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Kite Turbines
- blackoil 5y agoThis looks interesting for off grid areas. Even a small prototype can run water pumps etc. They look like should be easy to transport and install.
- adrianN 5y agoThis is interesting for replacing small wind turbines, which often break before they recovered their embodied energy[1], but I have a hard time seeing this technology replace large scale commercial wind turbines. Kite based wind power has been talked about for years, but somehow it fails to materialize. I assume cost and safety concerns play a role. [1]http://theoildrum.com/node/6954 http://theoildrum.com/node/6954
- sandworm101 5y agoLaunch costs. Kites work well enough when the wind is blowing but a lull, or even a quick change in direction, can see them crash to the ground. Then someone has to launch them again. I cannot see them ever being practical outside of those very rare places where the wind literally never stops.
- Grustaf 5y agoKites like Makani's are autonomous, and that's really one of the harder aspects to get to work.
- wmertens 5y agoMakani's kite is steered. This one just needs to stay aloft. Launching it is just a matter of a wind-up spool on a windvane-like small rotating platform (no more than a few m high)
- Grustaf 5y agoI know how it works, what are you arguing for or against?
- mainpeanut 5y agoYou wrote > Kites like Makani's are autonomous They wrote > Makani's kite is steered. This one just needs to stay aloft The implication is that you are suggesting that autonomous steering is neat and the other person is suggesting that not needing steering is neater. Also, Makani was steered into the ground literally and figuratively. It's been cancelled. It will never do what it said it could do because its creators won't keep doing it. It's over.
- Grustaf 5y agoNo, I just meant what I wrote. I'm simply agreeing with the guy that said that launching is expensive. It's indeed the hardest part for any kite energy system, I know this from experience, I spent several years in this industry. If you could live with having to launch and land the system manually, that would change the equation completely.
- mainpeanut 5y ago> Kites like Makani's are autonomous The are also cancelled, gone, don't exist, will never happen
- UncleOxidant 5y agoThe autonomous control of the kite is one of the big issues. It was basically not possible when the idea was first presented in the 80s - there weren't computers small enough with enough computing power needed for the task. Also there were materials problems. Now we've made a lot of progress on both fronts, but still, the control software is a huge issue. We were planning on using reinforcement learning to learn a controller for our kite (when I was in the biz), but getting enough data to learn on was an issue - the kite design was an iterative process - the kite design would change and that meant we needed to recollect data to enable us to model the new kite changes, wash, rinse, repeat.
- code123456789 5y agoLooks very interesting. Didn't find a word about birds' safety on your landing page. This is even less visible to birds than traditional turbines, if I am not mistaken.
- awestroke 5y ago2.4 billion birds are killed by cats every year. 600 million by flying into glass panes. 200k by flying into wind turbines. (these are US statistics, so not global numbers) The bird death argument is completely meaningless in several aspects. I'd rather make cats illegal than put any kind of breaks on wind power expansion.
- adrianN 5y agoYour statistics are of course true, but cats and wind turbines kill different species of birds. It does make sense not to put wind turbines where endangered birds are nesting.
- eecc 5y agoJust paint a blade black. The dazzle effect will keep birds away. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53909825.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53909825.amp
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y agoI don't trust those numbers.
- gambiting 5y agoOk, then either post better ones or say why you don't like them, or what is the reason for distrust. Just saying "I don't trust these numbers" adds absolutely nothing to the discussion. Imagine if I said "I trust these numbers" - is that helpful?
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- ishtanbul 5y agoI work in the wind industry. Dont see any chance of this becoming commercially accepted
- jcun4128 5y agoyeah arm chair comment, too many parts (strings), Makani couldn't do it
- lanamo 5y agoa bird killer.
- wmertens 5y agoMakani needed expensive equipment and locations, and worked very differently.
