Airborne Wind Energy - KQED QUEST 

RIP Corwin Hardham. Thanks for the elegant touch.

Wind turbines I put up are 300 foot. Wind is intermittent in a way. It's always windy someplace. We put them up from coast to coast.

This was really informative & educational

Everyone looks for jam today, but in reality jam starts with planting the fruit tree. Making jam takes time and effort. That's why jam isn't free.

are the jet streams not used by airliners? is there not too much traffic?

Crowded airways, bird-killing structures, noise pollution, spreading of the transmission system...surely the Makani team has a lot to solve before to get a reliable source of power but this proyect is quite inspiring..! Innovation can take so diversified routes...

Thanks !

Awsome awe!

Twice as much electricity compared to a conventional turbine? Keeping what constant? twice kWh/$?

Edited - A floating wind turbine on youtube to check out is Altaeros Energies.Also now checkout Solar Wind downdraft tower.

Awesome

so it's 2016? where is the mega-watt version?

Balloon designs do not perform very well in getting the most energy out of the wind, the same problem as with savonius-type wind turbines. Crosswind flying wings/kites collect winds kinetic energy from large cross section area (like wind turbine blades) and high flying speed helps to keep systems compact, yet very effective. In fact these systems can be so small (compared to wind turbines) in size that they can be hard to find in the scenery from a distance.

Great Scott We made it to 2015 Did you just say one Is one Mega whatt power Where are they now

My works too. Used Avasva handbooks and build it with no problems.

Flying turbans? Can't wait!

Here’s a question: WHY does it need to circle? Is it TURNING some generator on the ground? If it’s developing power air (wing mounted gens it’s props), the kite doesn’t need to do aerobatics

I have toyed with a tethered airplane kite like one of these but used not unlike a stunt. Wished I had the resources!

The right place for this technology is way outside the normal airways, and also the centers of populations it serves, but that makes the transmission system expensively long and probably highly distributed as well. Windpower is actually mankind's oldest mechanical source of power, even pre-dating water wheels. Darius the Great had windmills threshing grain. No wonder most conservative investors seem to favor it. But here is the rub. Windpower is solar power transported, diminished and delayed by natural obstacles. Solar warming out at sea (seven tenths of the earth) has to send that wind to just the right area on or near land to be of use. For the immediate future it can serve to augment direct solar, due to the delay factor and its utility on cloudy days and at night. In time, however, we will develop high quality storage mediums for the product both wind turbines and direct solar produce. Like our many grain storage silos that even out production surpluses to get us through drought and crop failures, today's generating and distribution system, so desired in the last century by so many that we did not mind the waste, needs to come into the age of the great storehouse granaries wise men created millenia ago.

If it is "offshore", that implies over the open ocean. If you are over the ocean anyway, what prevents the base the wing is tethered to from also producing wave or ocean current derived power. I can see problems with the computer system misreading abnormal conditions and reacting in a way that is harmful to the system.

I hate the word "cheap", is the machine cost effective on an annual basis. The Wright brothers were part of a generational movement, there were several viable flying machines besides the wright brothers, there are several viable means of producing energy from pollution free sources.

The big problem with a flying winged turbine flying in big circular swooping patterns is the potentially devastating problem it would have with killing birds.... which they would be sharing the sky with whether over land or sea.

Note that these can be deployed offshore in deep water. No one would see them. There are no birds. Building giant towers on the ocean for grandpa's wind turbine has been uneconomic because it takes too much stuff to keep them upright. But flying a kite over the water doesn't require a tower- just a barge, boat or buoy, as every Kite surfer knows.

Wonderful

Birds don't fly as high as these are mostly, and they are quite prepared to jump out of the way when a hawk or wind power kite dives down on them. If you actually want to save birds, and you know the difference between big numbers and small ones, stop driving cars, and stop living in buildings with reflective windows. And declaw all domestic cats.

could it be possible to gather energy on every commercial plane trip ,and once landed the energy box or whatever would be transferred to the airport ,then airport to a generator ,then distribute electricity? ..seems viable since they re looking for stronger winds at higher altitudes

I‘m afraid about high losses in the long cables to the Ground station! So I think the efficacy is bad! .... Because thicker cables are more load, and lower speed of the system....!

how long is it gonna take these idealistic college kids to get one of these up to 40,000 ft. this is a pipe dream.

FYI When they say Turbin they mean Turbine

Too bad no update in 7 years ( June 2020 ) !

In reply to tusonazerick: What I find humorous is that geeks tend to be convoluted in their thinking. Mt Washington in NH is the windiest spot on Earth with wind gusts up to 230 mph. First you need a wind device that will operate with ease at those wind speeds on Earth. Ha. Ha then on to the jet stream! Ha. Ha. The Baker turbo-vortex wind turbine model can withstand those winds and I would love to have a model on Mt. Washington-- Google me that! Ha. Ha.

It looks good but birds will have a problem with that ....try bladeless

Well, if it fails to be seen as a viable source of electrical generation, it could be converted into another amazing amusement park ride.

Makani took this concept much further. Their prototype crashed, and confirmed that even though these are very cool and interesting projects, these designs are far too complex to be commercially viable. Far too many things can and will go wrong.

True I don't have money to build my electric invention,but I'm going to keep my mouth shut about it until I find an investor.

