This
is exactly what I'm talking about. I remember the (supposed,
wannabe) "other demos" at HAWPcon09. Against a backdrop of my
working system capable of (gasp!) actually generating power,
that (gasp!) ran mostly unattended for (gasp!) two days, which got the
whole conference on the front page of newspapers, a few people brought
out what I remember as a couple of irrelevant foam wings on a string,
pulled around with a stick at a height of maybe 10 feet, something like
that. Goofy nothingness.
That
was ten years ago - if they were "demos", where are the resulting
systems today? "AWE" "Demos" incapable of generating any
power. "Demos" so forgettable that nobody has ever mentioned them
besides you. "Demos that made me feel sorry for the people
"flying" them, as in "REALLY? That's all you got? You even
brought that here as a demo of anything? A demo of what
exactly, that you can't even get something to fly without dragging it
around using overhead with a stick?" Those "demos" were pathetic,
if they can seriously even be called "demos" at all, which I do not
think they can. The only thing those less-than-toys
"demonstrated" was the people playing with them were nowhere
with regard to AWE, with nothing promising on the horizon.
Why don't you explain these "demos' to "the rest of the class", and
show us some photos, so people can witness the advanced state of your
aerospace AWE R & D program at that time?
Here's
what I DO remember: Endless attacks, and yes, unfair attacks,
from you. Starting with accusing me of "wasting helium" because I
used two bottles of it to possibly change the world, whereas literally
millions of times as much is "wasted" on party balloons at 99-cent
stores etc. across the world, probably every day. Every time I
pick up another expired party balloon on my properties, I think of your
irrational accusation that the main thing you got out of my demo at
HAWPcon09 was that I was "wasting helium."
Well I HAD to use helium, because while most newbies don't understand that you need wind for a wind energy system to work,
they want to see one work anyway, even if the amount of wind is
low. Due to lack of wind, a kite would not have worked. So
I was forced to stick with balloons even though a kite would have
worked better in actual wind, conferences and video-shoots can't be
scheduled with sufficient advance time to allow airline flights to be
reserved etc., around daily local weather, and unless you are in a
known high-wind area, which that conference was not, the chances of
sufficient wind for a WECS are slim to none.
Since
then we've seen an unending tirade of insults about any aspect of
SuperTurbine that pops into your head, such as torque being a problem
compared to pulling ropes, even though our entire civilization is
powered by torque, while pulling rope drives fell out of favor back in
the early days of the steam engine. Or I'm attacked on the basis
that "it can't scale" whereas the same thing has always been said about
every wind energy collection system, but somehow, they do. A
typical automotive driveshaft can carry a MegaWatt. But that
doesn't slow you down.
If I
convey my alarm that people keep talking about "laddermill" while a
hundred grad students and interns led by a supposed "astronaut"
together can't even build a popsicle-stick-level demo of the actual
laddermill concept, after years of empty talk, it is ME who is called
labels like "dire" or "negative" even though all I am doing is
describing the lack of action of others who keep saying
they are developing it. To me, the people who announce projects
that they never actually follow through on, are the negative
ones. To call the people merely witnessing
such a lack of follow-through, derogatory names is just typical
"shoot-the-messenger" behavior. It's like saying "close your eyes
- you did not just see that and you should never mention it to anyone,
ever! Nobody is ever allowed to ask what happened to any AWE
project, ever, OK?" Uh, yeah, OK, sure.
If, after ten previous years I have developed a "sense of smell" that allows me to categorically provide the accurate information that one after another stated project to "power X hundred homes" is NOT
in fact taking place, I'm only further denigrated, as though the people
making the false statements are in the right, while I am wrong to (try
to) call them out.
Let's look at
it logically: A company announces how many "engineers" it's hiring,
administrators, fabricators, power electronics people, etc., etc.,
etc. They have university and industry pedigrees, they are paid
good salaries, there are so many they need an HR department just to
keep track of them all, and so much office space it's seen necessary to
announce just renting it. There are CEO's, project managers,
accountants and of course interns and grad students, ready to line up
and smile for their smartphones.
So
you have a huge amount of highly-educated "talent", complete with
"adults in the room" who should have the ability to forecast whether a
project is on track to meet certain milestones by a given date.
