Looking at a wind turbine from first principles, it’s essentially a set of wings that generate lift in much the same way an airplane wing does. Putting the wings on a rotor and calling them “blades” is not a huge step away from that. But there’s no reason the wing has to rotate, or for that matter be attached to a fixed platform, in order to generate electricity. Anything that generates lift can be used, and this company is demonstrating that with their kite-powered wind generators.
Like other wind energy producers that have used kites to generate electricity, this one is similar in that the kite is flown in a figure-8 pattern downwind where it can harness energy the most efficiently, pulling out a tether which is tied to a generator. When fully extended, it is flown to a position where the wind doesn’t strike the kite as strongly and the tether is reeled in. Unlike other kite generators we’ve seen, though, this one is offered as a turnkey system complete with battery backup and housed in a self-contained shipping unit, allowing it to be deployed quickly to be used in situations where something like a diesel generator would be impossible to get or where the fuel can’t be obtained.
The company, called Kitepower, does note that these aren’t replacements for traditional wind turbines and would be used more for supporting microgrids. There are still some advantages to using kites over fixed turbine blades though: kites can reach higher altitude where the wind is stronger, and they require less materials for a given amount of energy production, often making them even more environmentally friendly and possibly more economical as well. Surprisingly enough, kites can also be used to generate energy even in places where there’s no wind at all.
The design as described in the IEEE article sounds really close to the one that Makani could never get to work. As far as I can tell, they haven’t developed something that can overcome the issues that killed that company: solar degradation of plastic, line elasticity and weight consuming a lot of the wind power, and one drop in wind or unexpected gust crashing and destroying an entire kite.
This could be a nice busines case to learn. Why did makani fail and how did these company solve it.
I personally read patents (for fun/hobby) from 1920 until 1950 around and check why they failed and it could work today. And its really interessting why something failed in customers segments but still used in industry.
Hi Armin – At Makani, we published a detailed technical report describing our findings. You can find links to the report at the bottom of this blog article: https://blog.x.company/sharing-makani-with-the-world-the-energy-kite-collection-ea49398df78c
the idea is so stupid it boggles the mind anyone would consider it.
So, we can’t get a generator on site, but we can get a shipping container there?
You just fly a shipping container full of gas generators there with a bunch of kites. I just solved el Nino.
That’s not what the article says. It says that it’s provided where getting a [reliable] continuous supply of fuel is not possible.
Maybe it is about paying the transport for the fuel: a many-time fee, not a one-time shipment.
Curious as well.
I wonder how they put this 2-container at the top of a mountain without road…
https://assets.verticalmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/S64_USMC_Conex_Mountain-2048×1152.jpg
Go fly a kite!
with a key attached….
With a pichachu attached to fight lightning back.
Subject to airspace control restrictions… Can’t see how this could ever outperform a VAT that is tuned to local conditions.
just another scam. it has already been tried in italy few years ago, and after having burned through a lot of taxpayer money, the project was abandoned.
i fly small airplanes and i can see the winds aloft. the statement that at 500mt there are always strong and steady winds is BS of the first magnitude.
last sunday i had a local flight and from 2000 to 1000 altitude there were 3 different winds from different directions, with the layer inbetween quite turbulent.
plus, such devices would be lethal for any airplane, helicopter or drone
just-another-scam.
If such things get deployed their lethality to aircraft is irrelevant – no flying over the zone (at least below x altitude) in the same way you may not fly in so many other places already. Though honestly I very much doubt they would be lethal to most aircraft even with a moron for a pilot – aircraft mass and speed required to maintain flight means a rather high momentum that on snagging such a kite would probably tear it to bits almost instantly. The aircraft may well take damage in the process, so it absolutely might become too difficult to control, but I highly doubt that level of damage would be the common result.
I do agree so far Kite generators don’t seem particularly practical or reliable, however they do work. Which makes it a long way from being a scam – especially as they are outright saying its not a replacement for more fixed ground level turbines or expected to power a normal grid supplier. Be a great thing to deploy in many other places if it works nearly as well as advertised though – an easily mobile power generator that doesn’t require a heap of fuel trucks and that ongoing expense to keep it running.
