AWESome potential: Airborne wind energy’s opportunities and challenges

so I'd like to begin today by acknowledging with respect the lei Quang boom speaking people on whose neck traditional territory the university stands and the song geese and wisc Y malt and ways on mooch peoples who historical relationships with the land continue to this day so welcome everyone I'm Sybil site singer the executive director of the Pacific Institute for climate solutions here on campus and I am I want to note that this seminar as always is being webcast and so we also have people who are joining online and afterwards when we have time for questions we'll be asking you to speak into the microphone not so that it amplifies it within the room but that so so that people on the webcast can hear your question as well so with that I'd like to welcome Marcus Sommerfeld today who is our speaker and he's a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering here at the University and he's a research fellow at the for us at the Pacific Institute for climate solutions one of the fellows he graduated in 2015 from the Technical University of Kaiserslautern Germany and obtained a diploma degree in mechanical engineering and energy technology there he joined the Institute for integrated energy systems analysis ice Vic here at UVic in September in 2015 and he's now working on his PhD in renewable energy and very exciting I'm sure talk today on airborne wind energy so thank you Marcus for joining us today and I look forward to hearing your presentation thank you thank you thank you for the introduction so yeah with this great introduction I don't even need to introduce myself anymore so I'm gonna get right into it today I'm going to talk about airborne wind energy systems and I divided up my talk into sick general category so I'm first I'm gonna start by talking about wind in general where it comes from a little bit of the history and the current state of the technology then I'm going to talk about the outlook and the potential of a bond wind energy as well as the markets afterwards I'm going to mention some challenges because this technology is still quite new and there are a lot of challenges that need to be tackled that some of them I'm working on and I'm going to talk about my research afterwards and summarize everything and then we will open it up for for questions I think so first of all does everybody understand me in the room do I need to speak up in the back great okay yeah so let's talk a bit about the background wind energy has been used by humanity for quite a long time here on the left-hand side you can see of a very early wind energy devices or a wind turbine this is actually like a Persian design it's about two thousand two and a half thousand years old and what that does is it's basically utilizing the drag force so as the wind blows against these sports it rotates around and thereby this motion was used to mill grains and create and use for flour making in the center you can see wind turbine design often referred to as the Dutch designs about a few hundred years old and it was used also to mill grains or or to pump water and on the right hand side you can see a modern vertical axis wind turbine and what all these designs have in common is that they are fairly close to the surface and fairly close to the surface means we don't have a lot of energy energy potential which is why most modern wind turbines look like this so after a long time of development the technology has converged to this standard design we have a mono pile Tower and usually a three bladed wind turbine and this what you can see here is actually the tallest wind turbine to date it has a hop height of 150 meters and the hop being here in the center the nacelle and from tip the which is up here the tip of the wind turbine blade all the way to the ground about 250 meters and one of the reasons why we go high up an altitude and I hope this is going to work it's because winds on average and generally are stronger and higher altitudes now what you can see here is the wind situation today and we can also see the forecast and yeah at currently at surface altitude now blue meaning slow wind speeds red meaning high wind speed now as we increase the altitude second ah where's my mouse okay that doesn't work as expected there it is sorry sorry for that just wanted to show you that as we increase in altitude even in areas where we had low wind speeds before the wind energy potential and the wind speed on average increases quite significantly so and this leads to the trend which we've seen in the last couple of decades from early designs and very low parts of the altitude of the atmosphere to modern designs and new future designs that are going to come out that tap into higher altitudes and in general what you can see here for one is that the towers are getting taller and taller and taller but also the swept area is in is increased by large and larger wind turbine blades now the reason why we increase the swept areas because the harvested electricity the harvested energy is proportional to the wind speed for one but also to the swept area now that comes with a couple of challenges for one transportation is getting really really hard at some point you might have a great spot for for wind energy harvesting but at the same point it's unreachable with conventional means of transportation and other things are is our that the loads and wind turbine blade as well as the tower are getting quite significant as well as transportation offshore grid connection offshore maintenance of Shores another whole nother problem at this point so why not oh yeah so another thing is the the turbine costs here you can see a cost breakdown structure for a conventional onshore wind turbine in yellow gray and in orange you can see non wind turbine related costs such as grid connection Foundation and planning and miscellaneous costs and in blue you can see everything that's related with the wind turbine and the majority of the cost as you can see he has actually come from the tower and the road hood the turbine blades and there were some people who had the idea well what