- jcun4128 5y agoI wonder if you were to design a conventional turbine that was made out of a telescoping rod. The blades were CF with fabric like an old wind mill, and then gearbox/motor/charging circuit... say it was only 10 ft tall, compare it to this (power). 1.5KW is nice but guaranteed 30mph constant wind?
- _p8hc 5y agoWhy, out of curiosity?
- Uberphallus 5y agoNot parent, but aside from the novelty factor: For small scale energy production small VAWTs [0] are relatively cheap, they offer more W/m2, and they are much more easily serviceable and installable. For large scale production it's orders of magnitude less efficient, plus having multiple kites on the same plane brings in the wake effect [1] in full force. That's why regular turbines are generally laid in lines rather than wide surfaces, or with significant separation between them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical-axis_wind_turbine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical-axis_wind_turbine [1] https://www.wind-energy-the-facts.org/wake-effect.html https://www.wind-energy-the-facts.org/wake-effect.html
- steve_gh 5y agoThis looks really interesting. Not a replacement for large scale (e.g. offshore) wind, but a complement. I work in infrastructure management. This might be a good solution for site power roadside or trackside.
- kitd 5y agoAgreed. Large-scale might be a stretch, but the low cost and weight, open source design, and the ease of transport would make this ideal for temporary installations, eg what you mention, emergencies or even in the developing world.
- tonylemesmer 5y agoWhat happens when the wind drops?
- wmertens 5y agoThen the kites have to be rolled back home until the wind is good again.
- sirt_2513 5y agoyou can also make kites for under water usage, make use of the tide movements which never stops.
- wmertens 5y agoIt's back-and-forth though so you are constantly changing direction and losing power.
- Grustaf 5y agoThe wind also changes direction sometimes, that's not necessarily an issue. Several companies are doing this, like: https://minesto.com/ https://minesto.com/
- kitd 5y agoconstantly Well, once every 6-ish hours. But even then, you put the turbine on an axle to turn it into the flow. Windmills have been doing this for centuries.
- wmertens 5y agoah yes, I was thinking of wave energy sorry. Actually, yes, that would indeed be a good use of the concept - anchor the generator to a submerged bouey (so as to not disturb shipping) and it will always be pointing in the right direction and generating. Nice!
- gorgoiler 5y agoMy brother has one of those Cannondales with a single sided front fork. He’s also got a dynamo hub in his front wheel. With some sturdy ground stakes to pin his upside-down bike the ground, this could make a neat source of power when your off-bike, in the field. What’s the smallest possible clone of this that you could bike-camp with, I wonder?
- adrianN 5y agoHub dynamos produce a couple of watts tops. You're probably much better off buying a small solar cell.
- AceJohnny2 5y agoMakani (of Google X) tried this at a large scale. It didn't work out for them, but they open-sourced all their stuff: https://x.company/projects/makani/ https://x.company/projects/makani/
- moffkalast 5y agoWell that's just utterly overcomplicated and overengineered. No way they could produce that at scale for dirt cheap for underdeveloped remote areas, which is what this sort of thing would be the best application for. Compared to this project that's essentially a few rings and a bike transmission.
- msadowski 5y agoI really enjoyed the documentary about their work: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qd_hEja6bzE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qd_hEja6bzE
- Cyber3x 5y agoThis is one of the best videos on Youtube. I really liked how they documented their progress. If only the video lasted longer.
- mainpeanut 5y agoWell funded grad students trying to scale-down an airplane into a kite
- UncleOxidant 5y agoMore like they scaled up a kite into a largish 4 rotor airplane.
- UncleOxidant 5y agoVery good documentary on the project. It's amazing what you can do with basically an unlimited budget. I worked at a much, much smaller kite power startup that folded soon after Google stopped funding Makani (investors lost interest because they figured if Google wasn't funding in this space it must not be viable). Anyway, looking at that documentary it seemed clear that Google must've poured hundreds of millions of dollars into that company over it's lifetime. So many engineers and so many resources. I was kind of envious, but then again the ready funding might have been part of Makani's downfall, you're forced to make different design decisions when money isn't so plentiful.
