Thread by @AukeHoekstra

I'm on record as being a fan of in airborne wind energy (#AWE).

It can reach more powerful wind at higher altitudes.
And there's less:
materials (5-10x less)
visual impact
sound

So I'm sorry to see Makani had to quit, BUT...

https://twitter.com/Theteamatx/status/1304460742913978368

In no way does this mean the end of #AWE. Makani was just one concept of one company. There are many other players and approaches. I've always been partial to solutions with a generator on the ground. So not Makani but e.g. @AmpyxPower or @_Kitepower.
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

For me the whole concept of putting up a tower to reach high altitude wind seems heavy handed and wasteful in terms of needed resources compared to letting up a kite on a string (here a graph of average wind power vs altitude from my Dutch book from 2010)zenmo.com/wp-content/upl…

Progress SEEMS slow but AWE started for real ~2005.

Commercial PV has a ~70 yr head start.
Wind started B.C. and turbines went from ~50 kW in 1985 to 15 MW in 2021. So a >~20 years head start.

So yes, AWE could use an @elonmusk type, but it only SEEMS to be going slow.

I've always believed the solutions of @_Kitepower and @AmpyxPower (who put the generator on the ground) where the way to go. So Makani giving up does not diminish my enthusiasm for them at all and I look forward to exploring their options within NEONresearch.nl

And there's a silver lining: Makani was partly killed by the immense success of regular wind energy.

Wind (esp. offshore!) has become cheaper so fast (thanks to the efforts of people like @Sustainable2050 and @Vision23) that it was increasingly hard to compete against.

I'm not saying I'm sure #AWE will take over wind turbines. And commercialisation could easily take 5-10 more years.

But I'm sure they could deliver us large scale wind energy with the fraction of the resources that are needed for regular wind. And that potential is nice!
/end