could we do about this how could we reduce the costs well we could reduce it by just taking away the tower well a design without a tower could look something like this which is a buoyant usually a buoyant is airborne wind energy system you can see two designs one being here on the left for left hand side you can see an lighter-than-air blimp filled with a lighter than a gas and it creates energy by rotating about its own axis and on the right hand side you can see another design which is basically like a balloon like a hollow balloon with a wind turbine inside well what if we went one step further and removed the blade now one reason to remove the blades actually that the majority of the energy is actually created more on the blade is actually created by the most outer part of the wind turbine blade because of the relative velocity is highest on the outside where's the inside of the turbine blade is mostly for structural support and to carry the loads so what is what would a design look like if we get rid of the tower and the turbine blades well it could be something like like this a tethered glider and he you can see three different system that I wanted to highlight briefly on the left and the top you can see a company called ni kite and they of course they use a kite which is a flexible structure here on the bottom left you can see a rendering from twing tech it's a Swiss company actually got funded or co-founded by a Canadian from Vancouver and on the right hand side you can see probably the biggest player in the market Makani and they use a rigid wing aircraft with three propellers and the way it's positioned here right now this is that takeoff and landing position so it takes off like a drone and lands like a drone as well I'm going to talk about this a little bit more in detail but for visualization purposes I've brought a little video and here you can see twin Tech's smaller prototype as it takes off in the Swiss Alps it uses propellers to reach production altitude and then at that point it switches into production mode the propellers are switched off and it produces energy through pulling a tether from a winch which you can see in a little animation in a few seconds so as I've said the general concepts functions like this it uses the propellers to reach operation altitude usually a few hundred meters that's one like two three hundred meters that's what they're as soon as reaches this altitude it switches into production phase and creates energy by pulling a tether from a winch and the winch is connected to a generator and if the wind gets too weak or weather changes it automatically lands again so what you've seen so far a bunch of different concepts and a bunch of different designs and I'm going to categorize them a little bit here in general we differentiate two different generation types so we have f1 wind energy systems here and we differentiate the ground generator and the fly generator the flying generator and these are then differentiated further first we have the fixed-wing Station fixed ground station as you can see we have a fixed ground station as we've previously seen in the video it functions by pulling a tether from wind from a winch thereby generating electricity as soon as is reached maximum tether length this whole system the whole aircraft has to dive down again at which point the winch is then reeled in and and then it reaches its initial position again and starts the production phase again so these this is also referred to as a pumping cycle a pumping motion because the motion of the aircraft is going up and down and another design that makes use of the ground generator is the moving ground station electricity is not generated by pulling a tether of a winch but more by the motion of the ground station itself usually on Rails or or a carousel and we differentiate a circular motion and a linear motion in contrast to the previous design the tether lengths here stays stays constant so we don't have this pumping motion more like a continuous generation and when it comes to the flying generators we have the crosswind designs which you can see here in the top two pictograms the left one being the Makani design a fixed-wing aircraft with propellers that flies up in the air and these propellers switch into a generator mode as soon as it reaches generating altitude and through the motion of the aircraft in the air these generators generate electricity aloft that is then transported via cable and similarly the non crosswind ones usually the buoyant on designs here consisting of a balloon and lighter that is filled with a lighter than a gas and wind turbine inside in my research I mostly focus on the crosswind design the fixed-wing ground station because our research has shown that they have the highest energy potential especially when it comes to scalability because scaling up for example these non crosswind motions because they don't make use of this higher relative wind speed that comes with emotion itself is rather limited and as you've seen earlier some companies use kites others use fixed-wing aircraft so all of these blue Li highlighted designs and concepts use different aircrafts that might be different sorts of kites or a fixed-wing aircraft or something in between which you can see here on the bottom left which is a semi-rigid kite with basically plates connected on hinges all have different benefits and different challenges for example the kites usually move slower through the air are therefore easier to control a fairly safe meaning if something goes wrong we have a soft kite rather than an fixed air wing fixed aircraft flying through the air uncontrollably but at the same time since they move slower the energy potential is is slower and for the fixed-wing aircraft which is when most companies are using right now as I said they move faster through the air therefore can produce more energy but are harder to control as they are so fast and yeah moving on to some potential markets so this technology is still fairly new and as you can see quite unconverted they aim at very specific small and niche markets at the moment most of them being off-grid communities