- LVB 5y agoThis feature film about Makani (another kite project) was extremely well done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd_hEja6bzE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd_hEja6bzE
- riffraff 5y agonotice this is a vastly different project though: it's not a high-flying kite with complex steering logic; it's a small wind wheel that transmits torque to the ground. If this things crashes to the ground there is basically no expensive damage.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y agoWouldn't the potential for damage at least correlate to some extent with the potential for energy that can be harvested? Even hobbyist kites can become quite scary when the wind gets stronger. I don't want to be hit on the head by a kite turbine in strong winds.
- wmertens 5y agothis looks to be made from only soft parts though. Worst case you get snipped by a tensed string (could still do damage)
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y agoThe soft parts on hobby kites get quite hard when they are strained by the wind, though. As I said - it should depend on the energy they can harvest - the same energy can also force them into the ground, or onto your head.
- riffraff 5y agoI was referring to the cost of the equipment getting destroyed by crashing: makani's (and others) kites are pretty expensive and crashing one is a Big Deal, it does not seem the same in this design. Potential for damage and energy are probably correlated, in the sense that this design seems to attempt to harvest low-altitude winds (30m), while makani and others wanted to get the high-altitude stronger and more constant ones. This design does not have an heavy high flying turbine, it has a small lightweight one, and they plan to have multiple tethering ropes so I think the risk you face is in fact in the same ballpark as a hobbyist kite. IANA wind-electricity-physics person tho, so take everything I say with a large grain of salt.
- kens 5y agoThe privacy popup at the bottom of this page makes entertaining reading...
- robin_reala 5y agoRegarding their use of YouTube, the best way of working around that problem (at least without using a privacy-preserving provider) is to embed from youtube-nocookie.com instead of youtube.com. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/171780 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/171780 (and look at the “Turn on privacy-enhanced mode” section)
- Tade0 5y agoPersonally I can't get over the overuse of ellipsis.
- russellbeattie 5y agoEver since I saw Big Hero 6, I've wondered about the practicality of something like this. Blimps with generators seems like something to explore! https://media.wired.co.uk/photos/606da5dc581351b2c44d7d4c/master/w_1600%2Cc_limit/Brightlights.jpg https://media.wired.co.uk/photos/606da5dc581351b2c44d7d4c/ma...
- Grustaf 5y agoFlying conventional wind turbines aren't that good, they suffer from most of the downsides of both normal wind turbines and kite turbines. The idea with kite energy (in serious projects) is to eliminate the need for a tower and the inner parts of the blades. The kites can be seen as the tip of the blades, which is where almost all the energy is generated. Kite energy can dispense with the tower because they are tethered with a largely horizontal cable, so there is no lever involved and the foundation can be much smaller. You could sort of do that with the flying turbines, but that wouldn't really work in a city environment.
- ncmncm 5y agoFly them over failed nuke plant reservations. Those have no-fly zones marked on all the maps, so you can go up where the wind is really blowing without creating a navigation hazard.
- riffraff 5y agono need for no-fly zones > Kite turbines can fly under 30m above ground - making them the only CAA ANO CAP393 compliant airborne wind energy system.
- ncmncm 5y agoEnergy available from wind goes up as the third power of wind speed. Wind speed rises with distance from the ground, up to a limit. So available power goes up as the 4th power of distance from the ground. There are very sound reasons for wanting to get your energe extraction farther from the ground.
- vanderZwan 5y agoThat is pretty great! But GP is right in the sense that to really extract a lot of energy you want to go higher into the air too, so why not make use of those no-fly zones for scaling this up?
- UncleOxidant 5y agoSure, but the higher up you can go the more wind there generally is. It's one of the big potential advantages of kite windpower over fixed blade systems.
- amelius 5y agoBird catchers.