Bird strikes are a problem and down aircraft. Getting hit by a large kite, or having your wings sliced by the cable isn’t going to be trivial. If the cable breaks, it’s going to come at you like a whip anyways.
I didn’t say it can’t ever happen, or wouldn’t be a problem if you had a pilot that stupid. But I think its far from likely to cause fatal certain aircraft crashing damage. Might write off the aircraft, but it probably won’t stop it flying.
Plus lots of aircraft hit birds and don’t notice in the flight at all… And those birds you can’t avoid just by being a competent pilot.
A large kite usually means a big parafoil – large area but almost no mass, no struts, just fabric.
It might still damage a plane, but itβs nothing like hitting a bird.
>however they do work. Which makes it a long way from being a scam
Gerbils in little wheels turning generators also works, but if someone was seriously suggesting to make a power station like that, I would call it a scam. It would take some serious bullshit to convince people that it’s actually worth the try.
How many times do we have to debunk kite generators, solar road ways, tower crane energy storage and other nonsensical “green” projects? None of them are practical or economical (It all comes down to power density, reliability, complexity and cost).
In many cases you can’t debunk it, only the implementation of it. Technology doesn’t stand still – you could for instance back when steam power was first discovered imagine a world powered by it rather than waterwheel, windmill or mammal power which was common at the time – but Hero’s engine is a very very very very very long way from a practical power source even though the basic idea of using heat-steam-mechanical power is very sound. Getting close to 2 full millennium before Necomen’s atmospheric engine that is perhaps the first practical steam powered engine exists, and still another century after that for the self propelling steam locomotives to happen at all, with the best part of another century before the technology starts to be really refined and efficient… Though it is worth noting that for most of those centuries nobody much cared to actually develop steam power – slaves and serfs largely power the world for a long time with very little motivation to change that.
So take solar roadways as an example the core principle actually makes sense – we don’t want to flatten everything natural to build lots of solar so lets put it in that big flat mostly empty stuff we have to have anyway is at its core a very sound idea. Its the engineering to make it happen that proves challenging, but that may not always be true. The same is true of kite generator – the wind is up there rather more reliably than on the ground, so master the art of controlling the relatively cheap kite (that may even be swapped out day to day based on weather forecasting to predict the optimal kite geometry) and the right materials to optimise the efficiency and it absolutely can work.
Even tower crane energy storage isn’t entirely nonsensical, though it is much less likely to ever make sense. But as a way to store huge amounts of power with effectively no self discharge while using only cheap materials, and store that energy for a very long time it might – you can just keep making that block stack higher and raise the crane more – not very energy dense, but it doesn’t have to be. I really can’t see it making much sense in general. However using things like elevator shaft as energy storage in a building you built anyway is quite plausible and practically cost free – some short term storage gains that might help keep the lights on or the grid stable etc.
“we donβt want to flatten everything natural to build lots of solar so lets put it in that big flat mostly empty stuff we have to have anyway is at its core a very sound idea”
Like roofs?
“Its the engineering to make it happen that proves challenging, but that may not always be true”
Excess vibrational, abrasive, and pressure damage as well as filth will be intrinsic problems with solar roadways until you can levitate vehicles. At that point, why bother with roads at all?
“However using things like elevator shaft as energy storage in a building you built anyway is quite plausible and practically cost free”
Elevator service times drive installed elevator capacity and therefore cost. In high rise buildings, packaging elevator capacity is a primary design limitation giving rise to double and triple decker elevator cabs and systems with multiple cabs per shaft. Schedule pressure to move people is always going to be detrimental to an elevator’s ability to service the grid. In addition, a counter-weighted or force offset elevator will substantially reduce the storage capacity of potential energy in an elevator system.
I would expect regenerative braking on an elevator to be viable, though.
I’m all for looking at all options and being unafraid to re-evaluate your prior reasoning, but you must also be clear and complete even in an initial, coarse evaluation of alternatives. In the case of wind power kites, how does this group intend to address wind dynamics at height which is such a fundamental challenge to the approach?