that currently rely on expensive and dirty diesel generators and also they they might be in a location where PV solar or conventional wind turbines are just not feasible come like economically not feasible so off-grid communities especially here in Canada often have the incentive to move away from fossil fuels and yeah and other potential markets that these companies are looking at at the moment our minds often also in remote locations and not with the energy demand of a large city so this could also offset some of their co2 emissions another potential market this is something a German company discovered it's rediscovered I mean we've been using wind energy for propelling boats and ships for for centuries so far they are using a kite to pull large tankers or ships through the seas thereby offsetting or reducing their fuel consumption and also thereby reducing their co2 emissions from what I've heard is that since since fossil fuels are fairly cheap at the moment and these tankers usually run on the most cheapest and worst climb worst fuels that are out there these kite systems are economically feasible only in a few regions where the winds are also beneficial going in their favor however they exist and they're doing fairly well from whatever I've heard and another potential market and this is a company from the Netherlands it's called Ampex powers they are investigating the repowering of old offshore wind turbines and what that means is as soon as the conventional wind turbine reaches it its maximum lifespan they strap off the tower they take off the turbine blades and what is left is basically this mono pile and instead of leaving it out there just like this or pulling it back in or repowering it with a new conventional wind turbine they want to use this to set up one of their takeoff or landing platforms and use it to generate high-altitude airborne wind energy systems which is especially interesting as we scale up because for one we offshore that even if something goes wrong is fairly safe but it's also quite interesting because the wind conditions offshore are usually beneficial for for wind energies in general now as we scale up when airborne wind energy does not only have to compete with conventional wind turbines but also with renewable energy sources and co2 neutral sources and what you can see here is the cost development over the last decades for PV solar and conventional winter turbines in gray and in yellow and as you can see the cost dropped tremendously which is great this way we can have more renewable energy sources within our grid but at the same time for a new energy source to be able to compete in this market we need to be able to produce energy at very low cost and one of these companies is aiming at this little blue line here so they want to have a market entry in the next two to five years this data is actually coming from kite power systems they are manufactured from from Britain that got a lot of money from Eon a couple of months ago so quite interesting that is their projection and they see that Evon wind energy has to potentially be the next leap in wind energy production now I've talked about the benefits and the markets but I also have to mention the challenges because this new technology still has a lot of challenges that it's facing and I know this is this looks really complicated and it's supposed to be complicated it's just here to visualize what an autopilot could look like because if you want to reduce the cost if you want to show continuous production we need to be able to remove the human as a as a control unit or steering unit out of this loop basically so we need to be able to have continuous autonomous production and not only for a day but also for weeks and weeks and weeks and month month month and ideally years without any human intervention so what that means is that our auto pilots need to be very sophisticated and there's a lot of progress being made in this field but these auto pilots need to be able to deal with changing wind condition changing weather conditions and they need to be a to do this reliably for years without human intervention basically now another thing that I wanted to show here is takeoff and landing is another big problem as I've said these devices need to be able to land and to take off in various wind conditions so usually you want to take the device down when the wind is too slow but you also want to take it down as the wind is too strong so an auto pilot needs to be able to land safely even if there are gusts and strong turbulence in the wind without crashing so that the device can take off afterwards again and with this very confusing picture I wanted to show the the current situation in the and the regulatory situation and the in the situation for these companies because different companies aim at getting the device regulated and a different and a different names basically so some some companies say hey it's a tether to the ground so therefore it's a structure while other companies as well takes off like a drone it looks like a drone why not certify it as a drone while others say like well it's basically an aircraft so it should be regulated like an aircraft and all these regulatory bodies have way different demands through the - safety - reliability and and and all these other things so there are a lot of regulatory things regulatory hurdles and a lot of these companies have different approaches which also makes it makes them a little bit more difficult to enter the market another thing often is overlooked is that wind is not not only clean in a way that it doesn't produce co2 but it's it's often noisy if you're fairly close to winter when I know if you've ever been close to winter and you stand underneath when you can hear this the sound of the wind turbine itself and nobody ever investigated this for airborne wind energy devices technically as they are going high up in altitude the the sound should be less however you have a tether that moves through the air at the same time so there will be some noise coming from from these devices and it needs to be investigated as well as the shadow of these airborne wind