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Flying kites deliver container-sized power generation

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: Flying kites deliver container-sized power generation

#101

Post by mista2nith »

londons_explore wrote: post #69
Scea91 wrote: post #61

Interestingly, 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.

Midwestern farmers very much disagree with that “impossibility”

Re: Flying kites deliver container-sized power generation

#102

Post by shkkmo »

krisoft wrote: post #98
shkkmo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The same kind that makes you immune to crashing a car, none. However the training presumably could help you asses and mitigate risks better than someone with no training.

Re: Flying kites deliver container-sized power generation

#103

Post by [deleted] »

s0rce wrote: post #100
OtherShrezzing wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

Re: Flying kites deliver container-sized power generation

#104

Post by Aeroi »

As a longtime kiter and sailor, the durability of the kite and line system seems to be the biggest weakness. Constant uv exposure and stress to these systems would make the economical calculations interesting. I don't know of a current setup that could see sustained continuous use for 1 year without significant material replacements or maintenance...

Re: Flying kites deliver container-sized power generation

#105

Post by mulmen »

londons_explore wrote: post #92
kingkawn wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Why would the access roads create a complex shape? Fields already have access roads. Either the farm is flat and the turbine access roads can be on a minimally invasive grid or the turbines are on a hill and the fields are already a complex shape.

Re: Flying kites deliver container-sized power generation

#106

Post by mulmen »

s0rce wrote: post #100
OtherShrezzing wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why? Nuclear plants can and do melt down.

Re: Flying kites deliver container-sized power generation

#107

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

OtherShrezzing wrote: post #79
Scea91 wrote: post #61

Interestingly, 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.

Of course it doesn't. We don't build nuclear generators with pre-approved unusable exclusions zones. This is a ridiculous suggestion.

Should we consider the potential blast radius of the catastrophic failure of wind turbines as well?

You literally cannot build structures in the path of a wind turbine if you want it to function.

Re: Flying kites deliver container-sized power generation

#108

Post by frankthepickle »

Scea91 wrote: post #61

Interestingly, 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,…

looking at the article, you're really splitting hairs - wind and nuclear are 0.3 and 0.4km2, many of the others are 20+

if you were to ask someone based on that if wind was one of the techs that use least land, it's an obvious yes.

I think you're being more disingenuous than the article..

Re: Flying kites deliver container-sized power generation

#109

Post by UncleOxidant »

I worked at a small kite power startup in 2019. Unfortunately we couldn't secure funding to keep operating. It became quite difficult to secure funding after Google suspended their Makani moonshot project - potential funders were like "well, Google got out of this so why do you think we should fund you?". (though our kites were much smaller than Makani's and we didn't need a huge amount of funding to keep developing)

It's a very difficult problem keeping a kite flying in a figure 8 pattern allowing it to rise to the end of the tether and then effectively stalling it to pull the line back in - repeat over and over and while you're at it try to maximize power output for the weather conditions (and then there was the problem of automatically launching - we were leaving that for last). We were starting to look at reinforcement learning for the problem, but it was going to take a lot more data and a very accurate model of our kite and weather conditions.

Definitely one of the more fun jobs I've ever had even if it was short-lived.

Re: Flying kites deliver container-sized power generation

#110

Post by SCM-Enthusiast »

jitl wrote: post #4

I’m happy to see this idea continues to develop. I was worried its failure was foregone when Google shuttered their moonshot Makani in 2020. It seems like this iteration is simpler.

for some reason, this always happens with the google moonshots; They come at it from the wrong angle. Someone comes along with a slightly simplier solution after google scrapes the whole thing as uneconomical or beats them to the punch on using a far more technical solution. Don't seem to have a big "Cost per KWH" KPI's internally nor a sense of urgency.
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