"High-altitude winds between 1,640 and 3,281 feet (500 and 10,000 meters) above the ground are stronger and steadier than surface winds. These winds are abundant, widely available, and carbon-free.
"The physics of wind power makes this resource extremely valuable. “When wind speed doubles, the energy it carries increases eightfold, triple the speed, and you have 27 times the energy,” explained Gong Zeqi "
Incredible progress on a concept that has been seeking investment for last 15 years. It doesn’t just provide 1.2mw, it also operates at a higher capacity factor than capturing winds closer to ground. I’m sure it can scale even higher.
This is useful for clean energy shipping. Design supports an unthethered airship that produces H2 and transports it at the same time. I believe the design would support forward momentum directly upwind, but some tacking angle would be supported.
This is not just a breakthrough in wind energy generation, it is a breakthrough in airship capability.
Meanwhile in the US, rich assholes are firmly convinced coal and oil are the future.
God I hate this place.
It’s late stage capitalism.
These fools are just hoarding what they have and trying to continue the « golden age ».
China will be the next superpower for sure
To be fair, coal and oil are narratives are being pushed by foreign actors too on the US. China knows exactly how to win a race, and step 1 is to tie your opponents’ shoe laces.
An untethered AWE cannot produce any power
Contentious. Thethering increases power production by restricting the “sail movement power”. The blimp part is highly/perfectly aerodynamic, and the betz limit means that a turbine does not fully “act like a parachute”. Ground vehicles that proved faster than wind speed directly upwind could use similar principle to turn a propulsion prop, that increases forward/apparent wind speed generating more power.
This relates to same incredulity for faster than wind upwind ground experiment, and needs experimental proof. But principles of sailing are indeed magical, and simply generating enough power to move forward is extremely useful, even if tacking were needed.
In all your examples there is the ground to provide a counteracting force. Maybe I am misunderstanding what you mean by untethered, but any initial airspeed difference between the wind and your system will eventually vanish and you’ll move along with the surrounding air.
I co-founded an AWE startup 8 years ago and let me tell you, literature does not support your claim.
…produces H2?
electrolysis of water (partially from starting water reservoir, and partially from air humidity = dehumidifier step), can displace water weight with increased H2 pressure in airship. Can put an infinite amount of these over ocean with no land lease costs, but moving giant ships solves the issue of thethering them.
Ha! Watch us burn some liquid dinosaurs!
- USA
Fossil fuels are from shit the dinos ate, like plants and other dumb crap. The belief that coal-rollers are cool enough to burn liquid dinosaurs is easily the single biggest lie of the oil industry.
Closely followed by -gestures wildly-
Lol, got your new advert campaign… Gasoline is vegan
I mean, they already rebranded some shitty vinyl as “vegan leather”.
Want to eat it?
Oil is solar power with extra steps.
Just cut out the 300 million year old middle man
The whole term fossil fuel is wrong.
And Africa, and South America, and the middle east, and Europe. Don’t pretend the rest of the world isn’t still burning fossil fuels it’s not just the US
USA is pretty much the biggest country actively fighting against better methods in favor of fossil fuels, so I’d say it’s an accurate statement
Meanwhile, large chunks of the world still use coal as their primary power source. Hell, Germany’s coal share is higher than the US’.
USA is pretty much the biggest country actively fighting against better methods in favor of fossil fuels, so I’d say it’s an accurate statement
From how darkly colored the countries are, the countries actively fighting against better methods are China, India, and South Africa, among others. Unless of course you don’t consider running coal as your primary power source ‘actively fighting against better methods’.
I don’t consider that, indeed. Bonus points for reading comprehension.
USA is the only country where I hear the president say that green needs to go and fossil fuels are the way to go.
Showing a snapshot of coal usage also makes no sense in this context. A country cannot just drop fossil fuel from one day to the next. If you check relevant data, you’ll see that the share of green fuel is actually rising in China.
Sadly, the industry is still very corrupt, where USA is he prime example, with the president is pretty much admitting to it publicly.
Showing a snapshot of coal usage also makes no sense in this context.
It’s the most tangible way to show who and who is not taking this seriously. Power generation used to be heavily coal in every country. The countries who have replaced it with better power generation sources are taking things much more seriously than the others.
USA is the only country where I hear the president say that green needs to go and fossil fuels are the way to go.