energy systems basically the human acceptance of of these devices and as an engineer if if something can go wrong it will go wrong at some point it's the purpose of an engineer to reduce that risk and reduce the impact so if you can get these devices flying for years and years on end what happens if at some point the Telus Knapp's what happens if the material corrodes or what happens for example how large needs the that's the safety radius need to be such that no human is harmed and everything is it's still safe these are still questions that need to investigate it in the last couple of decades as winter months winter mention wind turbines got taller and taller and taller they they've faced more and more harsh weather conditions and as you can see here lightning might make for really cool pictures but at the same time they're not that good for wind turbines which is why they they usually have lightning protection but at the same time everyone when energy needs to be able to deal with these these weather situations as well probably even more so as they are high up in altitudes and another thing of course is is corrosion or heavy weather effects for for example how does an kite or an aircraft deal with hail snow and rain and all these this weather situation take at all on conventional wind turbines they wrote the system they make this structural weaker which means we need to maintain them at a certain interval and this is also something that needs to be investigated and contributes to the overall cost of airborne wind energy systems as well now moving on to my research and I hope this time a little bit faster there we go so I'm gonna keep this short because I wanted to give a broad overview of the a bond beam energy systems in general this is supposed to show certain wind situations measured in Princeville which is in northern Germany or northeastern Germany over a flat land so great onshore location for wind and in fact close to this measurement location about two kilometers away there was a wind wind farm and yeah so in red you can see these measurements and in blue you can see a simulation of this of the wind with so changing in wind speed on the x axis on the y axis you can see the altitude so what that goes to show is that wind is not smooth and not always easy to predict the wind does not steadily increase with altitude it changes every time every minute every second and it's different every location so as conventional wind turbines have standard models for lower altitudes we need to develop and I'm working working on this to develop a more more reliable information for higher altitudes as well so basically the main takeaway here being wind changes and is not always smooth which which adds a lot of variability in the in the wind and the wind energy itself and as we move on we want to sell these these systems we want to sell our energy to the customer we need to be able to provide something that looks like this this is a power curve so you can see power of a wind speed for a conventional wind turbine basically meaning we do our resource assessment at a certain location we have a certain wind distribution we can say with a certain with a certain reliability a certain percentage of chance we have at least X amount of wind therefore we can sell Y amount of energy this is for a convention wind turbine however for for an airborne mennenga system there is no like concrete power curve yet as there are so many different designs and so many different path they could take that this just doesn't exist yet so what currently what happens and what a lot of people are researching are how these these power curves could look like or how the optimal power curve could look like because these devices are flexible they can move around and don't always have to go in a certain trajectory and don't have to move in circles unlike a convention wind turbine so what you can see here is a path optimizer it does so each of these little planes or these little yellow bars here is symbolizing the airplane or the tethered aircraft at a certain point in time and what we do is we give it a certain initialize initialization we initialize it with a starting path here circle and then we let the optimizer do a thing and we optimize for example for optimal for maximum power production and what it ends up being is that it looks something something like this so it optimizes and it ends up with it with a different trajectory that could look something like this but for a different device it might look totally different in four different wind situation the path might also be totally different so here you can see when the optimizer does its thing we initialize it with a one initial idea and it will find a local minima after tons and tons of iterations it'll end up maybe with this path for a given wind situation and as you can see here on the right in green this is power production of the pumping pumping design in this case Green is power production in red is power consumption and after tons and tons of iterations about five hundred duration it ends up and says for this initialization point for this wind condition our power curve could look look like like this but that might look completely different for another design and might look completely different for another wind situation and yeah so this is also something I'm investigating like finding out optimal altitudes optimal sizes of these devices optimal paths as well yeah and that's already that already brings me to the summary main takeaways everyone wind energy can be the next leap forward in wind energy production it it is cheaper as it has like as lower costs in as it doesn't need a tower and doesn't need expensive winter my place as well and wind is changing wind is definitely different every time in every location and many designs exist and many designs want to get into the market and they compete in these these fields so currently I cannot tell tell you which design is going to be the winning one or maybe there multiple ones maybe there are certain ones that work better and certain situations but this is still something that a lot of companies are competing in so yeah