But the puzzling question keeps emerging: If this much "high-end
talent" is being applied effectively, why do the stated outcomes never
materialize as advertised? Why is no information ever available
when the announced "show-time" rolls around? Why is it then, not
even possible to find out what happened to the projects?
How
is it possible, over and over again, for that many
supposedly-knowledgeable people, with all those credentials,and all
that money, to make the same basic promise over and over, and be that
wrong, every single time? How can they say they will power x hundred
homes, then power exactly zero homes? What good is all that
education and industry experience? How can that many project
managers be that consistently inaccurate in their projections? Do
they actually have no idea or real understanding of what they're trying
to do? I mean, normally that much talent would be able to turn
out at least something, even if it was less than projected.
It
would be easy to understand, for example, a project announcing it was
only able to produce about half the power it had anticipated, with
reasons given for the discrepancy, and possible remedies suggested to
improve the results next time. Maybe they run it for a year, then
announce a cessation of operation and a rebuild, based on what was
learned. That is what one might expect from adults with basic
integrity.
On
the other hand, imagine an NFL team claiming they'll win the Superbowl,
then just not showing up at "showtime"... Imagine a
highly-publicized project to build a bridge, with opening day announced
a year ahead of time, with every subsequent detail publicly specified:
the budget, the number and talents of people hired, tasks allocated to
subcontractors, when various components are ordered, when they arrive,
etc., then on the opening day (showtime), when the mayor was supposed
to show up for the ribbon-cutting ceremony, suddenly the entire project
simply goes dark, and you never hear anything from them again, until
maybe years later, the same bridge project is announced again, and
people fall for it again, as though they never said this before.
Could this really even happen?
Look
at Elon Musk for example. People wonder whether the company will
meet its stated goals by the announced times, and whether it will thus
survive as a business entity, but
nobody has to ask whether he ever produced a working car in the first
place, or why he said he would produce thousands, then just disappeared,
with no further news available. If that happened he'd probably be
arrested or severely sanctioned in some way. The SEC would have a
cow. Investors would be filing lawsuits.
These
days I'm silenced for even ASKING the status of any of these
highly-publicized AWE or underwater kite projects, as "showtime" shows
up. Fantasy only - no facts allowed. The promoters are
allowed to take in millions of dollars to SAY they WILL power X number
of homes by date Y at location Z using technology Q, and yet I am
castigated for then even asking the question of what is actually happening when date Y rolls around.
Amazing.
I am "bad". They are "good", right? Yeah sure, Joe says "I
know where you're going with that" when, after seeing this happen over
and over, I ask peoples' opinion on whether the underwater-kite project
designed by jet turbine engineers, backed by large organizations, will
ever truly enjoy a successful rollout. NO JOE, the point is I have a pretty good idea of where THEY are going
with their likely-false predictive statements - it would be typical if
they are raising millions of dollars and not doing what they say they
will do. Period. Odds are, at this point, they're playing
"fake-it-til-you-make-it", but without the "make-it" part. These
companies that don't follow through on their high-publicity projects
are most likely letting you down, me down, and everyone who wastes time
being interested down. Let alone people who are invested.
How many times are we willing to subject ourselves this level of
disappointment, before we speak up? There's a name for what these
companies are doing.
Apparently
nobody else realizes what's going on except me.(?) A hundred
sources repeat the false statements, and you have little old me
standing in the middle of an empty field asking what the result is,
being ignored and called names for even asking, by people with their
fingers in their ears, saying "la la la I can't hear you", while the
projects suddenly do nothing, say nothing, and the focus then shifts to
the next "future" "project" in
quotes only, since, well, should we expect every next announcement will
turn into a real project that gets completed?. At some point, we
need to ask ourselves: How gullible are we anyway?
Since
then, the attacks from daveS have never ceased. It's as though
you're in a fantasy-world of all-talk, all the time, where any progress
is seen as a threat to your own lack of results, while misguided
programs unlikely to bear fruit are worshipped in a religious frenzy,
since deep-down you realize as long as nobody has any real success, you
can posture as a "contender", even while not having developed any
significantly-power-producing prototype at all, the whole time, let
alone 10 years ago at the first conference..
---In AirborneWindEnergy@yahoogroups.com, <santos137@...
Sorry if Doug feels so unfairly treated. He did get good coverage by SF press.