Meanwhile, Germany’s on-lining coal plants. Actions >>>>> words
You know who is taking things seriously? France. They are kicking fucking ass. And it’s because they went nuclear, where they get 70% of their power.
you’ll see that the share of green fuel is actually rising in China
Praising China for green fuel while their primary power generation is coal is fucking wild. It’s certainly better they are improving things, but until they do, everyone else with a better shade deserves more praise than you are giving China. Give that praise to France, Sweden, Norway, and Finland.
adding over 1tw of solar per year deserves a lot of praise. That they make everything for the world requires more power. Focusing on this is usually a pretext for doing much less energy transition work than China does.
Focusing on this is usually a pretext for doing much less energy transition work than China does.
Please redirect praise from China to countries who actually deserve it; like France, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. It’s just fucking wild to praise China, a country that gets most of their power from coal, for doing well on power generation while shitting on a country that has done more than them.
I’d be more interested about the cable that is going to bring all that power to the ground level. With traditional tech that would weigh a shit-ton. Light weight generator would be easy peasy compared to that.
They should do a Nikola Tesla and transmit electricity wirelessly
Maybe there’s energy intensive processes that they could do up there instead. Something like Haber Bosch. Then bring the products down.
Microwave death ray to beam it down could be fun.
Local residents metallic objects would shoot sparks every now and then.
City in the clouds
Where they’re keeping my crew.
Maybe over estimate temperature deratings and maybe add a new wind speed thermal pulling capacity. But more likely forgo European and NA electrical standards entirely and submit questionables value for CE approval.
Say what you will at least China seems produce some much needed tech in exchange for selling their people to capitalism, the latter which almost all countries do but in exchange for funnelling the 99.99 % of the revenue to billionaires and/or war (pulled the stats out of my hass).
Switching to renewables makes a lot of sense from an economic and ecologic point of view but also geostrategically. Unfortunately, Western governments have pretty much lost the ability to act on those considerations. This is due to then being beholden to a few billionaires who would rather see civilisation as we know it end than accept a few percentage points revenue drop for a couple of quarters.
It’s because the regulatory bodies are captured by the interests of the fossil fuel companies
They aren’t limited by democracy.
This is a factual statement. Whether people like how it sounds or not.
It is true, though lacking fail safes of a real democracy is a dangerous game to play in the long term, even if technically positive in an instance. As most autocratic leaders seek to gain continuous and more power. Or their predecessor does.
I cant wait for the conspiracy theories about this
Finally the stupid floating jet engine looking turbines from Big Hero 6, except IRL they actually look good.
Neat.
Any real reason you can’t fill them with hydrogen? A fire can’t start inside the bubble, because there’s no oxygen. If a fire starts on the outer surface, then it doesn’t really matter if it’s hydrogen or not. It’s also cheaper and slightly better at lifting. There is some more danger with handling it on the ground, but you should be able to mitigate that with safety procedures.
Yes the Hindenburg disaster had more to do with the flammable paint used than the hydrogen inside it. But the safety procedures when working with on the ground may be more expensive than just using helium.
Hydrogen is hard to contains long term, it leaks through most materials. I’m no expert on the matter but I suspect the gains in lift would be partly negated by the changes to the envelope of the container.
It’s a novel approach, but the Chinese aren’t the only ones trying to harvest energy from high winds: https://skysails-power.com/how-power-kites-work/
Promising concept too, but this is 250-500x the scale of that.
What matters is scalability and how much material and cost you need to produce per energy unit. Kites (either parasails or fixed wing) are much simpler, can be scaled up too, and you only need a simple cable that pulls the generator’s winch. Overall kites seem much more efficient to scale up.
How so, when skysails talks about “Venyo harnesses the power of high-altitude winds with speeds of 13 m/s and a continuous output of up to 200 kW.” while the S1500 is featured with “Inside this duct are 12 turbine-generator sets, each rated at 100 kW.”?
It’s more like factor 5-6.Their v2 product produces about 5kw at much lower altitude (weaker 9m/s winds). 13m/s is a big ask. They don’t go as high as 1000m. I was comparing to their v2 product instead of the 200w theoretical max of their v1 product. But the blimp may not produce 1.2mw all the time either.
Yah, we need to have them running to get real numbers.
I find both approaches promising.