and advantages there is a high energy potential and the wind on average is as high aloft and due to the low capital costs this can be hopefully the next step in wind energy production some challenges and I think I've hope I made this point previously is that we need to show continuous production continuous autonomous operation of these devices to be able to sell sell these devices to our customers and therefore we also need to demonstrate how safe our products are all these airborne wind energy systems are in general and that they are failsafe in case something goes wrong they will still be able to land safely and not harm anybody yeah so these are some of the challenges grid compliance depending on scalability of these devices as well as I said currently they're mostly aiming at operate communities that don't have to have this compliance necessarily or have different different needs and demands and before I leave you this is a quick summary of some institutes and research institutes and companies that are working on airborne wind energy worldwide and university of victoria this is this is us here so we also part of this community and we're working on hopefully bringing evanwan energy systems to the market fairly soon and yeah i want to say thank you to Stephanie and everybody to organize this great event here picks for sponsoring my PhD here at the University as well as the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany who helped me with measurements and the University of oldenburg in northern Germany who helped me with my simulations as well and yeah so thank you very much for your attention and I will if it will be gladly take any questions that you might thank you very much that was terrific do we have some questions I'm gonna move this microphone around and please speak into it so our people online can hear thanks Marcus I you might not have this information to ham but it would be helpful if you could tell me some well world records I'd like to know the world record power production on the world record duration for continuous power production by Evan winter for wind energy or you know most of these I want to know what's being achieved in the field in terms of power and duration yeah so when it comes to power most of the current designs that are out there operate in the kilowatt scale so they have like prototypes that are in the order of hundred four hundred kilowatts for example the Makani design and the thing I can show you a quick video in the background if you it interested that's gonna do yeah okay so this is the Makani design this is their latest prototype it's called the m6 I think it has like 600 kilowatts at which is flying right now that was their first flight in 2016 and it operated at an altitude of about 300 400 meters if I'm not mistaken maybe a little below but they're still working on this and other companies have slightly smaller scales for prototypes for example the small one that I've showed you earlier from twink tech had you had a few kilowatts in power however they were able to show at least 24 hours of continuous operation I'm not really sure I so I was at the evanwan energy conference end of last year beginning of middle of last year and what they said is that they could have flown longer flying longer but there was hardly any benefit to be gained at that point for them they didn't they were kind of trying out the new controller and figuring out and after it it was in the air for 24 hours over 32 hours they said okay it works so now we have to move on to the next step so I think what they need to do is hopefully find somebody who sponsors a longer flight and then demonstrate that it works for months or months and enter the market that way I hope I hope this answered your question very much thank you thank you certainly I'm Rafe sunshine from the BC sustainable energy Association and my question is regarding air air safety yep small planes drones that type of thing when you have this airborne wind system what do you see as the solution for such a challenge when it comes to air safety in general yes so different companies and different I think that different approaches that you could take um ideally you want to have a fail-safe autopilot that can safely land in case something goes wrong in taste for example tether snaps it might be it should be able to land safely or at least land somewhere where it doesn't do any harm and therefore I see for example the generators as Makani has may be beneficial at that point because they have these onboard propellers that can still control the aircraft in case something goes wrong I think this might be the best thing they they could aim for like hopefully safely land hopefully without crashing the airplane as well but other than that for now I think it's important to have a certain safety radius around these devices whether that is one kilometer radius or two kilometer radius like so would that be part of the government regulations for regulating such a system yeah I think I think that's definitely needs to be regulated at some point but as I said like most of these companies are not even sure as on how they want to be regulated and whether it's the FAA or structural regulations at that point is it's really hard to find so it needs to be regulated but at the moment they're they're still in the face where they should have prototypes they want to show for a few hours rather than continuous operation but as soon as they want to go into continuous operation they will need to to show that safety radius or safety features you mentioned also about the north Canada has a lot of Northland yeah and as you say it has a lot of wind potential so I was wondering regarding this system whether it would work for not only small communities but actually be able to produce energy that could be exported along to other communities right potentially as it scales up as it is now the scale of these devices is too small if we assume that it's scalable potentially yes but at that point it also has you have a way way more other players interacting as Wells who need for example a grid connection at that point needs to be able to be strong