Mattheij made sound points in 2015 questioning Makani's AWES architecture, but nothing close to the detailed study of critical failure-modes presented here since 2009. The current fuzzy picture is that the M600 maiden flight admittedly used more energy than it produced above its predicted "cut-in" wind velocity, and probably crashed, with no public transparency. If the M600 crashed, NASA's Helios crash report is best-practice candor for sharing the engineering lessons learned; anything less is arguably academic malpractice.

It has long seemed clear that aviation-based scaling-laws in constant non-dimensional most-probable winds doom the M600. GoogleX's deep-pockets and simplistic mania for high complexity design must naturally fail to overcome basic physical barriers to high-mass high-velocity rigid-airframe AWES, and even compound vulnerabilities. Essential huge improvements in safety/reliability and performance are not imminent given M600 problems inherent to its marginal architecture. Great effort and many millions USD already poured into state-of-the-art optimization, with no prospects for major improvement for a decade or two (based on general aerospace critical path progress). A radical low-complexity redesign could occur, like adding a cheap pilot-lifter on a swivel above the kite plane (Open-AWE_IP-Cloud), but GoogleX has no expertise in such methods.

If only Makani had conducted broader deeper AWE R&D before down-selecting its scaled-up platform, rather than just claiming such due-diligence. It will be suspenseful to see how Fort presents M600 results at AWEC2017 (to compare with his admirable 2010 AWE analysis). Pray this AWEC conference is not once-again the tired dominant self-promotion of the same handful of well funded AWEC insider ventures, without producing real critical insight.* At some point, based on real-world results, AWEC's hype-driven insider-controlled-politics conference model must abate, and the open academic model of 2009 and 2011 conferences be restored. How Makani is presented at AWEC2017 will signal if AWEC-sanctioned marketing-hype is still the rule...

-----------

* Makani was lead founder of the secretive AWEC consortium that took over after HAWPcon2009. Control passed to AWESCO hands and still runs conferences opaquely, limiting them to Northern EU, with no US conference since 2012. AWESCO lead, TUD is known to do secret contract work for Makani, an academic conflict-of-interest. Makani gets favored treatment at AWEC conferences.

A tragic parasailing accident where blame is likely shared. We no longer blame users so much for "pilot-error", but shift more burden on designers for critical-safety.

The standard quick-release is mostly a precaution against drowning or dragging, and might be less effective in that role if a two-step release is required of inexperienced folks. The victim should not have released, but did, and this could have been foolishness and/or some flaw in instruction.

The tandem pro might have done a save if better prepared for the sudden event. Perhaps a safety lanyard between pro and client would improve safety, or GPS or barometric altimeter-based fail-safe would help, or letting the pro have control of release. Such engineering trade-offs are hard to resolve until experience indicates a clear advantage.

No doubt there will serious introspection over this mishap, and parasailing will become even safer (my mom enjoyed it), if not quite fool-proof.

Its a complex design tradeoff between large-scale AWES systems, like arches that rotate to orient to the wind as a whole, and metamaterial lattices that do not need to rotate as whole, since sub-elements rotate or tilt instead. The arch class processes wind as a single surface, while kite metamaterial has downwind depth with possible internal wake interference. Optimal choice is driven by the constancy or not of the prevailing wind direction. If the wind is always the same direction, like a sea-breeze or gap wind, choose the arch, but if the wind is from any direction, the metamaterial is attractive.

The metamaterial upper pilot-lifter layer can work either by distributed pilot lifters of conventional kinds on tri-swivels at mid-points of lattice lines, or by tilting membranes to accept wind from any quarter. So far, the WECS Layer under the Lift Layer was considered as open to whatever units prove best, from HAWT flygens to FlipWings. These would hang vertically and rotate to accept any wind direction, with electrical conductors or vertical pumping PTO lines. Some lattice design variants tilt the vertical line layers slightly up- or downwind.

Lets now add (COTS parafoil) Looping Foils to the Metamaterial WECS list. Simply attach a parafoil trimmed to loop on a vertical PTO line by a tri-swivel, and it will accept wind from any direction while pumping the line powerfully. Thousands of such looping foils could be hosted on a megascale metamaterial lattice. Endless refinements await discovery, like how to hotswap units by halyard, how to distribute clockwise and counter-clockwise units, how perhaps to crosslink PTOs, how to tune the large WECS motions to the tight dances of the lifter units, and so on. 