“Technology doesnβt stand still β you could for instance back when steam power was first discovered imagine a world powered by it ”
The world today is literally powered by steam. Nuclear, gas, coal plants and even geothermal uses some type of steam engine (usually a turbine). At very high efficiency. Often excess heat is additionally used to heat homes or produce distilled water.
“So take solar roadways as an example the core principle actually makes sense β we donβt want to flatten everything natural ”
Like Geoffrey wrote we have roof tops that are excellent to cover with solar panels. Right where their power is needed and installed at optimal angle and easily maintained. Solar roadways are at non-optimal angle, and the light is obstructed by dirt/scratches and shadows from vehicles, buildings and trees. It also gets hot which reduces output. You have to break open the street to replace a panel. Basically a tenth of the performance for 10 times the cost.
“Even tower crane energy storage isnβt entirely nonsensical”
It’s completely nonsensical. Gravity storage in the form of hydropower is much better. A crane solution is basically a tenth of the performance for 10 times the cost. And there wasn’t even a functional prototype.
Everyone is free to invest in technologies they believe in. But these projects should never have passed the back-of-the-envelope stage and the only reason we see them in the news is because they received subsidies.
>In many cases you canβt debunk it, only the implementation of it.
Which is a hallmark of crankery. If the idea works, but the implementations never do, that’s a sign that the idea is bunk and you just don’t want to admit it. There’s something you’re not taking into account in order to pretend that the idea is sound in principle. Thing is, there are no good ideas without context.
The reason why the steam engine didn’t take on until the industrial revolution is that boiling water takes tremendous amounts of energy, and while they could have done some useful work, people would have spent a significant effort just gathering up the firewood which they needed for other stuff. The reason why steam engines did become useful was that they got used for water pumps in coal mines. Note here the availability of cheap and plentiful energy – the coal that they were helping to dig – so the abysmal efficiency at first didn’t matter. Steam engines were bunk until we discovered fossil fuels, and they quickly became bunk again when we figured out better heat engine cycles.
Solar roadways are bunk because we have plenty of other idle surfaces where we could put solar panels, and even putting them “in nature” is not actually an issue. We don’t need to put them in the most difficult and expensive place where we’re literally running them over with cars. It was a solution to a problem that nobody had.
The tower crane energy storage is bunk because gravity storage has such a pitiful energy density that it almost automatically becomes too expensive. You don’t even need to analyze the technical complexities and will it or won’t it work, because the economics of it is bunk.
> the wind is up there rather more reliably than on the ground
No it isn’t. The higher up you go, the faster the winds are relative to the ground up to a point, but the weather patterns are still just as variable and you can’t rely on having wind, or how much wind you will have on any given hour.
So the Steam Engine would be bunk and remain bunk in your view because its currently 400 AD and doesn’t happen to work now. And if everyone thinks that way it remains bunk even though its now 2000 AD… If you don’t even try to do the research because this perfectly plausible technology is ‘bunk’ progress is rather unlikely to be made. (Plus you didn’t and don’t even in ancient times need any fuel at all to make steam – the sun and lens/mirror to focus it are evidently existing back then).
>No it isnβt. The higher up you go, the faster the winds are relative to the ground up to a point,
That is largely missing the point – very still air at all levels practically doesn’t happen so somewhere in the range of possibility for the kite you are much more likely to have some wind. And with some forecasting you can be pretty sure into the near future where that energy will be at that hour, and across a longer timescale how much you can expect to get from the moving weather fronts – you know the energy is there just not yet which days/hours will really be putting that energy in reach or at what altitude you really want that kite to be.
You could use LIDAR to measure windspeed at any altitude above the device, in real time.
The solar roadways concept still has the flaw that they are implying that it’s more expensive to acquire the right to put panels on a surface than it is to acquire and mount enough panels to cover that surface. It’s far more expensive to get an acre of panels than an acre of land, though, even if you insist on owning all rights to the land rather than just the right to put panels up.
> Itβs far more expensive to get an acre of panels than an acre of land
Really going to depend where you live for that, an acre near here I’d suspect the land might actually be getting perilously close to being more expensive. Not to mention land particularly suitable to solar panels is also reasonable likely to be prime agricultural land – while it might be possible to co-habitate both land uses we all do want to eat. So that acre might not be as available for solar.
