First of all, I'll start by welcoming all of you here to Strathclyde University and to Glasgow. I hope the weather keeps well for you over the next couple of days. You've probably experienced already that Glasgow is a very wet place. But for all that,

it's a really interesting city, so I'd encourage you to go out and have a look around at some wonderful Victorian architecture in the middle of the city. I think you've seen some of that. I believe you had a reception at the city halls yesterday. It's basically a

copy of a Venetian palace. It's all marble and gilt and very over the top. But if you like that sort of thing, it's fantastic. I'll start by just mentioning and thanking the team who organized the event here locally in Glasgow. They are members of the Wind Androgen

Control Centre. You can see up there. I'm plugging it because we changed our name recently. I'm just trying to make sure that the new name makes sense to people. Okay, so let's see if I can use this complicated machine. Before I say anything else, I should just advise you,

I know nothing about airborne wind, absolutely nothing. But I think, so I have a, well that's me. I put that up because there was a picture taken some time ago. It flatters me. I wanted to have a picture here, Fong. There she is. So those who, so you all know who

she is. She deserves the most thanks for organizing this, but also the other young members of our team, the young researchers, particularly Ollie. So yeah. So anyway, I just thought,

what can I, since I don't know anything about airborne wind, what can I do? I can give you a little bit of a perspective about unconventional wind if you like. But also give you some indication that Glasgow has had a long history of being involved in wind energy. And this gentleman up here, I don't have a picture of him, not only could a picture

of him, but this chap here, I think he was, he was mentioned at the reception last night, James Blythe. He built the first wind turbine. Now I know every country in the world from China to America claims theirs was the first one, but this gentleman I'm going to claim was the first one. Okay. He did a lot of good scientific work

early on and he had arguments with Kelvin about whether wind was a doable technology. He was talking about the same problems we've talked about even to today, storage, for

example. But his first wind turbine, there you are, July 1887. But that was what was probably more interesting, oops, I will come back to this so I get my fingers right,

is that this is an advert. I think, I'm not sure, it's a bit of a question mark. Was this the first commercial wind turbine? Vertical axis, so it's unconventional, it's in my mind. And here's the first one they sold, 1895. 10 horsepower, okay, I'm old enough

to know what horsepower are. I have to explain that. It's about 700 watts. Okay, so it's about a seven kilowatt machine. Well, if anybody can contradict me, I'm going to continue that claim until that happens. Okay, first commercial wind turbine. Unfortunately,

it didn't really catch on. You can probably see why, but it's a serious bit of engineering kit. Here's people on here to give you the scale of this. The work he did was much more sophisticated than this engineering looks like. And he actually did some horizontal

axis machines as well as vertical axis. Okay, now I've been in wind down to 30 years, but not quite as long as, I don't remember that one really. Crazy wind turbines that we've been involved in, this one here, multi rotor systems. There's a gentleman,

I think he's on the audience, Peter De Jemisin up here, who's been pushing these ideas for a long time and has worked on various projects. Now, it looks a daft idea. What you've got here is 44 small rotors, giving a total capacity of 20 megawatts. And there's

some serious reasons to believe this could be a way of getting to very large wind turbines that loadings are very evenly spread over the structure. For example, you've got a built in redundancy of one or two of these rotors fail or whatever. You can still keep

operating until you get scheduled visits to repair it and so on. And there's a little bit of extra energy capture. So it's an interesting idea. Second crazy wind turbine we've been looking at. This again looks a totally daft idea. For those up the back who can't see it, there are little small rotors here. There is no drive train up here,

all the power takers of these secondary rotors. Now, secondary rotors are not a new idea, but the problem you've got to ask yourself is you've got two sets of energy conversion from the wind here and here. Can you do it in a way which gives you high efficiency?

Well, actually you can. The design space is absolutely small, very, very small to achieve that. So small, in fact, that you basically have one parameter which you choose, then everything else from this follows. So it's a really interesting problem. Why might that be a possible

goer for unconventional turbines? Well, the conversion to electrical power is much cheaper. All you've got sitting down here is a rotor and a generator, and that's it. And it's a conventional generator. No gearbox, it's direct drive. Its O&M is much better because

all you've got up here is a main bearing and these things could be detachable, drop 20 meters above the sea, drop them into a boat, take them ashore for servicing and repair, bring them back, attach them. Or you'd replace them when you removed them. Other interesting things about this, it might be quite good for floating. Why?

Well, we've done enough work to know the total weight of this rotating structure would be just a bit over 150 tons for a five megawatt wind turbine. And the center of gravity is relatively low, center of mass is relatively low. So interesting enough to pursue.

Okay, other unconventional things. Eeyore stuff, airborne. And there's been, Hong has been leading the activity here in Strathclyde for a number of years. And if you just do, whoops, come up. So there's been several projects here,

and this slide is really up to give due acknowledgement to the funding bodies. So this is UKRI, UK, it's an amalgamation of all the research councils that fund science and engineering, it's oversight body. So there's various funding proposals, sorry,

projects here, which have been funded through that source. I'd say, I mean, I'm not going to bore you by going into details, but this is the acknowledgement of those. The one project was, is related to heavier than air. Sorry. This is a balloon suspended

wind turbine. This is balloons in a doughnut shape and the turbines in the middle. So that was the lighter than air form of airborne wind. If you want to find out more about it,

I would advise you to talk to Hong, don't talk to me. Another one is the kite one, which Olly has been doing his PhD in over the last three years. And again,

I would advise you talk to the experts, Olly, Hong, I again, you won't get any sense out of me, I'm afraid. So there's been, and of course there's been a number of different student projects related to wind. So I'm getting the big signal here folks. So there's been a fair

bit of work going on in airborne wind. Okay. So anyway, I'll just finish off by once again, welcoming you to Glasgow. Hope you have a really nice, interesting time. And yeah,

and it looks to me like this will be a really exciting, really exciting program. And I'm sure there'll be lots of very encouraging, exciting discussions between you. Okay. Well, thank you very much for listening to me.