Testing diligence remains the prime requirement to down-select a winning AWES configuration, but adding COTS looping foils to the list of metamaterial WECS options seems like a top contender.

Open-AWE_IP-Cloud

KiteWinder at the Bardenas Music Camp is the latest confirmation of Wubbo's "Happy Energy" idea that AWE and festivals (AWEfest concept) are a natural cradle of early AWES development, much like Ambient Camping and Texas AWE Encampment the month before. Perhaps the Rising Tide NW Climate Convergence in 2007, with KiteMotor1 only managing a single AWE powered phone call to Dave Culp, yet marked the beginning of the happy path to AWE, proving rather competitive against military-industrial AWE of zero festivity. Passive low-complexity AWES design is a key edge.

We see such primitive events begin as hybrids of existing portable power; helping AWE incubate and grow from "toy" devices now and someday into into "mighty power-houses".

Best wishes to KiteWinder in soon reaching production of its sweet little AWES.

Stanford's SRI International was a top Cold War futurist think-tank, on a par with Bell Labs, but now rather drowned-out in our exploding global knowledge age, even with half a billion in annual revenue and a staff of two thousand. Its all too normal that this patent overlooks a large amount of prior art in the kite-paravane concept space, and is mostly a redundant confirmation of what others have proven, notably Luc Armant's masterful thesis work. Perhaps SRI's kytoon incorporation is original conceptual documentation, if a tad obvious. I was interviewed by SRI in the '90s, in connection with humanoid robotics, and it was fun to interact with them.

Its nice to see SRI is thinking about kites at all. There is a chance that SRI research could plunge into AWE R&D big-time, and make a real difference. Stanford's prior record in AWE is spotty, having hosted the infamous Makani-Joby stage-managed AWEC2010 "hijacked conference", where free passes were handed out like candy to AWEC insiders, while the rest of us were charged 800USD, so we stayed home. Access to wined-and-dined US government officials was exclusive, with only GoogleX/Makani-Joby getting ARPA-E support soon after. The rampant hype caused many smart but misinformed Bay Area observers (including, no doubt, SRI folks) to conclude Google had AWE solved. Once the Bay Area figures out Makani is not a monopoly, some great new talents will no doubt step up.

Still waiting after five years for a small all-modes outdoor demo of Moritz's longstanding kiteplane spin-launch/land concept, so its rather surprising to see a scaled-up the lab version turning slowly with one wing missing, as AWEC2017 "conference-scope". Perhaps Enerkite is doing the missing fieldwork, since actual flying is the core engineering challenge. We have seen RC flyers fling gliders up and catch them, but scaling laws will not be kind to this sort of feat.

Moritz has two new videos on offer-

Both videos link here-

http://awec2017.com/conference-scope.html

Further scrutiny of this patent brings to light an implicit intent on the part of the US government, as part-owner of the claimed IP, to in effect monopolize the no-brainer idea of a communications network of HAPAs (submarine paravane tethered to sky kite) ships, satellites, etc. As such, this patent remains a mixed bag of prior-art, obvious-art, and over-broad claims. This patent is unlikely to ever be defended and upheld by itself, but adds residual statistical value to SRI's large IP Pool.

SRI can build greatly on this patent, securing key details of a specific operational system, and are obliged in any case to do something to develop it, under use-or-lose patent rules. A historically significant patent still requires a grand inventive leap; this much has not changed since patents became ever less examined by POs, and patent pools became the big corporation norm.

Presupposing a small-scale distributed AWES model, in contrast to centralized large-scale AWE kitefarms. Maybe JoeF's AWES scales will occur fractally within the same civilizational unit-system:

The drip-drip-drip of AWE press coverage continues; UPI cites Ampyx-

Close to the scale limit for practical E-VTOL AWES, and rather optimistic about rated-power-to-mass, this AWES study, in the mix of other student projects, conveys the mild fun flavor of undergraduate work at AE departments around the world. See Group 24-

More project details from Roland's Twitter feed. Hoping the world's AE students will soon study more scalable AWES concepts. E-VTOL is marginal in ratable potential and already very intensely studied by several groups.

