| Topic for open discussion: Bill Gates
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| March 9, 2021, post by Dave Santos Yeah, its Airborne Wind Energy, and Ken is like Lord Kelvin thinking powered flight was hopeless, even as the Wright Bros knew better and made it happen.
We
have GW scale Kite Network concepts, by a circle of EU PhDs and
kitepros, on the drawing board; its really happening, Stanford or not.
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| BLOWN OFF What About Wind? By Bill Gates| January 23, 2010 Ken C. answers Bill laconically. Joe Faust , March 9, 2021, over ten years later ::: Bill, 1. Energy-kite systems with ground-based generation (pumping water to storage or electricity generation directly or via hydro turbines) deserve profound attention. 2. http://www.energykitesystems.net/AirborneWindEnergy/index.html 3. Notice how trees and plants already slow mine the wind, but wind renews daily. ============================ March 9, 2021, post by Dave Santos Correcting your undue pessimism about AWE to Bill Gates Ken,
You are fortunately very mistaken about kite energy (Airborne Wind
Energy- AWE). There has been tremendous progress in the last decade.
Kites really can power the world. Talking Gates out of kites was not
helpful, nor rigorous. On Gate's Blog, you come up as a final word.
Researchers " all seem to think different things are the main impediment",
that's not a due-diligence conclusion. Then you presume only flygen
(conductive tethers-bad) but not groundgen (polymer tethers-good). Kite
Surfing already "works economically" (not "magical"). Then to presume
investment is too expensive (insert a number for poor Bill) and but the
potential return is tiny (powering the world with abundant wind),
deserves more serious evidence than you offer. The rest is just a lack
of expertise in power-kite technology, and how to avoid storms (just
land) and deal with calm (land or reverse-pump).
Please
open up to AWE debate again. Its like Near Zero was about a-priori
fatalism about AWE, reasoning only from hyped failure-cases (GoogleX). The Upper Wind resource is serious, and there now even utility scale kite plants in operation (SkySails). Gates
was right, and you were badly off-base. Please fix the damage to the
public record (at least make your techn-fatalism rigorous).
Progress in AWE is fantastic. Uncompetitive developers do fail, properly so, but not the modern power kite itself.
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