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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.
The wind is stronger at heights your pole can't reach.
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.
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.
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.
If you were ridiculously wealthy, what would you spend your money on?
I like the idea that he's spending his on advancing technology. I'd probably be aimed more at biotech and nanotechnology - about the only realistic chances to buy yourself a longer life expectancy, which would let you spend even more money on cool stuff - than wind generators, but I like that he's spending on wearable computing and space elevators and fuel cells.
If he wanted to solve the power issues, he'd be probably better off working on Thorium reactors than wind generation, given that one of the Diablo Canyon reactors puts out more energy than if all the windmills in California were simultaneously operating at 100% capacity, but for all I know he's building one somewhere, or there are anti-nuclear regulatory issues standing in the way.
He could do something stupid, like buy RVs for all the homeless people in San Francisco, but generally, you can't possibly hope to fix people one at a time, and concentrating on getting to the point where you can help everyone is probably the best use of his resources, if what he's trying to do is something to improve the general state of the world.
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.
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.
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.