"Doug cluelessly asked: "What is NWTC's greatest contribution to wind energy so far?"" - ***Dave S. predictably could not answer the question.

So you think more people "saying" they will develop AWE is progress?   Name-dropping produces zero Watts. What about all who have given up? Where is kite-reeling today?  Where is Laddermill?  Where is Wayne German with his Germy awards?  Where are all the carousels?  Installed "wind-tower" (as you call them) energy capacity has doubled.  Where are you? 

You keep leaning on your statements of testing more kinds of AWE than anyone in the world, but when asked which is most promising, are strangely silent.  Why not just answer the question?  Is it because the answer is "none"?  Or is the answer "my testing is not sufficient to show whether anything works, since I don't take it seriously, and do not build anything with even a minimum level of performance."?

DaveS, add to your vision shader materials that simultaneously convert
sunshine to electricity for that same city or village or state.

DougS, ... nice company add to the topic; their pole shaders confirm
some interest in shade ... etc. Thanks.

~ JoeF

DaveS,

Conference speaker in 2011

What data would you project onto the screens? star maps, navigation data power generation data, design data, current weather states....

That's the best ice-water dunk I've seen yet.  Yup, I've been needing to wear a sweatshirt a lot this August in the Mojave Desert, whereas daily highs should be averaging at 99 degrees.  Anyone can look up long term temps over the last million years and see we're near a temperature peak, at the end of the current, warm, "interglacial" period of the ongoing ice-age in which we have remained for the past half-million years.  These warm iinterglacials last 15,000 years on average.  The present interglacial is 15,000 years old now.  LINK: http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/Ice_Age_Temperature_Rev.png

 

Claim 18 (main claim) would seem to read on everything from magenn to makani (depending on definition of "airship having a lift element") to any previous proposed blimp, balloon, or aerostat with solar or wind generation and conductive tether - I do not see that this claim is novel at all.  Maybe I'm missing something.  This reminds me of a big hand-wave patent - "We could do ANYTHING!"...  Yup we could.  Not novel, in my opnion.  :)

White or silver kites might be useful in fighting desertification.  Here in the Mojave, we just have too much sun - most plants grow better "in the shade" here.  We're at the edge of the desert, the front line of the battle to roll back desertification.  The only caveat I'd cite would be that kites would require winds to stay aloft, and it is not always windy.  The kites would fall down when winds stop, possibly in a hazardous or inconvenient way, later requiring relaunch.  That would require a lot of man-hours to handle fallen kites then relaunch them.  Therefore, unless those problems are solved, I'd instead recommend awnings on poles (current technology) for this purpose of shading.  In either case, I do not see the connection to AWE.  :)

Doug S.,
The connections to AWE:
1. AWE has branches.
2. Providing shade by converting he wind's energy to form shade is a
branch of AWE.
3. The most popular branch of AWE in this forum seems to be the
production of electricity for feeding consumers' electrical grids.
Such popularity does not negate other branches of AWE.
4. In this shady topic thread there are indications of the potential
of integrating other good works in a shading AWES scheme, one of which
is direct electrical production by several routes. A shading AWES may
double as grounden electricity producer or as a flygen electricity
producer.
5. Some shading AWES schemes aim at reducing the use of coal or oil;
so, the conversion of wind energy to effect such reduction seems to be
part of the AWE space.

Best,
JoeF
Thanks for the anti-desertification scheme. Notice that ever-up AWES
may resolve your wish for stay-up AWES.

Fair enough to say providing shade "is a branch of AWE" if it can reduce the need to expend energy for cooling.  As compelling as the concept is, I think it's quite a stretch to call it AWE.  I see it as a "hail Mary" grasp at a straw, wherein, after stating ahead of the fact that what is commonly called "wind energy" today, by which people are referring to wind turbines and windfarms, (as opposed to solar panels) will be eclipsed and replaced by the genius of a new crop of self-described greater intellectual giants who have, in their minds, for the first time, recognized the higher wind speeds at altitude, and promised to replace those pesky "windtowers" with kites.  Somehow they want to pretend that the wind industry never noticed that winds are stronger at higher heights, as a start, whereas in fact it is perhaps the most basic fact of wind energy. 

Now that the people who bragged so much are not having any luck with that, after having made such sweeping promises, their bragging ahead of the fact, like a water-balloon being compressed at one point, has an emotional need to protrude somewhere else, rather than admit being defeated by a bunch of air molecules combined with gravity.  

My impression is that you and Dave S., rather than admit that nobody is currently pursuing a successful approach to AWE, are trying to convert what started out as a solid concrete block of "We promise to eclipse and indeed embarrass those evil "ground-hugging windtowers", to a nebulous vaseline-covered water-balloon that nobody can possibly ever get a grip on: "a kite IS a wind turbine - merely flying a kite IS airborne wind energy - gosh, I just realized it can provide shade!   So you breathe a sigh of relief, that you've "rescued" the previous bragging, by a mere change in word definitions.  At no point do you guys admit "We are actually a bunch of kite-flying yahoos with no idea how to do what we said we would do (eclipse "windtowers") and so are all the teams and their phalanx of grad students.  Collectively, we have not hit the stated target at all."  Instead of admitting you missed your stated target, you just keep moving the target by redefining words.  It's getting kind of weak.  I'd feel better about it if you just admitted that you've thought of a possible new use for a kite: providing shade.  I think to call it "AWE" just (further) waters down your credibility. 

You guys say one thing, then when someone tries to latch onto those words and respond in a meaningful way, rather than admit that they even have a point, your strategy is to endlessly redefine a single term "airborne wind energy" as though constant redefinition is a valid substitute for the progress that was promised half a decade ago, and which has not emerged.