Never under estimate byproducts of weird like stuff developed. Learn from everything.

yep I'm going to build one in my backyard

So it's 2018 now. Any updates on the development?

开源 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-jDiuNOLV-Jo.html

Im pretty sure this concept was debunked in a scientific journal in 2011. Google '2011 high altitude wind 200 times weaker than thought' Axel Kleidon... nevermind. All high altitude wind energy devices will work just fine. The wind speed and strength is terrific. The journalist and/or scientists dont know how to explain it or are trying to create a biased misunderstanding. High altitude just doesnt contain as much total energy in terawatts. But even if we got 1 terawatt, thats huge!

This will not scale up. To make large amounts of power require heavy generators and gearboxes. For to heavy to fly.

give it time, someone's going to find something wrong with it, that's what people do lol

11 years and nothing happened :)

"Clean" energy has a way of being a very unclean eyesore.

Way too complicated and depends on everything going right all of the time. When windmills break down...the blade just stop turning. What's going to happen if almost anything goes wrong with this thing as it's whipping around in a huge, very high circle above the earth while it's going 50 or 60 mph. I've been watching the progress of this company for 6 years now and at this point in time believe you will never see anything like this contribute in any meaningful way to our electrical grid. The idea on paper doesn't work out very well in reality. I've seen their most recent tests on RU-vid from a couple of years ago and while it's pretty impressive for what it is, there's still way too much to go wrong. I know about the connection to Google, but even they will figure out in time that this turkey isn't going to fly.

I cant see it happening ... Too many variables.

In the end the cost of other renewables fell fast enough to make further investment in Makani not worth the risk. Their last test flight was in December 2019. Watch this excellent documentary for the full story: Pulling Power from the Sky: The Story of Makani [Feature Film] ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-qd_hEja6bzE.html

So when it crashes from whatever....you make another one? Oops I just flew my Cessna into something...my wing is gone....!!!

Tarmac? WHo uses suck wordage !

theres a good idea about this, but are you also aware of the NOISE pollution that you can make for that turbine?.. imagine the noise that it creates right now, and multiple it by 10!! thats too much noise pollutions that you can also create from it.

Santos Dumont invented Airplanes. B-)

ΟΙ ΥΠΟΓΗΕΣ ΚΑΤΑΣΚΕΥΕΣ ΘΑ ΛΥΣΟΥΝ ΤΟ ΘΕΜΑ ΕΝΕΡΓΕΙΑ

Good luck ....not!

Just like the giant wind turbines that increasingly ruin the countryside, these bird-killing tethers would probably end up in scenic areas that were once free from despoliation threats. Why don't these "environmentalists" have a conscience about the physical blight on nature they're encouraging?

I think the key is to step aside and let someone else do it.

You can learn from inplix scripts how to make it yourself.

bunch of sitliars

carbon fibre turbine with wings, get jetstream altitude, boom. but no, we need to be slaves to our energy corps

6:16 !!!!WARNING!!! Do not show your current designs.. Most importantly, DO NOT EXPLAIN the in's and outs of them.. The Chinese are most assuredly listening intently paper and pencil in hand COPYING THEM...

Very cool, until it hits a flock of birds

What a joke! A propeller dynamic can not even withstand 50 miles an hour of wind let alone the 150 plus mph wind in the Jet Stream. Ha. Ha. Einstein said that doing the same experiment over and over again and expecting different result is insanity. To advance wind energy science, first one must break Betz’s Law. A propeller is of a single dimension, operating on a flat plane and rotating cross-wise to the energy source.-Now, if you had a true turbine dynamic that equation would change.

So a kite is the same price as a wind turbine! Shut up and go fly a kite.

Some questions come to mind: 1) Have you actually *measured* that change in climate yet? 2) If you are spending energy *flying* are you wasting energy? 3) Did you know that water is 900 times as dense as air? 4) Did you know that 80% of the planet is covered by *MOVING* water? 5) Would you be spending your time better if you were working to extract energy from the water? Dumb idea.

no, no chance of this working in this design. how do you expect to capture good power by spinning the blades which are 30 cm wide.. i mean that's leaving wind on the table. Better to have a kite based design pull the cable very forcefully, and with that torque generate power. If the wind is 100km per hour / hurricane type wind - what you want is to put a roof size kite in the sky and make that wind drag on the rope. That's force. A hurricane can remove a properly bolted roof on a house. That's force. If that force drives your generator non stop, then you are in business. This 30 cm propeller blades spinning is a joke. I can stop that with my bare hand. You have 8.. so what.. and another 20, increase the diameter to 60 cm.. is still nothing compared with the force which rips your bolted house roof. Its just a matter of what force you can capture. If you carry the generators with you in the sky how is that not very inefficient?! Why not keep that generator mass on the ground.. one big bulky cheap generator on the ground, instead of many high tech highly expensive ones in the sky .. that way you lower cost, increase the lift, and as such make more power for cheap. The cable needs to be there no matter what - everything else needs to be stripped out. You guys need to do this seriously or is not gonna solve climate change.

Wind turbines are excellent bird killers and very ugly to look at.

another bird killer

just another gimmick

Looks like a super bad idea

yah right, until it and an airplane collide...

Load of rubbish

Garbage...the big suck..........the balloon elevated multi rotor is the one...

Very stupid idea.

Awsome awe!