151–160 of 175 posts
> After the tether reaches its maximum length, the ground station winches the kite back in. Though the Hawk must expend energy for reel-in, it expends only a fraction of the energy work=force*distance, so presumably the kite can be controlled such that it exerts less force when they reel it back in?
Is there anything stopping them from adding a turbine system to the kite that would continuously spin (when there's wind ofc) instead of reeling it in/out?
How is the kite raised initially and what happens when air stops, how is it re-raised? Reading the article seems like it's pulled back if air is stopping, and slowly released based on air speed perhaps.
Why would they ratchet the kite in instead of making it dive and quickly winding the cable in? Should be easy enough with software right?
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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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.
>Of course it doesn't. We don't build nuclear generators with pre-approved unusable exclusions zones. This is a ridiculous suggestion. I'm not suggesting we assign 5,000km^2 to each individual nuclear plant, just in case they explode. I'm suggesting the 5,000km^2 that currently exists as barren nuclear wasteland should be included in the total land attributed to nuclear energy. That would bring down the average gener…
I assume the kite would be friendlier to our flying friends but I guess this is not a concern in every country.
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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.
> 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. You certainly can; single-objective suboptimality is not the same as impossibility. But perhaps this would be an excellent use-case for heavy-lift dirigibles.
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)…
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> 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!
How does this calculation work? 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?
AFAIK more and more (many even most, nowadays, as it is legally mandatory in many European nations) are recycled.