Airborne Wind Energy on TV and at TED

Great exposure for Ampyx, SwissKitePower

After a protracted blog-silence whilst I finished my phd thesis (now submitted!) I'll now be updating the blog again whenever there is news to report. 2011 should be an exciting year for Airborne Wind Energy, with more new startups, established energy and engineering firms moving in and some exciting projects in the pipeline.

To start things off, here's a video featuring Swisskitepower which is to my knowledge the first feature on Airborne wind energy on French TV, congrats to Corey and the team for the publicity!

Also Bas Lansdorp from Ampyx Power had a slot at TED Amsterdam, it's a brief talk but has some nice shots of the kiteplane and probably the best shots of their winch system to date. They seem to be making good progress and Bas is a great ambassador for the technology.

Good funding news both side of the Atlantic

Ampyx, Makani secure governent support

Two more sets of funding have been announced this week, Ampyx Power, the Dutch spinout from TUDelft, who have been working on their rigid wing, ground based power generation concept (see pic) since '08, today announced new EU funding, to continue their autopilot development and the scaling up process.

 

 Makani power, the Alameda CA based flying generator startup, also have been announced as recipients of c.$3m of ARPA-E funding, see their announcement for details.

Back to light entertainment, new Makani site, new companies, conference news

So after that painful exposuse to some math, here is something nice to look at, Makani's rather fetching new website . There's a new video I hadn't seen:



Which is nice to see, not sure what the wing area is, but you can see the power output and windspeed in the plot, if you managed to keep watching after that stomach churning on-board cam bit. I might do a post on the content of the new site at a later date.

Also here's a new company: Kitemill. I know not alot about this project but given the name I would expect ground generation with a kite? And another one : Altaeros Energies, who don't have a site yet but this article
shows a logo and the scheme of operation which is basically a windturbine elevated with a buoyant & lift generating, passively stable enclosure/fairing like this:

Final exciting news is that Jianjun Zhang of the snappily titled: Guangdong High-Altitude Wind Power Technology Ltd. will be at the AWE conference. I'm sure everyone is keen to hear about that project. Registration is open for the conference and I would definately recommend going. The list of speakers looks fantastic.