- lorey 5y agoThere's also Kitekraft from YC: - https://medium.com/kitekraft/kitekraft-takes-off-with-y-combinator-and-beyond-f5545ce892e3 https://medium.com/kitekraft/kitekraft-takes-off-with-y-comb... - https://www.kitekraft.de/ https://www.kitekraft.de/
- the100rabh 5y agoBeing from India where during kite festival hundreds of birds die due to colliding with threads that kites are flying from. I am a little concerned with this solution. But I guess that can be added to the design somehow. Also it just generates 1.5KW which I think its pretty low. Maybe I did not understand this completely.
- andy_ppp 5y agoI was actually thinking about an alternative energy source from the sea... it would float on the surface and be like a set of interlinked chains in a fabric with dynamos in them that the simple harmonic motion of the ripples of water constantly could be used to create electricity. Let's suppose out at sea each peak to trough is 60cm and the movement up and down causes the internal dynamo to be driven by 30cm for each one - you probably need two lines into each one, positive and negative serially and you could get a pretty good average amount of electricity probably. No idea if it would work or the output would be too uneven but there is a lot of sea and it seems a bit easier to build and repair than something that sits statically in the water.
- guerrilla 5y agoThis is already in production in Portugal.
- whoomp12342 5y agoI too have thought about this but more like an ocean/tide use case. basically a bobber/sinker with a generator
- Chris2048 5y agoGuessing it would need some weight to allow it to sink a little, but also be buoyant. Maybe aerated concrete (or even normal concrete) is the answer?: https://www.seasteading.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/The-Case-for-Geopolymer-Concrete-in-Seasteading-Michael-Eliot-3-2015.pdf https://www.seasteading.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/The-C...
- SuchAnonMuchWow 5y agosee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_power which include a description of the device you mention, among other ideas to extract the power from sea waves.
- leoedin 5y agoA lot of work has gone into wave power, but broadly it's not got anywhere - there's a lot of complexity in building machines which are robust enough to deal with all sea states and the hostile marine environment, and the amount of energy which can be extracted hasn't made any of the trials so far particularly cost effective.
- whoomp12342 5y agoseriously this is cool. Can you imagine having a few of these on the roof of your house in conjunction with solar panels?
- K0balt 5y agoThis is cool, but I’m not seeing how this could be useful in unattended application. It will need relaunching on a regular basis, and will wear a lot. Even string wears Internally just flying in the wind. My guess is that except in some specific applications like winter use in polar regions, solar power will end up producing more energy for the same investment over time. Cheap solar is hard to beat, and the new printable panels promise to make it even harder. Solar is just a lot of energy compared it to kinetic sources. It’s counterintuitive. A typical single solar cell from a panel (5 watts) does the work of lifting a 5kg weight 300m high every hour. It’s kinda mind blowing.
- Already__Taken 5y agohang it on tower so it never needs to re-launch
- aidenn0 5y ago> My guess is that except in some specific applications like winter use in polar regions, solar power will end up producing more energy for the same investment over time. Or energy generation at night and in cloudy areas.
- politician 5y agoYou could probably launch these over the top of an existing solar farm. It doesn't look like they will cast much shadow.
- dredmorbius 5y agoIt's the hard landings I'd worry about more than the shadows.
- heavenlyblue 5y agoI don’t understand the maths behind your last paragraph, can you clear it up please?
- EForEndeavour 5y ago
- Kaibeezy 5y agoMorphologically interesting here is these are HAWT at the top and VAWT at the bottom. A kite isn’t the only way to do this, could alt be; some kind of semirigid textile mushroom; suspended between buildings or across a chasm; integrated into a built structure; an inflatable; an aerostat; and so forth.