If we had better records of ancient Chinese kite history, Wilson and Melvill's 1749 kite experiments would not seem so fresh and revolutionary. Kite science accelerates in our time, and may have more future than past. Emergent AWE represents the culmination of all previous kite engineering science, potentially a major milestone of world history-

An old post identified conventional wing-flap control surface as well suited to locate WECS, like flygen turbines, by stability and performance criteria. A modified Ampyx graphic was provided, with its flaps suitably turboed.

This post adds that a small* AWES, with motor-gen turbines in moveable flaps turned up in spoiler position, can support VTOL, with the main wing chord feathered to ~vertical-climb apparent wind. Many E-VTOL designs, like TwingTec and Kitemill, do not feather main wing chord relative to vertical thrusters. Makani necessarily fixes its thrust line to the wing chord, for its flygen mode.

The turbines-in-flaps kiteplane configuration is the Open-AWE contender for testing in Loyd's "drag-based" AWES class, or as a RAT APU in reeling AWES. Turbines-in-flaps performs somewhat like a tiltwing, but requires a tail-sitting launch. Similar WECS placement issues apply to soft kites, whose "brakes" correspond to elevon flaps.

Open-AWE_IP-Cloud

-----------

* Only a few tens of kg gross-weight and kW ratable power, currently; rigid airframe kiteplanes not the most scalable concept.

New concept graphics; the offshore version rather ambitiously scaled. Nice touch to go all-red with hazard lighting, rather than use green starboard lighting, since a wildly aerobatic kiteplane is not much like a normal aircraft roaming open airspace.

Updated website: Seems like LEI kites are default selection for this particular "leading" AWE commercialization. Its hard to say why a water kite design, of greater mass, cost, and complexity, won out over land kite designs. Maybe the LEI won by force of habit. LEIs are the semi-rigid margin of the soft-kite spectrum, and a parafoil or SS power kite can always be adopted as wanted. Let the best kite win in the long run.

No definite knowledge of KiePower launch and land modes, except a problematic TUDelft mast experiment a couple of years ago. No sign of robust reliability statistics by KitePower or any similar player. Current AWES require constant supervision and lots of maintenance, and its hard to see a hot market if only rare kite freaks want to practice the art.

Nevertheless, KitePower represents a lower complexity alternative to Makani and Ampyx in traditional battle for early market revenue. All three ventures aim at the same hypothetical market, at the same time. Why can't a fly-off be arranged by TUDelft, in the name of science and informing investors, given its closeness to all three contenders? Its rather slower and more painful to let market failures do the vetting.

Where is Sky Sails, as the possibly dominant energy wing system? It may be that canny SkySails does not see the small AWES market developing either, that perhaps the small AWES market contest is a distractive trap, missing the big AWE game, of larger wing units in vast arrays. Or maybe small AWE really is the commercial path to large AWE, if only the best-of-breed can evolve relentlessly. Good luck to KitePower, and all the rest of us, in navigating this uncertain but entertaining R&D obstacle course.

Chris Carlin's aerospace early-innovation advice, to explore theoretic "similarity cases" of AWES technology, has taken us in many fertile directions. A major similarity class, not yet well explored, is musical wind instruments, based on shared acoustical physics with AWES, despite the broad scale spectrum.

An AWES produces a turbulent wake that can be interpreted as infrasonic "music tone". While an AWES wake is a secondary effect to powered load-motion, its intimately coupled to the AWES power output we are really after. We want to minimize acoustic energy lost to a wake, and keep most of the acoustic energy internal to the AWES, channeling it to a PTO to ideally drive a synchronous generator under varied wind and load conditions. This corresponds to an internal musical resonance, constant in pitch but variable in volume.

Here are some starting Wikipedia links to musical instrument engineering science. The extensive article on Whistle makes direct connections to powerful megascale acoustics, like mountain lee-waves. The Hornbostel-Sachs article provides a comprehensive classification system to eventually fit AWES to, as our understanding deepens-

Lee-wave wave-trains are well known in the form of powerful mountain wind wakes characterized by coherent periodic fixed and/or shed vortices. They can be a menace to aviation, so most pilots wisely avoid or minimize exposure, but glider pilots tap them for lift. Note that a flagpole creates lee-waves as a Von Karman turbulence that interacts with a waving flag, strongly driving it at key velocities. (similar motions but not identical to suspended flag LE self-tacking aeroelastically).

