How long does the Kite and Dyneema rope last before either breaks and one or both need replacing? Their site https://thekitepower.com/the-hawk/#space_requirements mentions the lifetime for the battery and ground station, but I'd be most curious about the durability of the whole system.
Flying kites deliver container-sized power generation
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Re: Flying kites deliver container-sized power generation
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wind turbines can be built big enough that the blades, at the lowest point, are higher than almost all other land uses, except perhaps forestry. To be honest, the access roads are probably the biggest real impediment to using the land around a wind turbine. Can't exactly farm millions of acres of corn with robotic combine harvesters with a criss-cross of access roads to the base of every turbine.
Why not? Seems easy to teach the robots to not harvest on the road
Odd shapes and constantly starting/stopping the plougher/seeder/harvester mean you get less ROI on your equipment. Farming is super tight margins - if your machines waste 20% of the time starting and stopping every time they pass over a road, your farms profits are wiped out.
This is true whether the machines are robot driven or not, and it's the reason most commercial farms have huuuuuge fields rather than lots of small ones.
Re: Flying kites deliver container-sized power generation
#93I wish if there’s an actual video of the whole system being operated and not just 3D renders, a lot of questions in mind about some details but probably most of them will be answered in such video.
I can only imagine how many 3D models they render in a physics simulation platform like Nvidia Omniverse so they likely just used what they already had.
Re: Flying kites deliver container-sized power generation
#94Gotta be more to it. They blithly say, reeling it in takes a fraction of the energy it generates when it pulls the line out. But that's nonsense on the face of it. I'm guessing, it changes it's wind profile, maybe going edge-on or closing up, to make it easy to pull down again. Gotta be something.
You're not wrong - they do that.
Have a look at https://thekitepower.com/products/ There's a diagram of the flight path and power generation over the cycles.
The flight path on the way out is much much longer going cross wind in figure 8s. On the pull back in it's a direct path back in, and it looks the kite shifts to point back at the base station more so there's a ton less resistance than on the way out.
Re: Flying kites deliver container-sized power generation
#95How long does the Kite and Dyneema rope last before either breaks and one or both need replacing? Their site https://thekitepower.com/the-hawk/#space_requirements mentions the lifetime for the battery and ground station, but I'd be most curious about the durability of the whole system.
I suspect looking to sailing would get you the best answers as an outsider. Dyneema ropes are used for sailing but I don't know about the replacement rates, or if they are replaced preemptively for racing where the risk of an issue after some use is too expensive and replacement is cheaper.
I have have seen lots of parachute or hot air balloon fabric offered because companies have a limited number of hours of use before they retire them.
Re: Flying kites deliver container-sized power generation
#96Interestingly, the very first statement is quite misleading. The statement: > On average, a humble wind turbine uses less land area per megawatt-hour than almost any other power source. The article itself refers to this citation [1]. It says, unsurprisingly, that the most land efficient power source is nuclear. The statement is of course technically true because it says "almost any power source". With wind, however,…
Wind turbines can be built big enough that the blades, at the lowest point, are higher than almost all other land uses, except perhaps forestry. To be honest, the access roads are probably the biggest real impediment to using the land around a wind turbine. Can't exactly farm millions of acres of corn with robotic combine harvesters with a criss-cross of access roads to the base of every turbine.
Re: Flying kites deliver container-sized power generation
#97After seeing Big Hero 6, I've always wondered about the feasibility of giant floating blimps with generators...
Re: Flying kites deliver container-sized power generation
#98People cannot be anywhere in the radius of the kite cable. Kinda limits where is can be deployed. But the quick deployment could work for some situations.
This is not correct. Untrained people can't be inside the flight zone while operating. This is roughly the downwind quarter of the potential flight zone.
> Untrained people can't be inside the flight zone
What kind of training makes you immune to being sliced in half by a tether?
Re: Flying kites deliver container-sized power generation
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on the numbers from the article: 40 kW * 80 s / 500 m is 650 kgf. So maybe it will work. Still I feel like as soon as you get a moment of calm it will all break. The wind may be very reliable in places but is it ever so reliable that you don't get moments of calm for hours at a time?
The diagram envisions the kite also being connected to a battery, diesel generator, and solar PV installation. The real question is not if the kite installation or renewable installation is 100% reliable, it's a question of how much does it cut your total diesel consumption. US military loves renewables because it reduces the amount of fuel they have to move.
I never saw that in the Army, but maybe I was in the wrong kind of unit. I wouldn't count on good continuity between statements of the upper officer corps (political appointees) and the operational realities of the line of business personnel. Just like any big organization.
Re: Flying kites deliver container-sized power generation
#100Interestingly, the very first statement is quite misleading. The statement: > On average, a humble wind turbine uses less land area per megawatt-hour than almost any other power source. The article itself refers to this citation [1]. It says, unsurprisingly, that the most land efficient power source is nuclear. The statement is of course technically true because it says "almost any power source". With wind, however,…
I'm wondering if the OWID data takes the 3,400km^2 of exclusion zone from Fukushima and Chernobyl (more like 5,000km^2, see below) into account when calculating the average size of a nuclear plant? I think if we're saying the space beneath the blades can count towards aggregate wind-power land use, an argument can be made to include nuclear wasteland in the aggregate nuclear-power land use.
Shouldn't you include in the average nuclear sites that didn't explode?