Ways to make electric energy available without burning fossil fuel are good.
Edit: I was trying to get more information from other articles and got the S1000 (100kW) mixed up with the S1500 (1000kW)
They’re trying to get it to100kW. That’s like a pretty big generator but not a huge one. So this isn’t a replacement for wind farms just yet. The picture is from a year ago. No mention of costs.Would it be possible to use heat to get it to float, instead of helium? Heat it up with electricity.
The article says:
The S1500 features a main airfoil and an annular wing that together form a giant duct. Inside this duct are 12 turbine-generator sets, each rated at 100 kW.
That suggests to me (admittedly a layman) that each blimp is more like 1.2MW?
The title itself already says it’s 1MW.
Sorry about that, I got all excited at just a tenth of what they are trying to achieve. Oops
It’s all good mate, we’ve all got over excited at times.
Would it be possible to use heat to get it to float, instead of helium? Heat it up with electricity.
Sure, that would be possible. The generators themselves will produce some amount of heat. It’s also going to have a fair amount of passive lift, as it’s essentially a kite. So simply being able to maintain a rigid shape and effective airfoil could do a lot to produce the desired lift. If it were redesigned with that in mind, shaped more like a glider/kite/parasail, something to maximize lift, it’s possible that it could be done without a light gas, though it would also be more reliant on favorable winds.
I have to wonder though, how much the power transmission lines weigh, that seems like a serious limiting factor on maximum attainable altitude.
The transmission line question is interesting though, there’s a complex optimization problem there. Traditionally with wind, larger turbines are more efficient. As you increase the turbine blade size, the area that the blades cover (and thus power generation potential) increases more than the mass of the blades do. So the result is (generally speaking) a larger wind turbine is more efficient than a smaller one. But now factor in the transmission line… The larger the turbine the more power it generates AND the thicker (and heavier) the transmission line has to be for its entire length. To complicate things more, higher altitudes mean stronger and more reliable wind. So now how do you optimize for turbine size/cable gauge, and cable length/altitude?
It seems tricky, but like perhaps there’s just a right answer, an optimal size.
Can they preference the generation to favor voltage over current? Current is what tends to need really thick cables.
it is 1.2mw = 12x100kw
Did they actually generate power during the test flight?
“demonstrated 1mw production” from other sources.
Using hot air instead of helium would not work. The density of hot air is much higher than helium, so you would need a significantly larger airship to lift the same mass of payload (the useful bits). That and keeping the air hot would require constant energy input reducing the efficiency of the system dramatically. I’m pretty sure that system would be literally impossible to construct.
Hydrogen is simply the right lifting gas. Helium not abundant enough for sustainable scale. AFAIK, this model did use H2. Previous protototypes used helium.
[face Palm].
JFC people, take a grade 10 physics class.
How about you take a ninth-grade speech class first?
Saw this in Big Hero Six. It’s a crazy concept. Hopefully it works.
Cities are going to start looking like San Fransokyo (Big Hero 6) soon. Seems like an excellent idea though. If it really gets pursued, I wonder how it will interact with air travel, since I would imagine you would need no fly zones around these, at least at a certain height.
I assume they have designed these in a way that doesn’t adversely impact migratory birds
Birds don’t fly at 3,000 feet.
Some very few do, not sure if they’re in China though.
“Windfarms hurt birds” is 90+% fossil fuel propaganda though. Yes birds run into windmills, they also run into skyscrapers and houses and antennas and planes.
We should of course look for ways to mitigate that. We should not just pretend smokestacks do no harm and not develop renewable energy projects.
Just vultures, cranes, geese, ducks, kites, swans, condors…
They’ll hire Anna Paquin, she’ll sort something out.
And her cousin, Anna penguin, the avian consultant.
Shira, get me my god damned tea!
Very cool, and definitely worth switching too where it makes sense.
But there is no mention of cost, so it probably won’t be cost competitive with regular wind for a while, which sucks.
But the silver lining is that this is among the first of this type of power generation, and it will only get better and more efficient as the tech is built upon.
They did mention 30% cost savings. (these claims are easy to exaggerate though) While already useful scale, the advantages would grow with higher scale and high volume automated production.
Very interesting development. Especially that it can be deployed in disaster zones to provide energy - if there is a strong foundation to anchor it, probably.