Well, alright, an acre of land plus some miles of wire. The insane consumption of modern cities places a large demand on what can be produced by people living in the surrounding rural areas, but that doesn’t mean the rural areas and the overall regional average have anywhere near the same money versus land ratio. Of course, partly that’s because rural areas get the shaft. The money just doesn’t make it out there; it’s easy to have land that goes unused because it’d be too expensive to afford to do anything with it. Or maybe it’s only useful for hay and not for higher-value ag, or maybe it’s kept more natural for wildlife, and panels might do less harm than a plow.
If the monetary value of somewhere to put panels is more than the value of the panels themselves, you’d like to think when someone let a company build panels on their land, the company would pay the owner some of the profit instead of the owner paying the company for some of the power, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
To all those complaining at my take on Solar roads – I’m not saying there are not other places putting solar makes more sense right now. Heck I have them on my roof already, and as far as I know we are the only house on this street or most of the neighbouring ones that have really great south facing roof to do so! So at least a few hundred of the seemingly standard size panels can be fitted right now in but a few mins of walking distance of where I sit. But one they are there and we still want more power…
There is only so much already developed space you can put PV panels, and roads have such huge surface area usually exposed to sun – so they make a good choice if the other engineering challenges can be met. And dirty really isn’t a problem – a small requirement for at least some classes of vehicles to actively help clean the roads, the right surface treatments, perhaps a tiny bit more camber than is currently normal can all add up to keeping the level of dirt down (possibly even cleaner than my roof mounted panels 90% of the year – too much diesel and marine heavy fuel oil in the air around here and I only really clean them a few times a year as its soo much hassle to get them properly clean). Plus renewables benefit from being spread widely and interconnected – which the infrastructure required for a solar road would add by its very nature and we are humans excess of energy will never really happen – the more we can have the more we will use, so being able to have more if you can is never a bad thing.
@C – There is no reason to believe as tech improves a solar road would have less performance than a modern panel, it might even have more – just because the trialled versions were bad doesn’t mean the core concept has to be that way – its not looking for perpetual motion style violations of the laws of physics, just a bit of material science that creates a good light pipe and road surface in one… And yes hydro is great, but requires suitable geography, where in theory the crane can be setup anywhere at all and just keep picking up the blocks, and will also actually be massively massively cheaper initially. Building a dam of any size is hugely expensive, and will actually require the services of cranes that are basically the same as the ones you could use for energy storage…
@Geoffrey – on the Elevators there is no reason to assume the elevator has to be and always stay counterweighted – motor performance is sufficiently easy to get now that you can deliberately in times of excess power crank some extra weights to the top and drop them when you need them or just uncouple the counter weight as the elevator descends a bit etc.
Solar roadways? Just say no. Think of the kids!
“There is only so much already developed space you can put PV panels, and roads have such huge surface area usually exposed to sun”
Except as has been demonstrated, the environment they have to function in is absolutely brutal. Even mounting on walking paths and bike paths causes problems for solar cells. In comparison, mounting panels at the side in the right-of-way or overhead is comparatively attractive.
“@Geoffrey β on the Elevators there is no reason to assume the elevator has to be and always stay counterweighted β motor performance is sufficiently easy to get now that you can deliberately in times of excess power crank some extra weights to the top and drop them when you need them or just uncouple the counter weight as the elevator descends a bit etc.”
Vastly increasing costs for diminishing returns as noted in my OP.
>Except as has been demonstrated, the environment they have to function in is absolutely brutal.
Has no relevance to the plausibility of the concept though – with nothing more than finding a suitable material to be the road surface, or alterative method to making the solar panel such that it can even survive it that is no longer a problem. So you can’t actually debunk the concept, only the implementations awaiting new technologies.
