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Google Makani – Wind Energy Kites

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Re: Google Makani – Wind Energy Kites

#51

Post by austenallred »

xbryanx wrote: post #30
callesgg wrote: post #10

Good, could people just stop messing with how scrolling works.

I'm with you, but I'm a power user. I wonder if anyone has any sentiment analysis showing whether the average web user likes this sort of thing, or finds it annoying.

I'm probably a "power user" as well, but I literally cannot navigate the site. It's like 1/3 of my scrolls don't even register.

This isn't "design for the masses," it's just plain broken.

Edit: I don't know why I'm being downvoted, it must be working for some people. Here is a video of me trying to scroll (in Chrome) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulAw0P2geRE

Re: Google Makani – Wind Energy Kites

#52

Post by tjradcliffe »

dredmorbius wrote: post #41
grownseed wrote: post #4

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that wind turbines were effectively unsustainable due to the materials they are made of and their actual lifespan not offsetting the initial financial and environmental costs. Now, I understand that this project is supposed to provide greater versatility and efficiency using cheaper materials, but it seems to me (by no means an expert on the subject) that…

EROEI of wind turbines is about 20:1. That is, you recover 20x the energy that goes into constructing and maintaining the turbines over their lifespan. The argument that some of the materials used in turbine manufacture presently rely on fossil fuels (e.g., coal used for coking steel) doesn't mean that other options for such processes aren't possible. Though shortages of fuelwood were among the key reasons for switch…

Metallurgical coal is going to be the very hardest thing to get away from. Improvements in the coking process (carbon capture) are plausible, but the chemistry basically demands burning a butt-load of carbon.

Thermal coal is replaceable by conservation, nuclear power, and to some extent wind/solar plus storage, and if I were in charge I'd be pushing to ban new thermal coal development. But metallurgical coal is going to be almost physically (or chemically) impossible to replace.

Re: Google Makani – Wind Energy Kites

#53

Post by downandout »

xbryanx wrote: post #30
callesgg wrote: post #10

Good, could people just stop messing with how scrolling works.

I'm with you, but I'm a power user. I wonder if anyone has any sentiment analysis showing whether the average web user likes this sort of thing, or finds it annoying.

Google is in the position to have done exactly this kind of analysis, and apparently the majority likes this crap. I'm glad I am not alone in hating it though.

Re: Google Makani – Wind Energy Kites

#54

Post by allworknoplay »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #28

I think this is pretty cool, but several questions spring to mind which I haven't found good answers for. The first is what sort of density can you get out of these? How many per acre/hectare? 1? 3? California has a number of wind installations and some of them are pretty dense [1]. The second is what sort of radar signature does this thing have? Probably not a navigation hazard but should be interesting on the weath…

given the variable heights I'd imagine an enormous amount.

Re: Google Makani – Wind Energy Kites

#55

Post by tarequeh »

For a second a tried to imagine a satellite view of the earth with many of these flying. It'd look mesmerizing. I really applaud Google for funding research on affordable renewable energy. It's unfortunate that the scrolling doesn't work, but hey the prototype does!

Re: Google Makani – Wind Energy Kites

#56

Post by TylerE »

beat wrote: post #13
grownseed wrote: post #4

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that wind turbines were effectively unsustainable due to the materials they are made of and their actual lifespan not offsetting the initial financial and environmental costs. Now, I understand that this project is supposed to provide greater versatility and efficiency using cheaper materials, but it seems to me (by no means an expert on the subject) that…

I'm fairly certain you're wrong about that. A quick googling suggests that a commercial wind turbine produces about 1M kWh/year, more or less. That's a great deal more energy than it would require to manufacture and install. By comparison, it takes about a pound of coal to produce 1 kWh of electricity, more or less. So a single wind turbine produces the equivalent energy of a MILLION pounds of coal every year! How mu…

A million pounds of coal isn't as much as it might sound like. That's about 5 railroad cars worth.

US coal production was over a billion tons - 2 trillion pounds.

Re: Google Makani – Wind Energy Kites

#58

Post by bsbechtel »

downandout wrote: post #53
xbryanx wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you, but I'm a power user. I wonder if anyone has any sentiment analysis showing whether the average web user likes this sort of thing, or finds it annoying.

Google is in the position to have done exactly this kind of analysis, and apparently the majority likes this crap. I'm glad I am not alone in hating it though.

Google, and to a certain extent Facebook, LinkedIn, and all other large web companies are in positions to make data driven design decision, and every time it's done I hear lots of complaining. I'm wondering how great data driven design really is.

On the flip side, how often do you hear that Apple's software design is driven by data analysis, and how often do you hear complaints about their designs?

Re: Google Makani – Wind Energy Kites

#59

Post by jlebar »

TylerE wrote: post #5
elevensies wrote: post #3

I'm still a bit confused about how the forces line up for the flight path. If I'm understanding: - the wing flies in a circle which is perpendicular to the wind (oriented the same way an ordinary wind turbine would be) - the tether is up-wind from the wing, so the force from the tether pulls the wing into the wind which generates lift, which is used to propel the wing along the circular path - the propellers are driv…

I think that's more or less it. I think what they're doing is a milder version of dynamic soaring, which is a popular technique used among RC glider pilots (and some birds). The speeds attainable are pretty insane, the current RC record is 505 MPH, which in a rather fascinating twist is faster than the fastest POWERED RC aircraft. This a video that shows a pretty good idea of what it looks like, at compartively slowe…

It's also basically the same idea as used by the people flying trick kites on the beach. Once an aero-astro friend of mine explained that, this whole thing made so much more sense.

Re: Google Makani – Wind Energy Kites

#60

Post by allworknoplay »

grownseed wrote: post #4

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that wind turbines were effectively unsustainable due to the materials they are made of and their actual lifespan not offsetting the initial financial and environmental costs. Now, I understand that this project is supposed to provide greater versatility and efficiency using cheaper materials, but it seems to me (by no means an expert on the subject) that…

The materials you're probably talking about are rare earth magnets used in their bearings -- the jury is kind of out on their sustainability since they're rare and depletable but highly likely to be recycled at the end of a turbine's life.

The lifespan questions are different -- wind and constant mechanical motion put a lot of stress on turbines and I believe as some other commenters pointed out that the actual lifespans often haven't measured up to the predicted ones.

Makani's capex for a kite should be pretty low; as I recall, talking to Saul like 8 years ago, the difficulty was in stable control of the tethers, not in the economics if control was achieved. But who knows where they're at now (or even exactly how good my recall is).

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