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Google Acquires Kite-Power Generator
garymortimer writes "Google has acquired a US company that generates power using turbines mounted on tethered kites or wings. Makani Power will become part of Google X – the secretive research and development arm of the search giant. The deal comes as Makani carries out the first fully autonomous flights of robot kites bearing its power-generating propellers. Google has not said how much it paid to acquire Makani, but it has invested $15m (£9.9m) in the company previously."
Join this power-generating capability with Google's recent initiative to provide internet access to sub-Sarahan Africa via blimp: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/26/google-blimps ...and you've got a robust, uninterruptable combination for internet access in the poorest, and the most corrupt nations in the world. Under such circumstances, Google will have great communicative and, perhaps most interestingly, surveillance power over the people under these oppressive governments. It should be interesting how such absolute power, so closely aligned with government interests, affects Google's behavior.
Of course, it could be that Google simply feels these citizens represent a huge market for targeted advertisements for tablet PCs and Lexus vehicles.
even if it didn't generate any electricity.
You didn't eat enough of your Paranoids today?
Folks, this is friggin Skynet.
Autonomous power generation.
Always on video feeds. From circling, self powered robots.
Autonomous cars.
Some of the largest computing resources on the planet.
Hidden by the biggest smiley face in the known Universe.
I'm getting a few more German Shepherds. And Sarah Connor.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I agree a cheap beach stunt to try catch some wind in unpatched sales
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The wind is stronger at heights your pole can't reach.
Shhh!
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I really don't see how you can generate enough power to keep the aircraft in the air, and have extra power to spare and send back to the ground. A kite, ok, maybe. But they say this flying wing flies in circles. So it stays aloft and generates power. How high can it actually go anyway? It still is dragging a cord back to the ground. Every foot higher is another foot of cord it has to support. I would think it would be much simplier to create a modified wind turbine that can come down safely when the wind starts blowing too hard instead of creating some sort of 'perpetual motion' machine that creates energy.
"Cowardice in a race, as in an individual, is the unpardonable sin." --Teddy Roosevelt
I'm with you Intrepid - I've seen this lately too. Is this the new "Hot Grits!", are we being actively trolled or is this happening by chance?
Whatever it is, I'm pretty tired of it....
This sounds interesting, but is anyone familiar with plans or devices that do the same thing, except in the 10 to 100 Watt range that you could carry in, or strapped to, a backpack?
In this brief talk, Saul Griffith unveils the invention his new company Makani Power has been working on: giant kite turbines that create surprising amounts of clean, renewable energy.
They have been doing demos at small scale, but to really pay out big it needs to be done at much larger scale - as the line drag becomes a smaller and smaller loss the bigger you go and the wind stronger the higher they get. Given that most of their challenges are control system related solving them in small scale means the scale up should be far less risky (flying kites is really really hard compared to aircraft etc due to dominating and unknowable future variance of wind speed and direction)
And if you look at it from a simple cost of materials point of view the systems will be far less than 10% the weight of the turbines they replace, while the wind power flux they can access is several times as high at the altitudes they are aiming at. They are predicting less than half the cost of existing wind energy, but might end up even lower.
Fundamentally there is nothing preventing 10's or even eventually 100's of MW per wing, and its a lot easier to stick out at sea or in other tricky geographical locations than trying to assemble the current huge turbines and their towers.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1248068.stm
It is old ass news but the concept is correct. The jet stream is better than the surface. Don't worry about commercial airlines they run 10k feet lower.
Asked and answered.
Makani Power will become part of Google X – the secretive research and development arm of the search giant
Google X is Sergei's play thing. Maybe he has an inferiority complex from taking second place in a science fair, or it's just that billionaire's can afford cool hobbies. I know I'm being a wet blanket, but this seems very tenuously related to anything Google is involved in. I think it's fascinating tech, but I'm skeptical that Google X is a real industrial research lab as opposed to a cool hobby and a good way to get more of what Google thrives on: hype.
Que the Benjamin Franklin posts in 3... 2... 1...