Also I’d really not see much in the way of a cost increase to any of the options suggested for an elevator. Compared to the cost of the building large enough to have suitably long elevator shafts to be worth any effort on energy storage at all, or even just replacing the worn out existing elevators in such a building the additions required cost peanuts. Never going to store huge amounts, but if the point is emergency lighting, grid stability, or even just powering the elevators a bit longer… You’d spend more on fitting, maintaining and fueling a generator, that nobody will actually maintain in most of these buildings…
“There is no reason to believe as tech improves a solar road would have less performance than a modern panel, it might even have more”
No reasons other than the those nasty laws of physics. If the same panel is used on top of a building as under a road surface the latter one will always perform worse due to the reasons I mentioned before. Solar panels on a rooftop could, in theory, use the exact same orientation and coating as the ones used in solar road ways so even if a worse orientation and terrible coating somehow made them perform better due to magic we could simply use those on rooftop solar as well. Any technology that will improve efficiency of panels themselves will improve both, so the difference remains the same. You just can’t admit you are wrong.
“And yes hydro is great, but requires suitable geography”
Correct. I never claimed otherwise.
“in theory the crane can be setup anywhere at all and just keep picking up the blocks, and will also actually be massively massively cheaper initially”
False. You cannot build it at sea or in a windy area on land. And all the calculations I’ve seen make it one of the worst forms of energy storage on paper and a non-existent one i reality.
Nothing in the laws of physics say the solar road and the solar roof panel have to have different performance to each other. There are engineering reasons to expect them to, and certainly they currently do. But that is a very different thing from it being impossible for them to match or even the roads to outperform a roof mounted PV setup in practice – trust me you still get shading from trees and buildings (probably more than on any major road – people put trees in gardens, where local authorities tend to cut trees down when that near the major roads, and you can’t knock down your neighbours house or fell their trees.. Plus actually cleaning something at ground level is trivial.
But even assuming identical conditions for roof and road if we also assume the next generation of PV is built directly onto the back of some super durable textured surface that works as a really really effective light pipe from any angle for a really good solar output throughout a day and happens to be really grippy for driving on… Then the roof and the road may end up being exactly the same product, and being less affected (if at all) by their orientation having very comparable performance. And being future tech it aught to perform better than a modern panel, as the modern panel does to the ones from the 80’s… And nobody debates that a modern solar panel is effective.
>False. You cannot build it at sea…
Actually you could, stuff is built at sea all the time. Its a terrible idea in terms of making the engineering or operation simple and efficient, adds a whole extra layer of effort fighting with the sea that actively likes to tear stuff apart, but its not impossible at all. Though I never said anything about the crane system looking great on paper, just not entirely implausible. If the primary goal is really long duration energy storage without the self discharge problems, or your primary concern is energy storage without rarer materials it might even be the best method for you. So to quote my earlier comment “Even tower crane energy storage isnβt entirely nonsensical, though it is much less likely to ever make sense”.
You are failing to realise the fundamental difference between what the laws of physics actually require and how we would be forced to currently engineer something. And it is that disparity that is why you can’t debunk these concepts fully – we can’t yet build a great solar road in the same way the Roman Empire couldn’t build a high pressure steam locomotive. Which has nothing at all to do with limitations imposed by physics (at least that we know of yet – as we as so far from really understanding the universe to that level) and is entirely down to the limits of our ability to engineer such a thing.
@Foldi-One
“Nothing in the laws of physics say the solar road and the solar roof panel have to have different performance to each other”
I mentioned orientation. This is purely math. The total of sunlight that reaches the panel is greatest when the the rays from the sun are perpendicular. Solar tracking is ideal, an optimized static orientation is acceptable, flat is mediocre (in most areas), and a panel at a wrong orientation is the worst (upside down in most extreme case).
Another thing I mentioned is temperature. Rooftop solar panels have air moving under the panel that helps it keep cool. A road gets really hot. Hot panels perform worse.
“textured surface that works as a really really effective light pipe from any angle”
Such technology doesn’t exist and would also increase cost. And you didn’t provide any reason why this would make them perform better than rood top solar for the same cost.
“and happens to be really grippy for driving on”
You cannot make something that’s cheaper and superior in every way. Every technology has tradeoffs. This is because tech that is inferior in every way will die out. So we are left with competing things that are better in one way and worse in another.