Drawing on our aerophone similarity-model, we find in the mountain wake a sort of preprocessed flow whose induced oscillations can drive passive kite membrane surfaces in coherent pumping. A special advantage of mountain lee waves is the vertical polarization perpendicular to the surface groundgen field.

Its proposed that mountain scale inflated structure is possible by soft kite means {Bolonkin, etc), so follows the idea of an artificial mountain lee-wave generator, whose lee waves are tappable as phased pumping energy inputs. Natural mountain terrain is a ready start for lee-wave tapping experiments. Small bluff inflated structures are also practical test objects. Maybe airships should anchor crosswind and eat their own wake.

The very idea of harvesting wakes is worthy of AWES study, since ordinarily a wake is seen as parasitic, and wasted. Rather than obsessively reducing wake, the lee-wave harvesting concept enhances it, and the low complexity passive control is robust and inherent. A counter-entropic measure of complexity self-generates in the wake itself, as reordered flow suited for harvesting.

Open-AWE_IP-Cloud

Recalling early doubts over AWE's R& growth, which motivated crude 2011 critical path analysis by WoW/KiteLab, inspired by NASA methods, where collected peak power claims by AWES developers were plotted against time, and the trend revealed was healthy growth, which has held in reality.

Here is similar aerospace analysis of progress in solar cell efficiency, as a enhanced merit-model for anyone to further apply to AWE. For example, Christof's AWE Mind Map could be incorporated as color-encoded content within the graphed power-trends over time, and the most promising AWES architectures and teams floating to the top.

There are even familiar AWE players in this energy-oriented graph, like Fraunhofer, Boeing, NREL, and Stanford; which underscores the cultural suitability of this data format to AWE-

Continuing the Hornbostel-Sachs classification process for generic kite energy cases- Just what sort of aerophone, formally, are our common AWES rigs?

[3] http://www.mimo-db.eu/HornbostelAndSachs/237

An old staple notion in AWE R&D was that some sort of "Manhattan Project" or "Apollo Program" was needed to accelerate progress. Of course, no such coordinated effort ever happened as the "leaders" chose to focus "stealth-venture" capital on quick down-selects, rather than broad cooperative research. This pattern is leading to a lot of losers and boring duplicated work, but the news is not all bad.

Thanks to the Net, and the ultimate need of AWE ventures for publicity, we have, paraphrasing Malreaux, an R&D world "without walls". Even a brief coy video shot is enough for experts to judge basic AWES performance, given the barest videogrammetric cues of scale, wind, and motion. The AWES Forum itself is a creature of the Net, helping fill out a clear-enough picture of current capability. The ages of real secrets suddenly seem over.

A major coordinated AWE R&D program could still emerge to help move things along, but if not, we can count on modern media to comprise a virtual AWES flyoff for close observers, and the technology emerging eventually, by slow market selection.

How is the virtual AWES flyoff going? We see flygens hard pressed to scale, a trend toward small rigid gliders with VTOL, but soft kites keeping pace. The AWE race is not over, and the action will continue visible.

Very little inside info leaks out of GoogleX, given enforced NDA restrictions. I had to recover my own NDA out of office files, as KiteShip was somehow absorbed into oblivion by Makani, to be able to report Makani inside doings free of legal coercion.

Glassdoor, an employment review site, adds a bit of new third-party light. Four reviews by new Makani hires since 2013 are almost totally positive, and I also found Makani superficially very attractive, in 2007; but the one 2013 "con" comment, only visible if one signs up to glassdoor, adds balance; minion "angst" indeed. Its not really a happy place to work after the initial glow fades-

There is high energetic cost to sustaining excess mass aloft aerodynamically, so heavier higher wing-loading AWES concepts incur a higher parasitic drain, with less power-to-weight in rather slow most-probable wind velocities. Sailplane derived kite-planes are attractive in nominal conditions, but fall out of sky from minor flying errors in marginal conditions.

This is the reality of why the M600, in its maiden flight, reportedly used about as much power as it generated. It needed few hundred kilowatts of wind harvest or worse, power from below, just to stay up. It likely crashed owing in large part to its excess wing-loading (excess mass or insufficient wing area).

