGoogle would only have to disclose it if the loss is material, IIUC. I doubt it is on Google's scale.
- sandoooo 7y agoIt's an update on their incredible journey.
- 1024core 7y agoEver since Sundar, a McKinsey guy, took over, the writing was on the wall for all of the bets that Sergey and Larry engaged in. He just cares about the bottom line (as some would argue he should), and doesn't have a "passion" per se. He's more than happy to just keep the train rolling, and keep the perception of growth up by showing more ads and using dark patterns[1] to make users click on what they think are web links but are actually ads. Eventually the train will run out of steam, and then its on to the next gig. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823
- new_realist 7y agoGoogle has no leaders, only managers.
- tehlike 7y agoRealistically, very few companies has inspiring c-level people. Bezos is inspiring, maybe thats about it for me.
- mcny 7y ago> Bezos is inspiring, maybe thats about it for me. (Not an Amazon.com employee or ex-employee. I have no inside information.) I was excited to learn about the culture at Amazon.com but I'm personally very disappointed (perhaps because of the high bar I imagined). The story of buying a door and using as a desk probably gets repeated a lot but that and the touted base salary cap gets lost in the sky high executive compensation. Salary.com https://archive.md/oIQ67 https://archive.md/oIQ67 pegs both Jeffrey A. Wilke, CEO Worldwide Consumer and Andrew R. Jassy, CEO Amazon Web Services at over seventeen million dollars per year and Jeffrey M. Blackburn, SVP, Business Development at over ten million dollars per year. Even Jeff Bezos took in over a million and half dollars. I don't find it inspiring at all. I would find it inspiring if the leaders made closer to the salary cap (definitely under a million dollars a year).
- tehlike 7y ago
- chrisco255 7y agoNuclear is the only feasible way to scale electricity to the globe at an affordable price, over the next few centuries. Wind and solar are great supplemental sources but they can't run a modern economy.
- trimbo 7y agoI agree with you, but it will never happen. I lamented with a few reasons why in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19167207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19167207 The best we can do is get behind solar and wind and pray for a fusion breakthrough.
- chrisco255 7y agoGood post. I don't share your pessimism but I get why you feel that way. I think people just need to be told by a good leader that there are real trade-offs with taking "the nuclear option" but we have to embrace it. People accept trade-offs all the time. We understand some jets crash but we still don't give up air travel. We understand cars crash but we don't give up automobiles. I just think nuclear meltdown risk is overblown. If it happens four times a century, is that acceptable? I think it is. All things considered, how many people have died from nuclear meltdowns versus coal extraction?
- v7p1Qbt1im 7y agoMy amateur opinion is we need to get fusion before fossil runs out or we‘re fucked. Then it also needs to be shared among all humans (for free hopefully). Or we are fucked as well. Either energy collapse or war or both might result otherwise. If we manage to avoid either (seems unlikely so far), then we just need to solve climate change and we’re almost at type 1 civ. /speculation
- vl 7y agoAnother way to meet energy demand is to reduce population. Which already started to happen by itself in many developed countries. As standard of living raised globally, it’s probable that population will plato or decline. (With this said, I still think nuclear energy is the best option until fusion comes through).
- davidivadavid 7y agoThis sounds like one of the typical Google X "problems" that's more or less a fun experiment with no real concrete sensible applications. Can you make electricity with kites? Maybe. Probably. Should you? Probably not. If you look at the Goole X website (https://x.company/ https://x.company/), the problem is stated thusly: "How can kites be used to generate electricity in unexpected places?" Any sensible person's first reaction to that should be: Why would you want to do that in the first place? You want to generate energy in "unexpected places"? Why? I think you want to generate energy in places that need energy, no? And why would you want to constrain the problem to use kites? What about all other energy sources? Is kites the best one? The most economical? Or is it just some engineering porn stuff? Other problems seem to suffer from the same nonsensical approach: "How can beams of light support the rapidly growing global demand for data?" Uh, what? "How can balloons deliver the Internet to rural and unconnected places?" Who cares? How can paper airplanes deliver the internet to urban places? That's just a thought experiment with no motivation. Etc. etc.
- ggm 7y agoYou went too Far. Loon (the balloon project) has done real work which people are benefitting from, in rural and remote areas which cover 5b people. Also, their design ideas for inter-device communication are popping up in spaceX and other places. The space-X inter-satellite communication is photonics: beams of light. So thats two things you pontificated on, you don't actually understand. Loon is not 'blah, who cares' -Loon is 'wow: this is working, lets get this deployed' joined to 'we can re-purpose your model in LEO sats' Do you seriously think "rural and unconnected places" is a who cares response? Here's a hint: go read the iridium story. People (with money) care a LOT about these spaces.
- davidivadavid 7y agoI think you're missing the point. The point isn't that they're not doing "real work" or that what they're building doesn't work at all. The point is about the approach which consists in engineering a "hard problem" by adding unnecessary constraints/hypotheses to a real (although often ill-defined) problem, and then claiming it's a marvel of engineering when a half-functional, non-viable solution is completed. It's the XY problem applied to startups. Instead of trying to solve the problem (energy, connectivity, etc.), they start from a given technology, and try to shoehorn it into a problem. That's bad design, and probably bad engineering in most cases.