enough to be able to transport that much electricity from far far away distances I would say energy potential yes but there are so many other other factors that play a role here it's it's hard to say thank you appreciate thank you thanks Adam on ahend from our earth and ocean sciences at UVic so in the in the flight path of one of these airborne twin energy systems they moved through a fairly large range of altitudes and could be experiencing a fairly large range of environmental conditions other than just variations in the wind yeah so are these devices equipped with for example thermometers to measure the air temperature they're moving through to determine if they might be moving through an air column where they might have the propensity for the turbines to ice the icing was actually a mentioned at the the conference - I know that they equipped with tons and tons of equipment tons of measurement devices at the moment probably because their project has to occur because they want to get as much information as possible whether that is necessary in a large-scale deployment I I don't know it could also be that you want to have let's say you had a wind farm of multiple of these everywhere energy devices you might have lidar measurement devices that measure where the wind is coming from might be able to measure certain situations before they occur they were able to to change the control schemes for these devices before for example a gust hits um when comes to temperature sensors I'm not sure if they do I would I assume they do because I I talked to a few of these companies at the conference and they they want to get as much information as possible on these these devices so I think they do have that but de-icing and ice weather situations are definitely not to be underestimated I believe Ralph Evans civil engineering at UVic a couple of quick questions just about the potential of these these systems from very basic level so on the resource side you showed the boundary layers mm-hmm what sort what's the total wind power you can get at this typical altitude versus a more typical hub height well it depends which kind of device you're looking at if you look at like a stationary one then you would the power curve would look something like let's say you had a convention wind turbine but just extremely tall right the power increases with the velocity Cube so if you have a doubling and the velocity you have a quadrupling in the and no eight eight times yeah but eight times more the power sorry so with an average wind speed increase in these higher altitudes you will get way more power out of it of course at the same time density variations in density drops but on average you get way more power out of it as you go up higher that is with the conventional stationary one if you have these moving air one wind energy systems because of the relative velocity increased because of the motion of the device itself you could even increase the energy potential even more okay so you'd be hoping for maybe a doubling in average wind speeds would be plausible well I think wind changes all the time it's around you know yeah hard to generalize that at the moment what we found out in our measurements is that wind there are different altitudes at which the wind is on average strongest for example let's say in the lower 500 meters whatever them might even be most economically feasible for these device not go any higher at that point because as you go up as you scale up the tower gets heavier which drags the whole thing on you have more losses so let's say we stay within the lowest 500 meters which is still an wind speed increase of let's say 20 30 % let's assume that would still increase the overall power output significantly okay and you sort of answered my second question but looking at the the power the typical power curve you showed with the cutting speed and so on there's the standard problems of designs that they don't work well in low wind they don't work well in high wind it doesn't really ramp all their benefits to this kind of device that they can get around some of those issues well there will still be a cut-in speed this thing might not be able to take off when the wind speed is below three meters per second however if you look at the design that Makani is building they have these drone takeoff so even if there's a comm below they might be able to reach altitudes where the wind is significant enough to keep this device of float so aloft so there is definitely the potential that this kind of device because it's flexed because it can move around as it will to kind of aim for altitudes where the wind is strong enough however if there's a comm all the way up to a five hundred eight nine meters it will have to land at some point but you could technically aim for altitudes where the wind is strong enough so let's say you take off you find that you have highest wind speed at 200 meters you can produce enough energy but then there's a common 200 meters but then you go even up higher and can continue production of energy so there's the potential but you need to be able to measure this at a given time and you need to be able to control the device so that it safely reaches these altitudes thank you thank you and hello male icepick and thanks for presentation Marcus it was great I was wondering your devices a lot of them have at ever with the electricity cable down is it possible to remove the tether and have electricity generation on board with some form of storage or is the weight of that storage too great and where to have it the I suspect you without the tether I would assume that the third weight actually would drag it down too much at that point that is my initial guess even though I have to admit I didn't investigate that further that design I'd say technically possible but definitely quite heavy what we found is for example as I said like as you scale up you make these devices bigger they can produce my and at the same time you need significant Eva's because that the forces are getting quite strong and this heavy heavy tethers not only are they heavy but they also have a lot of drag so at that point it pulls