The one proven solution is to add a lot of cheap soft-kite pilot-lift to support a fast heavy kite plane, but only kPower has taken advantage of this method, so far (see video linked below) Added advantages to pilot-lift are hoisted kite-plane launch and land options and overall flight stability, without complex avionic controls.

Makani and Ampyx have been scaling up rather blindly, without much regard for square-cube scaling law, at high capital cost, with unreliable control, at high risk. So they seem to require cheap pilot-lift to generate maximal power economically at highest safety-critical reliability. Instead, they will likely continue to crash far sooner than pay-back, with stubbornly disappointing outputs, without resorting to pilot lift; for lack of classic kite expertise.

Open-AWE_IP-Cloud

---------

Dr. Peter Harrop of IDTechEx has produced another 4995USD report containing AWE analysis, this time peripherally, in the context of battery elimination. This latest report claims to be "confounding the skeptics", but what intelligent skeptic has paid so much to be confounded?

Actually confounding default battery elimination skeptics in AWE would be great. Besides sharing his ideas freely, Dr. Harrop woul need to explain why so many prominent AWE developers wrongly count on more batteries, not less, like Makani's AWES concept for a back-up battery to safely land controllably-powered, in the event of a conductive tether break precluding reverse-powering from below; or KiteGen's notion of local battery storage to buffer its cyclic pumping output; or Gabor's IFO scheme, and others, to recharge batteries aloft, by cheap kite lift, and bring them down anywhere, as an alternative to holding up fixed conductors. 

Most AWE developers also imagine we will drive new battery use for any application, by providing a new better way to recharge batteries, or recharge pumped-hydro, cryo-storage, and other storage schemes. We know upper wind is not truly 100% baseload reliable, nor blows so steady, nor are our complex aviation platforms very reliable, which drives our engineers to include aux and back-up batteries. We have even identified the potential for AWES to become super-batteries in themselves, as chemical-mechanical hybrids. That's "battery creation", the opposite of "elimination". Congratulations to Dr. Harrop if his mysterious reports somehow prove AWE will eliminate batteries more than drive demand for them, as a cheap bountiful charging means.

Recalling DougS provided an email quote where Dr. Harrop complained that the open-AWE knowledge-sharing ethos, as long practiced here, is at odds with his pay-wall business model, as if the fault is openness. kPower is unable to see its own Harrop assessment, for fact-checking, nor is there anyone we know who can say who the AWE "winners and losers" are, that Harrop is claiming to identify for his clients.

Lets hope these mysterious reports enter in the public record as soon as their supposed strategic value is spent, so scholars can judge the analysis along with everyone else's. Does Dr. Harrop  duly present, or willfully omit, a strategic role for free Open-AWE expertise to his clients? It would be odd if IDTechEx is somehow a better source of AWE knowledge, at any price, than the community of full-time practicing domain experts, including the preponderance of our PhDs, academic papers, etc.. At least we will get to follow how IDTech Ex's AWE conference ambitions pan out, in real time. Never mind their business model, we only hope for real insights from them, not yet known to us.

Dr. Harrop is Cc:ed in the hope he will openly address the questions and critiques posed of his AWE knowledge products. Here is the ad for his latest report-

Pondering deeper into Dr. Harrop's core proposal, "complete elimination of energy storage", its obvious that biological evolution has always tended to add energy storage for fitness. Plants and animals, as a rule, store sugars and fats both internally and in many cases externally, for example, bees storing honey. There is no general evolutionary trend to eliminate energy storage, yet Dr. Harrop is proposing technological elimination of energy storage is logical.

The expensive message to Dr. Harrop's business clients is that the global quest for better storage technology is misplaced, and they can make money betting against engineers who treat energy storage as a standard technology to further perfect, rather than eliminate. An odd picture is presented of electric vehicles that will somehow always harvest enough energy in real time to get around, of robots that run indefinitely just because they have no energy storage, and so on.