If you were really interested in using kites to provide shade, you'd be talking about architecture rather than pretending to provide power, and the first thing you'd do would be to compare using kites for shade versus supporting the same fabric on poles.  Instead you play with words and logic to pretend you have "cracked the code" one more time, by a mere mention of a possible use for a kite.

If I had a building that I wanted to shade using a kite (and I'm not saying it's a bad idea - it is a good idea) I'd look at a comparison of various ways to shade the building, with kites as one possibility.

I've actually always wondered why we don't routinely provide a "roof over the roof" of buildings, just to provide shade while preserving airflow - seems like it could reduce air conditioning loads by a lot.  But I also have thought about the many unforeseen problems it could cause, such as leaves building up between the roofs and then animals build nests, damage from wind, ice, and so on - building maintenance always runs into "issues".

Anyway, I like the idea of kites for shade, but I'd feel more comfortable describing it as an idea for a use for a kite, than automatically calling it AWE, when we started out with the definition of AWE as an improvement on "ground-hugger windtowers".  If I build an awning on a building, it is not "wind energy", and if that awning is a kite, it does not magically become the excuse-solving "airborne wind energy", so much as an "airborne awning".

I'm not sure if you were in on the 1980's "deconstruction" movement in the study of English language, but the gist of it was you can prove or disprove ANY statement by merely redefining words until any previous statement is rendered meaningless, wrong, or right - whatever it takes to "make your point".  That "deconstruction" of language is really all you're doing with these endless redefinitions.  I say, let's start HITTING the target, rather than MOVING the target to a place where we think we can hit (still without hitting it anyway, even though the target is moved, the new definition becomes just one more transition to more bragging-ahead-of-the fact promises.)

I'll give you an example:  You state, on the one hand, that AWE "is a newborn baby", but without skipping a beat, you claim that any kite flying is not only "airborne wind energy" but, when pressed that turbines rotate, that any kite "is a wind turbine" due to the fact that almost any kite can occasionally rotate???

OK so if every kite is a wind turbine, and flying a kite is AWE, and people have been flying kites for thousands of years, how does that make AWE "a new baby"?  Your endless redefinitions, at some point, collide and crash, losing all meaning.

At some point, your endless redefining of words makes all of your statements meaningless.  At some point it just seems that you and Dave S. are most intent on humoring yourselves and pretending you are somehow visionary and "right about everything", above all else, while in actuality, you guys and everyone else are failing to live up to the stated original AWE promise.

Instead of breaking so many topic foci, this thread is a space that
invites sorting out what is AWE.
Tethered AWE and untethered AWE?

Some starter notes:

Tethered AWE: kite systems. Main focus: achieve good works with the
AWES. Within the set of "good works" is a branch that provides
electricity for electrical grids. However, that that branch exists
does not logically mean other (hundreds) branches of good works by
AWES simply vanish. For some of the good works, see the open forum
called KiteApplications as well as this present forum. Some AWE
branches are thousands of years old; some branches are very new. Some
freshened foci are sometimes respected as new as even if the
freshening is the main new aspect; that is, the idea involved might
have some old roots while the contemporary investments seem newish.

Untethered AWE: Aircraft RATs. Soaring. Air-transportation using wind
energy. IFOs.

Tethered note: One freshened participation involves an old idea:
having the wind energy morphed to electricity by use of kite systems.
Participating in that AWE branch does not win a demolition of the
other AWE branches which still remain as optional activity by persons.
A participant in one AWE branch is ever invited to respect that other
AWE branches exist and may have merit.

A kite system is naturally a wind-energy conversion system; and even
more pointedly, every natural kite system in real flight-working
environments rotates; mining the rotations involves methods and
schemes of great variety. Rotations may be increased or decreased by
design; mining the rotations varies in method. The kite has its
necessary main parts: wings, tethers, resistive-system parts; such
complexes are set in media (solids, liquids, gases, plasmas, hybrid
mixes). Either the kite system will be moved by various foces or the
media is relatively flowing by cause of various forces ... or both.
During the interactions of the kite system with the media of choice,
energy flows into various formats; clever people use some of those
formats for pointed applications or good works; some people aim to
sell some of the energy; some people aim to sell some of the good
works.

Lift and Drag,
~ JoeF

Doug S., your post has very many points in it. Some sentences seem to state for me things I did not state. In time I will aim to address most of the points.   One invitation is to sort out "What is AWE?" in a dedicated topic, which see started.    This present hereon topic thread is about "Shade" from the use of AWES; this is a branch of AWE even beyond one of the potential merits of reducing use of fossil fuels. The full reach is the conversion of wind energy to provide shade for a wide host of possible good works, not just reduction of fossil-fuel use.    And please note that the shade branch of AWE is one of hundreds of AWE branches or sectors; that the shade branch exists does not mean that you personally need to work in such shady branch; if you do not want to work on the shade sector, then that is fine.  But when you do have a shady AWE note, then please post it like you did regarding anti-desertification.  While opening the shade branch of AWE, there may be found in the studies notes that will affect other branches of AWE. 

The recent post by DaveS about cases of unwanted shade brought up in me the need to mention that shade may be graded and scheduled.  That is, a good work might beg for 10% shading or 50% shading or 80% or full shade.    And a good work might want 10 minutes of graded shade or 1 hr of graded shade or all-day-light shading.  And recall wavelength screening; let through some wavelengths of light and block other wavelengths of light ... and such also with the grading and scheduling options.