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For SpaceNut .... I found another article about the wind system you found ...
https://newatlas.com/energy/airloom-energy-wind-track/
The article explains that the sails drag a cable around the track. I'm getting the impression the sales don't revolve like a regular propeller.
In other words, this system comes across to me as a set of sailboats running along a circular track. I'm sure hoping other members will read the article and try to translate it...
ENERGY
Bill Gates backs novel device promising wind energy at 1/3 the cost
By Loz Blain
November 07, 2023An oval-shaped track supports a series of vertical wings, which harvest wind energy to pull themselves around in a loop
It looks nothing like a typical "fan on a stick" wind turbine, but this oval track with evenly spaced wing blades could be an enormously disruptive addition to the renewable energy mix, since it slashes the cost of wind power to unprecedented lows.
Wyoming's Airloom Energy has come out of stealth mode with a new CEO fresh out of Google[x], US$4 million in seed funding, led by Bill Gates's Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, and a radically different technical approach that it says fundamentally upends the financial equation for wind farms.
Wind turbines are getting absolutely enormous, with some new designs standing taller than the Eiffel tower, as some of the largest moving machines in history . And they'll continue getting bigger, because the bigger they get, the greater the energy incentive becomes to make the blades even longer.
But their sheer size increases cost at every step; the materials, manufacturing, transport, logistics, construction and maintenance budgets all take a severe hit when you're dealing with long blades, tall tower structures, and massive generators that have to live at the top of them and support the blades.
Airloom's approach makes everything much smaller and much closer to the ground. A 2.5-MW Airloom setup would use a number of 25-m (82-ft) poles to suspend an oval-shaped track, into which a series of 10-m (33-ft) wing blades are set, joined by a cable.
Like sailboats, which can harvest motion energy from wind in any direction except dead-ahead or straight behind, these blades harvest wind energy as they travel around the track, which is oriented such that its long sides are angled for maximum wind capture and its short ends are spaces where the blades can change direction as the rest of the blades haul them around.
Power takeoffs harvest linear motion from the cable to run generators. Where a regular wind turbine gets maximum torque from the tips of its blades and very little from the bits closest to the hub, the full length of each of the Airloom system's blades will contribute to hauling the whole loop around, with effectively a short break twice per revolution as they turn around at the ends.
Thus, a 2.5-MW Airloom track will fit on a single truck, it won't require enormous turbine tower cranes (or indeed the remarkable climbing cranes that are starting to pop up), the parts can be built in relatively small factories, from non-specialist materials, and every part of installing and maintaining them becomes easier, cheaper and safer.
Compared with a regular turbine, for example this 2.5-MW-rated GE unit – a 100-m-diameter (328-ft) fan supported by a hub held 85 m (279 ft) high on a tubular steel tower – Airloom says a wing track will be less than 10% of the cost, at somewhere under US$225,000. Add in the land requirements and whatnot, and a full wind farm setup promises to be less than 25% of the capital cost, at less than $6 million for a 20-MW wind farm.
And at the brass-tacks level, Airloom claims its design will bring the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCoE) of wind energy down to about one third of what it costs today per kilowatt-hour, somewhere around 1.3 cents per kilowatt hour – making one of the cheapest forms of renewable energy much, much cheaper.
An early small-scale Airloom prototype is already operating
It also promises to be far less visually intrusive than tall wind turbine towers, potentially making it relevant to a wider range of sites and reducing NIMBY opposition. It's capable of scaling horizontally, to the point where the tracks could run for miles, and the height of the system can also be altered to make maximal use of a given site.
“For decades, the wind industry has lowered the cost of energy production by scaling ever larger turbines," said Carmichael Roberts of Breakthrough Energy Ventures, in a press release. "Although this has been extremely successful in driving down overall costs, the approach now faces challenges in terms of both siting and cost of materials. Airloom’s unique approach can solve both these problems, opening new market opportunities for wind energy that will further drive down costs. We look forward to [new CEO] Neal [Rickner]'s leadership in bringing this revolutionary technology into the market.”
With smallish-scale prototypes already up and running, Airloom will use its seed funding to prove the technology with a 50-kW test device, and will move to commercialize and scale it from there.
We'll be interested to learn what kind of capacity factor these wingtrack setups will achieve in a wind farm setting, as compared to the average 35% capacity factor of on-shore wind turbines in the USA. You'd think that being lower to the ground, the Airloom system might miss out on the higher wind speeds further up.
Airloom also says the idea will work offshore, where the bulk of the best wind resources can be found. That's interesting; presumably it'll simply require longer poles, anchored in the sea floor.
Still, energy is primarily a cost game, and if this machine can pump out energy at a third the price of a tall tower, capacity factor won't matter, and land resources will become available. We're fascinated to learn how this idea progresses, although we expect progress to be painfully slow. And while it's hardly a shining example of a source, we were interested to chance upon this Glassdoor review, in which an anonymous and unsuccessful job interview candidate reports Airloom has been having "many issues" with their first prototype, which they've been working on for seven years.
Source: Airloom Energy via the excellent Recharge News
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ENERGY
Sailboats and sailing vessels have operated close to the surface of water for centuries if not millennia...
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Here's an animation (or perhaps a video?) showing the sails moving around the track ...
My guess seems to have been close to right .... the sails do not rotate around the cable. The entire cable rotates around the line to the center of the Earth.
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Where I live in the UK, population is packed in and planning application is needed to build anything. The same is true in most western European countries. But there are things that you can get away with. No one gets planning permission to put up a 6' fence. If a company could develop a fence that extracts energy from the wind, a lot of Europeans would be interested. The airloom idea isn't an exact fit. But the idea could be adapted.
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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For Calliban re #28
Just curious ... would the Airloom idea work along the coasts where winds are reported to be strong and reliable?
It seems to me they might be a bit less expensive than the comparable standard rotating propeller designs, but I suspect that remains to be seen.
According to the article(s) Airloom has been fussing with the mechanisms for 7 years. The track that carries the sails is under constant motion, and the mechanical support systems need to be robust. The cable that transfers force to the power take-off mechanism is going to be under constant flex so it would need lubrication. All the pulley mechanisms to support the cable will require lubrication. There would be a lot going on in that system.
I am reminded of the (interesting) transport systems you've described, that use cables to transfer loads due to gravity pull on filled buckets, while empty buckets are carried back up the hill. I seem to recall your observing that those cables had to be replaced occasionally, but it also seems (working from memory) that the lifetime of the cables was/is respectable.
The application of this technology on Mars seems speculative at best, due to the almost non-existent air mass. Everything would have to be gossamer in comparison to the Earth version, and the dust in the air would clog the mechanical systems quickly.
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I was thinking about the top of buildings that can support this design.
What I could not get from the article was for sail / blade shape, whether it was on a circular shape, whether an oval would be better or that the loop was flat lined along the straight away.
It did resemble some of the water idea that I had for the hillside at my home for the loop.
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For SpaceNut re #30
If you visit the company website, and if their web site is working the same way for you as it did for me, you ** should ** be able to see the sail configurationl
The have an animation showing rectangular sails that look like metal to me, and I ** think ** there is a video of their demo live system.
***
I ** like ** your idea of putting this system on top of a building. The towers don't ** have ** to be 82 feet, so there would be some flexibility in that respect. A large office building with a flat roof would be a good bet. Taking the idea a bit further ... a lot of ware houses and big box stores have flat roof designs, so this wind system might be a good fit for those.
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Granted the slide shows in on the ground but with knowledge that air moves more constantly at heights above the trees.
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