- marmakoide 5y agoA portable kite turbine, tested on the field and that is a finished product, not a prototype. 24V DC, 100 watts guaranteed with 25 km/h winds, a very conservative estimate https://kitewinder.fr/ https://kitewinder.fr/
- Kaibeezy 5y agoNice! Basic description: Parasail kite with a small bladed turbine hanging off it. 100 Watts, 4.5 kg, no tools to assemble. €900 is not cheap, but the price should come down eventually.
- marmakoide 5y agoI seat the office next to the team of people who designed it and who are currently producing it. Cost is mostly because of the current low production volume : they can't buy full containers of screws, bearings, motors, they can;t order thousands of injection molded parts. They assemble it themselves. They make the control board mostly themselves, apart from the PCB which is made in China. They also produce the plastic (molded resin I think) and metal parts (we have a big CNC mill) themselves, so they can handle low production volumes without a big upfront investment. They recently tested it on the Brittany coast under heavy winds, it did fine. It was tested a lot on Aquitaine coast.
- Kaibeezy 5y agoThat all sounds so familiar. I was involved with design and low-volume production of a complex optical assembly long before AliExpress. We tried using surplus lenses and prisms, which were practically free compared to new or custom stuff, but the inability to standardize was ultimately more costly in terms of re-engineering, searching for parts, etc. Balancing all that out was an ongoing challenge. I remember finding a factory in India that could make us prisms at a very reasonable price and it was a huge relief. They came in individual handmade pasteboard (cheap frangible cardboard with surface layers of very thin paper) boxes with hand-lettered labels glued on. Old school. I think these will be very appealing for campers, off-grid, emergency and other backup situations when they can hit a somewhat lower price. I understand solar panel costs are dropping, but it isn't always sunny everywhere!
- spowerei 5y agoI don't understand why Makani got so much attention in this thread. Flying things need to be lightweight. Electrical generators are heavy. Makani: Ok I will build a flying generator ... :thinking: Related Keywords: - Airborne wind energy (AWE) (the name of the field) - Fly-gen (mechanical to electrical conversion happens in the sky) - Ground-gen (mechanical to electrical conversion happens on the ground) Other resources worth of attention: - On the edge, possibly near to commercialization: https://www.ampyxpower.com https://www.ampyxpower.com, ... - Commercial solutions: https://thekitepower.com/ https://thekitepower.com/, ... - Project similar to the one linked (rigid wing): https://www.someawe.org https://www.someawe.org, it also have a nice conceptual map style overview of the field https://www.someawe.org/awe-map-the-someaweorg-airborne-wind-energy-map https://www.someawe.org/awe-map-the-someaweorg-airborne-wind... - Forum with knowledgeable people on AWE: https://forum.awesystems.info/ https://forum.awesystems.info/
- cdeonier 5y agoWhat's the reason for the emphasis on weight? From reading the technical reports (from Makani), there were larger issues with the design unrelated to the weight. As an example, Makani's Y-bridle design to attach the tether to the kite introduce stability issues during hover, and limited their control when the kite was aloft making circles, which in turn limited their power generation.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago> What's the reason for the emphasis on weight? .... As an example, Makani's Y-bridle design to attach the tether to the kite introduce stability issues It's quite possible that if their kiteplane was much lighter that these tether issues would have been much less of a problem. Remember that the Makani tether also had to include some copper cable for power transmission to the ground. That makes the tether itself heavy as well.
- UncleOxidant 5y agoMakani had huge amounts of capital from Google to work with. As you point out there are other much smaller players in the field who keep the generator on the ground and generate power from the upward pull of the tether. I worked at one of these startups. But after Google canceled Makani it became very difficult to find funding because angel investors figured that if Google got out of the game it must not be viable. And so we folded. > - On the edge, possibly near to commercialization: https://www.ampyxpower.com https://www.ampyxpower.com A CGI video does not convince me that they're near to commercialization.
- mleonhard 5y agoIdeas for making it self-launching: - Add a lifting balloon a the end - Add mini lifting kites to each ring. Tether it to a point above the earth so the first ring will always have some mini-kites in the wind.