Dr. Harrop dismisses Lithium ion batteries as inherently not safe enough, despite current market acceptance of the low statistical risk and ongoing revolutionary safety advances. [IEEE Spectrum, May, 2017] details such lithium ion safety advances and concludes, "All these features, taken together, essentially eliminate the danger of explosion and fire.". His idea that the "Internet of things" cannot properly succeed without battery elimination is old-hat, since battery elimination is already a standard design method, by distributed power, including RF, wires, PV, and fiber optics. There is no overlooked goldmine in battery elimination; its been around a long time.

As noted in theprevious message, AWE does not really tip the battery elimination equation in Dr. Harrop's favor. One further advantage of the case for energy storage as a proven engineering method with a long future is that it does not cost 4995USD. If Dr. Harrop's prolific technological forecasts are so prescient, it seems he would make far more money directly investing in them himself, as he advises his clients to do.

As documented on the AWES Forum for over five years, and uniquely encompassing global AWE developer talent, there has been detailed planning and organizing for broad AWE R&D investment (working-name "Fraunhofer Plan"). Led by the world's richest billionaires, the Breakthrough Energy Fund has lately emerged and is considering where to fund billions in diversified foundational energy research.

The Fraunhofer Plan is therefore now taking final form for submission to BEV. There is a lot of exciting news in the background, of new faces and collaborations. As a "bundle" or "basket" investment, the aggregate M&A value of all the small AWE ventures and IP already onboard is larger than any previous single player. We have used 100 million as a collective BEV funding target, but a even higher adjusted valuation may fly, based on AWE's superior promise, value growth in our talent and IP pool in recent years, and BEV's deep pockets.

If you, your team, or IP is not on board yet, its not to late to join the inside planning circle. Please reply to this final call and help shape the final submission. If you miss the boat now, you will still have an open invitation into the broader program, based on merit, but no influence on the current push. Every known AWE merit-player will be listed in the BEV submission databases, either as confirmed or possible participation.

"Wubbo Lives"

Carbon capture technology aims to sequester fossil fuel CO2 emissions by various means, from re-injecting them back into the ground to chemical separation for reuse. Its not yet economic technology due to high costs and inefficiencies, and may never becoming economic, but an enormous effort is underway to develop carbon capture nevertheless, if only as a fake solution, under pressure from fossil fuel interests.

kPower advocates converting selected fossil fuel plants to kite hybrids, reducing the fossil fuel need in proportion to wind availability (Open-AWE_IP-Cloud). This provides a path to fossil fuel elimination with less economic disruption, leveraging existing generation and distribution infrastructure. The practical details of converting coal and gas generators to AWE dual-input have been covered in past postings.

This post is to coin Virtual Carbon Capture (VCC) as a working term to relate the AWE hybrid concept to conventional carbon capture thinking. Unlike the conventional version, VCC leaves most of the excess carbon in the ground, eliminating most of the inefficiency of the conventional capture concept. Residual remaining fuel use would still benefit from conventional capture, with less total capture cost.

VCC should be researched and deployed in relation to conventional carbon capture, since the same end goal is served, to reduce CO2 emissions with the least economic disruption, as fossil fuels are phased out altogether in favor of cheaper better renewables. kPower will attempt to promote VCC within conventional carbon capture research, including the Mission Innovation framework.

The "kitematter" metamaterial AWES paradigm emerged from observations of characteristic lattice waves in classic kite lattices (trains, meshes, arches, etc). These spontaneously emerge as wind velocity increases. Traditional kitemakers have, as a rule, added damping and stabilizing features to each unit-kite, rather than seeking to harvest the excess energy as proposed in AWE, by PTO networks. We have one-at-a-time explored applicable math from many sources, from multiple historic roots to specialized engineering versions (like AE Aeroelasticity). It has been a pending task to match up the varied mathematical presentations of the same fundamental crystal-phonon lattice-wave physics.

