141–150 of 175 posts
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> I'm suggesting the 5,000km^2 that currently exists as barren nuclear wasteland Aren't you exaggerating by quite a bit?
It appears it's not far from the truth. According to https://www.britannica.com/story/nuclear-exclusion-zones it's 4100 sq.km. for Chernobyl and 371 sq.km. for Fukushima (800 sq.km. at peak) which isn't an exaggeration. Interesting.
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,…
> It says, unsurprisingly, that the most land efficient power source is nuclear Not true if you factor in waste storage and the time to store it Long after all the nuclear energy has been used making your toast, and long after many cycles of climate change, you will still be storing hi level nuclear waste, and monitoring it. But who cares about tomorrow? Party on, and let future generations pay!
Take simple chemical pollution, for example with lead - as far as I can tell, it stays around forever and we,ve poisoned vast landscapes with it during mining coal copper for example.
Or take simple industrial waste , say wind turbine blades, they go to landfill, sure they aren’t hurting anyone but there are a lot of them- does it count?
It's an amazing project, but, out of curiosity: Why do all the AWE projects except Google's seem to use the reel-in/reel-out approach and don't attach turbines to the kite itself? Reel-in/reel-out seems a lot more complicated, power inefficient and taxing on the material than just having the kite up there (semi-) permanently. I assume there are some technical reasons why turbines are less practical, but could anyone…
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I know nothing about kites but as someone who currently works at Google and knows a bit about how projects are funded, the first argument doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. At Google's scale, a materially impactful opportunity needs to have the opportunity to generate billions in revenue and have high margins. That's just a function of Google's size and opportunity cost (people can otherwise work on Ads, Cloud…
I think they saw Google's decision to defund Makani as a sign that kite power wasn't viable. We certainly weren't in the same league as Makani - their "kite" was essentially a largish 4prop airplane. Google must've spent in the several hundreds of millions on that project. Our prototype kites had a ~8' wingspan and we were operating on a shoestring budget.
I am very disillusioned with VCs in general.
They aren’t as clever as they make out to be - they have herd mentality, they allow themselves to be bamboozeled and sometimes they outright don’t do their homework and invest in Theranos
Really it’s more poker than science
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It appears it's not far from the truth. According to https://www.britannica.com/story/nuclear-exclusion-zones it's 4100 sq.km. for Chernobyl and 371 sq.km. for Fukushima (800 sq.km. at peak) which isn't an exaggeration. Interesting.
i guess we think of different things when we read "barren nuclear wasteland".
work=force*distance, so presumably the kite can be controlled such that it exerts less force when they reel it back in?
It's an amazing project, but, out of curiosity: Why do all the AWE projects except Google's seem to use the reel-in/reel-out approach and don't attach turbines to the kite itself? Reel-in/reel-out seems a lot more complicated, power inefficient and taxing on the material than just having the kite up there (semi-) permanently. I assume there are some technical reasons why turbines are less practical, but could anyone…
I only have wikipedia-level knowledge, but my understanding is that turbines are heavy, and wind power spent holding the turbines up is power that isn't converted to electricity. If you want to put the turbine up high, you can save power by just building a traditional fan-on-a-stick wind turbine.
Lifting things requires power, there is a formula for work done. Keeping things up does not require power, a chair does not collapse under you when it runs out of battery.
A ‘normal’ wind turbine generates a huge force on its foundations when it operates - that’s why they have to be so heavy. It’s not moving so no work is done.
That force does not care what is opposing it - whether it is fighting the strength of the tower holding up the turbine, or if it’s fighting gravity and a steel cable holding the kite. As long as the forces and their directions cancel out, it’s all the same.
Lastly, waste does not matter, wind power is available for many kilometres vertically.
If a kite is flying 500 meters above ground, it can suddenly access the power a turbine could not.
So if it accesses power that was inaccessible before, it’s a win even if half of it is wasted.
Lastly, none of this discussing has any relevance, only economics matters.
You care about cost of equipment, how long it lasts, how hard it is to repair, how many people are required to operate it and therefore salaries, where can you build it - a system could be 100% efficient but unprofitable.
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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…
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Falling bolts and tools don’t really care if they’re on a construction site or not
So let me quote my original question >Does this imply that everyone living under the kites will have to wear one too?
That also assumes people are living under the kites.
I think you're overthinking a short demo video and hats. I doubt anyone fought hard against wearing it, and company liability is different from your own personal risk assessment.