- strangeloops85 7y agoX seems a strange blend of overly ambitious and overly critical/ constraining (which is partly related to conception of what is "big" enough). It's also unnecessarily secretive and would benefit from being more open, especially in the energy and climate space. A lot of interesting ideas get shot down quickly, which is not necessarily a bad thing.. but I'm not sure what the false positive vs. false negative rate is in this process. But for those ideas that develop, it seems like perfectly solid technologies that could form the premise of an interesting startup don't get out the door because they don't meet an internal bar of "worthiness". Maybe let the market and external funders decide that? Their internal process is not intrinsically good or bad, but what's unfortunate is that they don't really publish. I know they're not looking to be Bell Labs, but if they think a lot of these ideas aren't going to pan out, but many person-years of research effort goes in, they really should share the learnings and lessons as opposed to locking it up internally. When these projects don't pass their internal bar for being commercially viable (which seems rather disconnected from what that bar would be if the idea/ tech stood on its own outside), it's basically like academic research. Truly is a shame that a lot of smart people working on interesting non-commercializable ideas don't get to share that. Others might pick up on it, if not now.. maybe a decade or two down the road.
- g2020 7y agoUnpopular opinion from a former Googler (who never worked in X, but knew a lot of people who transfered over there): In general, people in X get paid too much to make it "worth it" to innovate. Obviously there are exceptions, but I'd say there is a perverse incentive to string the funders (Google) along as long as possible. Line engineers are making $250K+ / year, managers are making $500K / year. Innovation is kind of a "swing big and go home if you miss". But there's no incentive to "go home" if you have a comfortable lifestyle. You want to keep going and you can convince the management of that because you inherently know more about the tech than they do. It's an information assymetry problem. I see a similar effect in non-X moonshots funded by Larry Page. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2019/12/01/inside-larry-pages-kitty-hawk-returned-deposits-battery-fires-boeing-cora/#1c2b5ea58ab4 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2019/12/01/insid... Basically there's an incentive for "demo-ware" and not real innovation. I'm glad I worked at Google rather than say Tesla, because I was doing "non-moonshot" engineering work. Tesla is notoriously chaotic. I think Chris Lattner said Tesla had the highest turnover rate he'd ever seen. But I actually think the idea of firing a lot of people makes sense if you're innovating. It should be chaotic and messy because the whole goal is inherently risky. I used to work in video games and they also fired people all the time and paid them like crap. I made 3-4x at Google what I did in the video game industry. But honestly it makes sense because of the financial profile of the industry vs. Google's industry. Put bluntly: you're filtering for people who really love it and are doing something irrational to innovate hard tech or create a blockbuster game. I'm sure a lot of people will bristle at this from the employee perspective, but having worked in both environments for many years, I can see how the compensation changes people's behavior. You might not realize it but it does.
- KKKKkkkk1 7y agoGoogle X aka the moonshot factory has existed for longer than the original Apollo program. Has it launched any successful products for Alphabet?
- mdonahoe 7y agoThe Apollo program didn’t exactly reach product-market fit either. It too got shutdown by price-conscious Congress. Moonshots are inspirational, but sadly do not seem sustainable. On the other hand, I wonder how many successful startups ex-X employees will have launched.
- jacquesm 7y agoThey worked just fine, they delivered the product that was required: a PR victory over the USSR which had stolen America's thunder in the space race.
- smooc 7y agoInteresting how people measure these endeavours always in the context of their perceived end goal. Remember "shoot for the moon and if you come half way you still got pretty far"? This is exactly that. Learning what you can't do is as important as to know what you can do. I'm happy that Alphabet is doing these long term research projects and bets. >5 years I think, apart from government, only oil & gas companies project that long term, but they know much better what they will 'find'. What Alphabet does it moves the academic needle cause we learn so much on the way. Maybe they can do better in publishing the results, cause that is an alternative to just shareholder value: society value.
- jpm_sd 7y agoAs far as I know, Makani has never successfully demonstrated net positive power generation. They have designed an incredibly complex tethered-helicopter-flying-wing, and that is an impressive technological achievement. But it's also a terrifying controls problem, and suffers from the same drawback as all the "flying car" startups: What goes up, must come down. Traditional wind turbines are a bit more predictable. The offshore flight test in August ended with a crash and the loss of the aircraft. I have to assume that no net power was generated during this test, or they would have mentioned it in the press release? https://medium.com/makani-blog/makanis-airborne-wind-power-system-takes-flight-offshore-907fd4c9af86 https://medium.com/makani-blog/makanis-airborne-wind-power-s... Makani's device is able to briefly generate power for a fraction of each crosswind loop it flies, but it has to draw power from the grid to push itself the rest of the way around the loop. This is neither useful as an energy source, nor cost competitive with a traditional wind turbine. For offshore applications, there are much simpler competing projects to put traditional wind turbines on spar buoys or semi-submersible platforms, e.g. http://www.principlepowerinc.com/en/windfloat http://www.principlepowerinc.com/en/windfloat
- jacquesm 7y agoEverybody that is involved in the wind power scene that I know was super skeptical about Makani. Those are people that have been building wind power installations for decades. Criticisms ranged from complexity to zoning, land use, safety and efficiency compared to more traditional designs. Moonshots are great if you have an actual goal that is achievable and will give you an advantage if it succeeds. Keep in mind that the original 'moonshot' (going to the moon!) was a PR effort, not something that was meant to be sold, turn a profit or done on a large scale. It was simply a massive PR job to try to recover from the double hit of first satellite and first man in space victories the USSR scored over the USA. This whole project to me looked like a Google level version of Armadillo space, interesting but ultimately going nowhere. Shell may keep it alive as a PR item, they will need all the help they can get on that front but I really doubt it will ever be used in production anywhere in volumes that matter. The easiest way to compare Makani to stationary wind installations out there generating power today is to look at the effective cross section of the rotors and to realize that a moving rotor consumes exactly the same amount of power in lift that it uses going forward. So that will cancel out across the loop leaving you with a bunch of small rotors vs a much larger rotor sweeping an enormous surface. And launching it is one thing, bringing it back in in a storm is a completely different proposition. A 12MW Makani installation would use much more land and would be much more fragile than a comparable regular HAWT.