This 2007 lecture note by Suzuki and Suzuki presents major mathematical lattice wave models and demonstrates that "all these methods lead to the same conclusion, the existence of lattice wave, phonon in the quantum mechanics", which in our kite lattice case is a macroscopic quantum mechanical analogue, to duly distinguish from microscopic QM. This is a valuable primer for anyone seeking to understand kite lattice-waves, where each unit-kite corresponds to a virtual atom as a spring-mass in a periodic structure excited by wind. A few equivalence models are missing here, like fluid-dynamics and topological networks, but kite metamaterial lattices governed by these standard equations promise to scale far beyond any AWES scheme based on single unit-kites-

The trend continues for AWEfest to develop organically from humble beginnings, as a global phenomenon, rather than emerge full-blown by any single party. This latest new event, the Kent Wind Festival, is ideal for AWE demos to gradually become the star attraction. Perhaps Rod or Olivier can quickly mobilize a demo, but if not, next year will do. To the extent that kites are inherently AWE-based, the KWF on the critical path. As the originator-of-record of the AWE popularization festival concept, with three proto-events this year so far,

Wubbo Lives-

New long term R&D investment at odds with IDTechEx's recently announced battery elimination investment strategy-

Correction to article- Makani has not yet deployed in Hawaii, if ever, based on my uncle's resident investigation, and confirmed M600 testing in Continental US SW.

AWE figures toward the middle and end of the article, especially as a mobile replacement for remote diesel generators, if not as a  general grid solution, as most of us hope. Such AWE content is quite welcome anyway, to make more folks aware AWE even exists.

The EIV concept of ambient energy only, with no battery, fuel, or other storage, overlooks how little available ambient energy there often is, certainly not enough to reliably power a vehicle, not like a battery-based ambient-charging during parking can. What ambient energy gives is less dependence on storage. kPower proposes a brief transitional era of AWE-diesel to AWE-battery hybrids, to maintain adequate supply reliability.

Once again selecting metamaterial science overview study references, this one linked below dating to 2014, the same year a metamaterial AWE System Identification basis was first suggested here. Its great to see so much emerging metamaterial science directly applicable to periodic kite lattices, as an effective AWES theory. We had in prior years struggled to formally characterize the kitefarm level of abstraction, but now we have a flood of supporting sources, with powerful analytic tools to apply and clues to follow. This general review narrows in some on metamaterial kinetic energy harvesting. As usual, all core principles cited of metamaterials can be expressed by means of periodic kite lattices. The succession of papers recommended do lead to seeing kite arrays in a new light.

As usual with borrowed academic metamaterial sources, think unit-kite as our periodic point-mass element in an AWES lattice. "Vibro-acoustic" is the awkward term used to clarify that phononic acoustic energy extends below audible frequencies, including our ultra-low AWES pumping frequencies. The authors point out a nice established fact, less "limitations of space and intensity" favoring our engineered km-scale kitematter made of many unit-kites-

No surprise Makani is failing, as long expected here, ever since its hasty high-risk high-complexity 2009 design down-select. Its not really due to cyclic energy prices, which Google has previously claimed to ignore, by deep-pockets and a long-view. Makani's epic failure really is due to the factor SaulG identifies, of technological "arrogance", but not just by the gullible Google parent. SaulG himself, as Makani's founding principal-scientist, is most responsible for the specific arrogance of the AWE architectural down-select now proving uneconomic, even to naïve observers. Ruinous arrogance is still apparent in Google's characteristic omission to Bloomberg, that there is a large global AWE R&D community, that has mostly avoided Makani's insuperable technical errors; a community of many great teams whose prospects are better in proportion to their lower-complexity AWE orientations. No sign Google can diversify its AWE R&D now, still poisoned by the same Bay Area arrogance.

Confusion reigns in technical details of the Bloomberg article. Its reported the M600 took ten years to "build", rather than being the recent over-scaled culmination of Wings 1-7. "Testing" in the article is a likely a misleading conflation of flight and bench-testing, since its hard to believe Makani is ever flying a lot. If it is flying until all its prototypes have crashed, due to overoptimistic reliability assumptions, the worst news is the inherent power curve being revealed by its bloated AWES is necessarily sickly. Bloomberg only properly knows that Makani should have done far better by now, after so much time and money spent, but nothing about the particular drawbacks the M600 represents, compared to more promising architectures, as long detailed here.

New insider info is provided, but with misleading details, and no longer matters so much, given Makani is being chopped, and seems set to either die quietly or be sold off to some naïve buyer, as losing GoogleX ventures are typically disposed of. DOE-jumper, Zoi, who sailed thru her short boardroom stint, apparently is still thinking Makani's business model was sound, even as failure is widely conceded. Corwin is now said to have suffered from a chronic heart condition, which is at odds with the SF Coroner not finding any cause of death, not even karoshi death-from-overwork syndrome, consistent with personal knowledge of Corwin's overwork and tragic end.