the whole system down again and you you don't get all these benefits so these are like counteracting yeah counteracting the things get happening at the moon thank you basically you want to go big you want to go high but at the same time this is kind of kind of productive so it's it's really difficult to balance this and my gut feeling would be I think that's probably too heavy to keep it aloft thank you so I have a couple questions one is any possibility and of you know making the whatever the the form is of the of the device to cover it with very very thin lightweight solar panels to boost the energy by even you know 10% or so any thoughts on that um that was actually somebody who did the energy calculation on that who said basically what his takeaway was that you could increase the the overall energy production but the weight of these things as it is right now would be very good even if it would add a little bit weight would drag the whole system down a bit and comparing the the surface area of these devices and the energy that can be harvested from that and comparing that to the energy potential that is in the wind is just orders of magnitude difference because we have these the the correlation or the inter correlation but the energy is relative to the cube of the velocity so the overall electricity that can be produced from the wind as such it's just orders of magnitude bigger than and then the one that could be harvested by a PV solar at the moment so therefore probably not being done now thinking further one could imagine though that you could have a farm these airborne devices with solar on yeah yep definitely that would be yeah try and maximize I think this is a good idea because this is would be in within the safety zone where nobody is supposed to enter anyway so yeah definitely the other thing is when you were showing your modeling of the wind profiles you know what two questions came up but one was you know how much variation is there from you know this end of a field to that end of a field and does the movement of the device in any way follow the energy of the wind you don't I'm trying to say there can it seek out and it seek out these like high energy pockets of the high wind speed pockets yeah because as you say you've got Gus you've continually changing yeah it's quite interesting I'm Moritz dear from the University I felt kind of corny was from in Germany he had this idea where he wanted to position lighter devices around these these airborne winninger's systems and then he wants to aim for these these high wind speeds to produce more energy which yeah could be done but at the same point the question is do you really want to have this spike in the electricity production because ideally you want to have continuous production for a longer time and a spike in the in the energy grid is not necessarily what you what you want to have maybe the grid is not able to handle it so you might need some buffering at that point to be able to off this offset these energy spikes do smoothen out the grid input a little however there's there are other effects at play as well for example if you have multiple wind turbines in behind each other you have a wake effect basically the reduction in wind speed behind these wind turbines and for airborne wind energy systems because they're more flexible these let's say the wind footprint the reduction in wind speed is less significant as what we see right now in in our simulations but it's definitely still exist so there is some energy loss if you have like a farm where these devices are too to each other for example we have farmland out on the Sinai Peninsula they have problems with geese that come and eat their crops now I'm wondering I would slice them up with the tempeh I'm just thinking that it would be very fortuitous as the farm would be a certain area hmm that would be half of the potential for wind energy and it could offset some of the cost to the that the farmer might have exactly yeah and then it could also be a deterrent to the geese coming on to you is through crops yeah definitely yeah there's there's definitely this this potential we basically need to find or these companies would need to find somebody to buy this electricity right it's not only that we want to set up a prototype they just sit there and no we want to want to produce electricity so there's definitely a chance to set these devices up I believe and why not on farmland I think that's probably a good area if their safety it's always big enough thank you so you know we're so addicted to electricity I wonder if we've apps miss the point it's about energy and in the airborne generator it's generating electricity and then translating it but the other it's not it's generating mechanical motion right it's pulling yep so it's pumping so other other investigations where we might look at integrating the services provided by this as mechanical energy services are not electrical so great connectivity is not all on everything particularly in other parts of the world definitely um so what I've seen was that they in third world countries or emerging countries there was the the idea of basically building like a small taking a small kite that because often these smaller communities don't necessarily need like a big surf kite or whatever but taking a smaller Kai to actually pump water at that point and because the motion as you said is already a pumping motion so it could be definitely used for that and there were I think a few universities a one or two universities were had like a group investigating this I don't know the state of the of this project right now but there was what's that idea to and I think it's something worth investigating and could also be used for like if you have have a small kite if you could have it on the backpack or something and small generator on the back yeah why not no definitely [Applause] you

Channel: PICSCanada

Views: 16,422

Rating: 4.8709679 out of 5

Keywords: climate change, wind energy, clean energy, airborne wind energy, mitigation, lecture

Id: UiriQHZMcs0

Length: 52min 6sec (3126 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 05 2018