But when the wind stops blowing there's no more reason for the kite to stay up, so why is it a problem if it comes down?
you could put your turbine on a fixed pole, so it doesn't come down when the wind stops blowing.
A length of string is much cheaper than a pole.
Go up high enough, and the wind never stops.
Wind power goes up as the cube of the velocity, so the stronger winds at high altitude are a big win.
This is actually meant to provide power to their secret datacenter on the moon.
You haven't seen my pole.
So it'll take the AI's to outpace the regulators that keep us from using the technology we have available to us today?
The Terminator view of Skynet is very 80's - today's version would have a nano- tech or bio-tech plague that would just wipe everybody out. Terminators and HK's are a very inefficient perspective.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If you actually went right to the source, you wouldn't be repeating tired old silliness. For your edification: in a standard wind turbine, the outermost part of the propeller blade is generating most of the energy. The rest is essentially dead weight. Makani's approach cuts the weight by roughly an order of magnitude. They can also operate in slower winds, and they can operate higher when the wind is faster and more stable. Never mind that their tethered airplane automatically copes with wind gusts - the tail realigns the wing to face the apparent wind. Standard turbines need to use relatively slow and bulky high-torque servos to adjust the blade pitch. Such an adjustment's time constant is an order of magnitude longer than what you get in Makani's approach.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Their way of doing stuff shouldn't be called a kite. What they have is a tethered airplane, not a kite. They started with a kite-based approach and dropped it. Their flying wing can hover under its own power, for example. Look at their videos. It's pretty damn impressive top-notch engineering. I'd probably hire any of their engineers sight unseen, except that the projects I work on may not be as exciting after you've worked on a flying wing wind energy harvester.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
You're absolutely silly. The space is much smaller than that occupied by a turbine (DUH). The system is actually less fragile because a light flying wing passively deals with wind gusts by the virtue of having a tail. A big fucking turbine is more fragile than you think - a wind gust of sufficiently high acceleration (change in velocity over time) is guaranteed by design to break the blades. The blade pitch control system is slew-limited and uses humongous high-torque servos to adjust the blade pitch. Never mind that all the load can't but be transmitted through the narrowing base of each blade. In Makani's flying wing, the forces that contribute to generation of power are partly internal, and partly passed through the tether. It's much easier to control the flow and distribution of those forces than in a big wind turbine where the propeller base is the most structuraly loaded part of the system and you can't help it.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
It's secretive because it Google's skunk works – with lots of hair brain ideas, where 9 out of 10 fails. Since it is secret, in the sense that Google isn't publishing what it is doing, people can feel free to throw out and try wild ideas without the fear of embarrassment that comes with failure. (You don't know until you tried something, you learn from your mistakes, bold experiments tend to turn up unexpected results, etc.)
lol :)
Remember kids: What's right isn't as important as what's profitable.
I'm pretty sure it's squared, not cubed.
Nope. Energy is equal to mv^2/2, but that assumes m is constant. With wind, the mass of the air passing through the blades increases linearly with the velocity. So the energy collected is proportional to v^3 not v^2. Here is a more detailed explanation.
Also the captured energy is related to the square of the diameter and these turbines are tiny.
That is a prototype. I think the plan is to scale them up.
How could anyone seriously consider this idea to be better than a standard wind turbine?
You're right, all these people with degrees in engineering and practical experience in this area are obviously wasting their time, and you, dear Slashdot AC, once again have all the answers!
Praise be to the AC!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Their flying wing can hover under its own power, for example.
Emphasis mine - it only goes into powered flight when it has to. At other times it seems to act just like a kite.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I read around ten years ago about another scheme involving kites. The kites would be louvred (for want of a better word) and the wind would act on them to unwind their tethers which were attached to dynamos. Once a kite reached the end of its tether, the louvres would be opened and the kite could be wound back in - using energy, but less than was generated in the unwinding. Or that was the theory, anyway.
This seems a more elegant solution.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Damn. Time to change my password...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Well, sentient Grey Goo was an 80's thing too. I don't think I got around to reading Bear's Blood Music until the 90's however.