Makani's debacle does some temporary public-opinion harm AWE R&D as whole, as many observers will wrongly suppose that if Google could not do AWE properly, then maybe nobody can. A silver-lining is that extreme AWE hype itself, as Makani long practiced, is discredited, while general AWE public awareness is higher than ever. AWE developers currently concentrating on first perfecting small effective AWES, with modest funding, to then grow by actual market revenue, have a clearer way forward in a less-hyped field, even as other "leading" developers, like Ampyx, those who most over-reach technically, must continue to fail. The ultimate success of AWE still seems inevitable, even if most early ventures fail. The upper-wind resource is still unmatched, and the modern power kite already is able to use it, cost-effectively; so the race to refine AWE continues, without Makani seen as a serious contender anymore, even in the press. 

Saul,

No other horse in AWE better deserves flogging, even by Bloomberg. As a close long-time observer, I consider Makani's woes primarily due to your personal failure of early due diligence. If only you had led Google to support broad open global research across all contending AWES architectures, instead of only your pet concept in an oversold founding clique lacking aerospace experience, and exiting early while cashing-in big-time, Makani would be happily credited by me for doing "great things".

The great thing Makani has done is adequately explore your jumbo autonomous aerobatic E-VTOL endurance flygen concept, with plenty of time and funding, to prove that basic engineering scaling-law and safety-reliability concerns were valid. Based on highest power-to-mass, highest unit-power, and highest safety, at lowest capital-cost, integrated formations of ship kites based on power-kites remain the Cinderella in kite energy potential, just as in 2006. Thank goodness Google has overlooked real power kites,

dave

For over a decade AWE promoters have raised large amounts of cash by promising to be able to quickly scale up a prototype high-complexity* AWES. As predicted by innovative-aerospace historical scaling norms, not a single such venture met its announced timeline, nor even seems close. The venture secrecy imposed has sadly limited open knowledge.

Spinning out of TUDelft, Aenerate is taking another path; to develop high-complexity AWES control at a small scale for educational use. From Aenerate's Mission-

A follow-on musing by Mark Bergen of Bloomberg, to the effect that the business world will tend to reduce green energy R&D in self synchopacy with Trump's proposed ARPA-E funding elimination. ARPA-E won't be much missed in AWE, since its single major investment in our field was merely to give 3 million to Makani, as if Google needed a handout. Dave Lang's SkyMill was passed over. Perhaps Bergen will get around to reporting the general prospects for AWE investment worldwide, with dozens of ventures, not just one company that over-reached on the TRL curve. AWE has a healthy diverse R&D ecosystem relatively immune to US politics-

Yet another expensive AWE market report spun from rather crude domain expertise, but the San Jose based outfit, Credence Research, at least understands that AWE R&D itself is a true early market, preliminary to commercial deployment. We see these reports slowly growing in sophistication, as AWE continues to develop, and grow its observer community-

Altaeros has figured out its last best early investor pitch is as a self-powered broadband "Super Tower", given how marginal LTA is as a general AWE solution. Other aerostat companies can simply add RATs in "Oberth AWES" configuration to compete as AWE-driven super-towers. Alteros might be able to establish market dominance while somehow transitioning to the ultimately better performing and cost-effective Oberth AWES. Mitsubishi seems to have drawn Softbank into backing Altaeros, as a second Japanese institutional investor. Expect Japan to branch out boldly from initially naïve and timid AWE investments, and ultimately be a lead developer country in its own right.

Close reading of the free content part reveals a few interesting details. "Kites" are claimed to be ahead of other architectural categories, at 50% of overall R&D effort, but its not clear how they define kites. The analysis is unusually abstract, favoring visible statistical cues like venture growth and technological diversity, and less responsive to marketing noise. Other early AWE investment reviews have tended to just process hype, rather than track available meta-data like Credence. Here is a sample of the new narrative; asserting us to be "manufacturers", as indeed more and more of us are now, albeit at the most primitive level, with marginal designs-

An IDTechEx echo, mined for shipping relevance-

Trickle of public details, old and new-

2006 SEC filing-

"successful" tweet-