“Actually you could, stuff is built at sea all the time. Its a terrible idea in terms of making the engineering or operation simple and efficient, adds a whole extra layer of effort fighting with the sea that actively likes to tear stuff apart, but its not impossible at all”
I didn’t say it’s impossible. I said you cannot do it. For the same reason you cannot jump into an active volcano. It’s not impossible, but there are very good reasons why you shouldn’t or will be stopped when trying. In this case such a project would not get approved and would not get funding. But if you are rich and bribe the right people and want to burn money you might be able to make a fool of yourself and do it.
“You are failing to realise the fundamental difference between what the laws of physics actually require and how we would be forced to currently engineer something. ”
Engineers have to make things that work withing limits of physics and also within economical and legal limits. New technologies offer new opportunities, but will never get rid of these limits.
>Engineers have to make things that work withing limits of physics and also within economical and legal limits. New technologies offer new opportunities, but will never get rid of these limits.
I could almost agree with this entirely, except you are using the limits of today to apply to a potential future and write of a concept – My whole point here is fundamentally until your concept actually requires violating the laws of physics you can’t actually debunk it.
Plus new technologies also create new rules, changing society creates new rules on what is acceptable etc – nothing is static. So whatever limitations prevent you from trying to build something now…
>>βtextured surface that works as a really really effective light pipe from any angleβ
>Such technology doesnβt exist and would also increase cost.
Doesn’t exist yet sure, increase cost we have no way to say as the technology doesn’t exist yet! It might even be cheaper to make them that way when somebody has that accident that creates an interesting result…
And such a surface may well make them better than your current flat panel on a roof for two very simple reason
– Not all roof space happens to be particularly good orientation, so many building especially the giant industrial ones tend to be very very flat…
– really perpendicular to the sun happens on fixed panels maybe once a year, and gets close for only a short period each day. And that makes the output really excessively spiky. Which means your very likely to be wasting heaps of energy as the storage either can’t take the current or is full already, while also reducing the reliability of the system as a whole – it only takes a few days of cloud at lunch time on an otherwise sunny day for the flat panels to look really quite terrible. But a panel with some form of light capture from any angle so it works well through the day will reliably make good energy every time the sun is over the horizon and the weather allows. Something sun tracking can also do, but you can’t then pack the panels as densely as they need all that room to move and not shade each other not to mention moving parts = maintenance costs.
Also temperature doesn’t have to be a problem – airflow is nice and all, but when you have a huge volume of dirt you can directly dump the heat into… Plus a future version of PV may not be so sensitive to temperature anyway! Nothing in the laws of physics says extracting electric from sunlight has to be done only the way we are currently doing it.
Exactly. Why people dismiss completely ideas? Its time and tech may not came, but someone could somehow crank it to make it work, or, there are very specific places it could be used…
Some ideas should be dismissed completely. Example: “free energy” devices.
Other ideas can be shown to have one tenth of the performance for 10 times the cost, and have fundamental problems that cannot be overcome. No technological miracle can save such a bad idea. While some ideas might work in specific places, none of these ideas are advertised as such, they are advertised as the perfect solution that works for everyone.
I’m not against people trying. But please don’t use my tax money to fund such crazy ideas.
You can’t actually definitively say “one tenth of the performance for 10 times the cost” to the idea only the implementation. As tech moves on, which in parts happens because somebody put the money/effort in to develop the predecessors that almost certainly are expensive and inefficient something can become cheaper to make and/or more performant.
For instance assume we are Ancient Greeks from the height of their empire (or just about any other major civilisation known for social organisation, large material availability, technology (etc) over the last 2000 years) debating steam power – current technologies don’t (as far as we know anyway) have any way to create a high pressure capable tank, the concepts of things like boiler tubes haven’t been thought of so producing steam in any great volume is challenging, and turbine are even further off. So right now any attempt to power anything by steam would be really expensive, yet once the effort is put in steam becomes the ongoing core of all energy production for the last few centuries… The reason steam really takes off is largely a fluke of geography and politics that means the British Empire has a real desire to improve the mechanisation they are already using while happening to have a great source of high quality coal and just about every mineral you might need across the empire..