The idea that a network of computers could form a brainlike awareness floating in "cyberspace" (on a cloud, if you prefer) was also done around the same time.
I don't like to grade scifi on the movies. I was watching Nerdist last night and they commented on the lack of modern movies that were like 2001 A Space Odyssey, right before they brought out Guillermo del Toro for his new movie about Giant Robots With A Stupid UI.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
If I understand their website correctly, it takes off and lands like a VTOL, but once it's in the air it acts primarily as a glider. If needed the turbine/engines can be used to propel it like an airplane for short periods.
So it's not exactly a kite, it's more of a mashup between a helicopter, a glider, and an airplane.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
(You don't know until you tried something, you learn from your mistakes, bold experiments tend to turn up unexpected results, etc.)
Really? That's how civilization works? We all learn everything from scratch, without even a glance toward science, past experience, and the accumulated knowledge of mankind's history?
Would you participate in a study of the chance of surviving a game or Russian Roulette played with all cylinders loaded?
How about a swim unaided across the Atlantic from New York to Norway?
Some things are simply not going to fly, and a kite with heavy wind generation equipment when the wind dies it one of them.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
An airplane on a tether is not a kite.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Exactly.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Small and light enough and I can see people with boats getting them. There's only so much deck space for solar panels and not a lot of room for windmills. The name of the game there is burning less fuel, so a few windy days and one calm one is still a win.
Using wind from what atmosphere?
Oh, I get it, you think that towed gliders are kites. Well, might as well call an unborn mammal tethered with the umbilical a kite too, then.
On another thought, though, that would make the pro-life vs. pro-choice debates even more hysterical.
(Must be that I invoked The Son of Godwin, or something.)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
We're not exactly talking space elevators here. Makani's system will be feasible even with current materials (i.e. dyneema), although they will indeed probably be using carbon fiber tethers by the time they commercialize. They do conversion to HVDC onboard the kite, so the electrical conductors embedded in the tether can be very thin and still carry a lot of power.
You can buy huge customized sliprings surprisingly economically from china:
http://slipring.com/
These are still smaller than what Makani would use in their larger turbines, but we use them in AWE research, and they have worked out well so far.
Oh, I get it, you think that towed gliders are kites.
Why do you think they're not?
Well, might as well call an unborn mammal tethered with the umbilical a kite too, then.
They don't get aloft so well.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Oh, I get it, you think that towed gliders are kites.
Well of course. Don't you? Assuming of course you mean towed gliders that never leave their tethers. But then they're not really gliding, are they?
Well, might as well call an unborn mammal tethered with the umbilical a kite too, then.
Ummmm, okaaay.... o_O
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
This can not at all be extrapolated to economic scales.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
this thing doesn't operate "high enough" nor at "high altitude", a mere hundred meters up the wind will stop blowing.
this craft doesn't operate at those heights, just 40-100 meters. the wind is the same as for turbine on a pole
I don't even know where to start. The altitude it operates at is adjustable, by, um, changing the length of the tether, and that's obviously an insurmountable obstacle to the likes of you.
What they have so far is a 30kW proof-of-concept. As you hopefully realize, there aren't any 30kW turbines atop of dedicated 100m tall poles, because such poles cost way too much to be worth it for a small 30kW turbine! So they have clearly demonstrated that it's feasible even for a startup to do such a thing. Thanks for bringing this up, but it sorta-kinda disproves your implied beef.
As for the craft being "mostly wing": yes, it's "mostly wing", but if you look at the scale of this device compared to a conventional 3-blade turbine, it's only the wingtip. As in the last 25-30% of the turbine's blade. So, let me get this straight: you replace a turbine with 3 blades with just the 30% of one blade, and you consider it, presumably, not big enough of an achievement?
I don't know what you are doing, but I've went to the trouble of reading their entire website and as an engineer I certainly appreciate the concentrated effort they've put into this. This isn't just a brute-force kind of an effort, it's backed by what looks to be very solid engineering design and analysis. I have no stake in this at all, I can simply appreciate their work for what it is, without resorting to spouting bullshit.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.