@Foldi-One
“You canβt actually definitively say βone tenth of the performance for 10 times the costβ to the idea only the implementation.”
The idea IS the implementation of a technology. You cannot change fundamental things such as energy/power density of certain green technologies.
Take for instance gravity storage: Gravity is pretty constant and density of certain materials are constant, so if height and volume is known we can calculate energy density.
We might use different technologies to improve efficiency of conversion, but this can never exceed 100%. Currently the roundtrip efficiency of pumped hyrdro storage is 80%. I’m not an expert, but the engineer in me things we might be able
to increase this a few percentage points, but with diminishing returns. Future technological improvements can improve other things like ease/cost of construction/maintenance or safety/reliability, but won’t change the fundamental properties of the system (unless we can manipulate gravity).
And in the case of crane energy storage there is also wind. While weather engineering is possible to some extend (cloud seeding) it is very unlikely we can turn off the wind where such a crane is installed, and even if we could we probably shouldn’t.
It could be that in the future we may discover a material that has good properties for use as a road surface and also functions as a very low efficiency solar cell. We might as well use that side effect to generate power. But if the material
is not as durable and/or costs a lot more, then it would be useless.
However the idea/implementation of solar roadways involves the exact same solar panels as the ones used on roof tops. So we can easily make a comparison between the two.
The same technology implemented in an optimal way compared to a abysmal way.
Some level of skepticism is healthy. We might discover that we need to adjust some laws of physics, but this is getting increasingly less likely.
Pioneers have to risk their own money. One in a thousand crazy ideas might work, but we have limited resources so we shouldn’t bet on the sick three-legged horse.
I find myself doubting this one. Of course, wikipedia lists lots of ideas and says none of them have “taken off”, as it were. But I still think if any of them are going to, it’ll be the kind which are able to stay airborne on their own, because even a good wind day may not support a kite consistently. Hydrogen would probably be best, since helium shouldn’t be wasted on it, and it’s only an unmanned aerostat anyway.
Is wind turbine/farm software hackable?
Can wind turbines be bricked?
Is safety-critical wind turbine/farm software certified/certifiable?
https://www.prosefights2.org/irp2023/windscammers18.htm#2usnfoias
As others have said this very much looks like a scam trying to get some juicy government tax dollars by slapping the word “green” on the side of a shit idea.
Please just stop all the nonsense and build nuclear power. Then for all these microgrids you ship them diesel generators because the idea I can ship multiple shipping containers, but I can’t ship some portable generators is hilarious. The energy density of this monstrosity vs diesel is not even in the same league.
But but… nukular is scary and ‘dangerous’ whilst the fuel rods apparently glow green yet the green parties mostly (the Finnish green party has seen sense) decide that this shade of green is not the right shade of green thus brown power is better because shutting down nuke plants means you need to fire up the fossil plants instead – but the greens seem to lack the ability to see consequences of their actions, which is essentially what the Swedish government auditor said about the decision to shut down several reactors during the last parliament. Hindsight being 20/20.
It’s one shopping container.
It’s the RELIABILITY of getting liquid fuel to a generator that this solution is suitable for (irrespective of not paying big oil for their polluting, non-renewable energy source that uses up cobalt in its refining).
Rather less practical to continually air lift in containers of fuel for the generator if there is no other access etc. If I had one one of these and happened to live way off grid somewhere I’d be happy enough as I have reasonable control and predictability in my energy supply, where if it was a generator alone I relied on I’d be very nervous – will the fuel truck actually come, how much will the prices fluctuate for the goods and to ship it here etc. The fuel itself is energy dense, but the infrastructure required to bring it to me really isn’t…
Don’t get me wrong though I agree nuclear should be built far more widely. But there is a rather big difference between a concept like this that lets you extract your energy locally and one that puts you at the mercy of a very long and quite complex resource chain. Time and a place for ICE generators, big battery backups, these easy to ship renewable power station concepts, and just spending the money to put in enough redundant grid connections you don’t need local backup – not every solution is the best or even possible for every usecase!
I would be interested to see a cost analysis and price per meg watt. How does it compare to wind turbines ?