Our idea was to try to make this a little bit more of an industry of an industry event. So one of our ideas was to get the industry here together to discuss some topics. My goal would be to get out of these gentlemen here the things they did not say on

their presentations and let's see how that works. If it gets too boring, we can ask about regulation or which is the optimal system strategy. It's pretty open, so it's a test. I would also ask you then in the second half to

ask your questions. Let's see how this works. Thank you very much for Cedric for starting this whole cycle with bringing us some great news from the real world.

You will also be here to give us a little bit of a real-world check and a real-world feedback. What was your impression you had from the very first presentations? Where is Airborne Wind

in where you were? Maybe yesterday we had a wine together at the nice conference opening and there you said, well, why is Airborne Wind not there yet? I don't know,

this morning I had the impression with the two presentations from Empix and Makani a little bit of the reasons why it is a simple brilliant idea but maybe in practice faces some detailed

challenges. What's your view on this? Well, thank you. First of all, the wine was good and the building was magnificent. Second, I'm still wondering why it's so hard to move away from 10 hours to 10 years. This is still a bit of a mystery to me but I'm sure we'll get answers

from the industry because of course I'm not with the industry. And third, I was thinking on what has made the success of solar and wind so far and I think there was a succession of things.

The first thing certainly was to have, certainly for PV, to have niche markets in isolated sites. Now isolated sites on the global PV market is a very tiny line but 20 years ago that was

the bulk of the market, right? That was telecommunication relays, that was isolated villages, small islands, etc. And I think that some of these companies here are already targeting these niche markets and I think that it makes lots of sense to start there to prove

the concept. And then the thing is to move away and to scale up both the engines and the number of engines to go on the learning curve for cost reduction. And what's been done for PV,

I'm not sure if the governments will repeat it exactly the same because many of them still believe it was too expensive. But what's been done is filling tariffs, very expensive at the beginning, starting at 400 euros per megawatt hour.

And when it's open-ended of course it's difficult to control so I'm not sure the governments will be back to that. But what they've been doing since then is to say okay we dedicate, we want to have X 100 megawatts installed of this technology.

It's going to being technology neutral more and more and of course if it's technology neutral it will all be existing technologies and for emerging technologies it needs to be specified, not in detail, but maybe we want to procure 50 megawatts, 500 megawatts of airborne

wind energy maybe offshore as it seems to be easier to start with. And if a few, a couple, three, four governments were able to say that and to put auctions for that with auction giving

access to a 10-year contract, maybe not immediately a 20-year contract but 10 years would be good enough, then we might see both an interesting competition and rapidly enough

scaling up of the buildings, the facility and hence the scaling down of the costs. Perfect thank you very much. I think if we answer half of those questions we did a good job in the remaining panel. Maybe Neil Rickner, CEO of Makani. The first question was the simplest, why is it taking so long from a few minutes to 20 years? Was that the question?

I'm not sure I remember but that's okay. I would say we're working on it, I think all of us are and it's a difficult challenge. I think creating new technology basically from scratch is difficult

and requires looking around corners that are not obvious and I think we're all learning every day more and more. So I think we're all moving forward quickly in the grand scheme of, I think

these are brand new challenges in many ways and so therefore I think some delay may be expected but I think we're all moving forward pretty quickly in the grand scheme of things. On that challenge or on that way with the challenges, where do you feel is Makani and or the industry maybe just Makani now? Is it same like two years ago, three years

ago? How will it be in two years, in five years? We're focused on continuous unattended operations. I think that's also been a theme of today is what is expected in the industry is

for the system to be operating by default and not the other way around and so we need to measure ourselves as the industry does and I think we're all sort of working in that direction. So somebody else wanting to answer this question? Okay I can answer it.

Yeah it's devil lies in the detail, that's what I can say. So it's incredibly hard to operate longer because you experience things just yeah that you never think about like one thing leads to another leads to another and these are things you learn when you actually

fly the system and that's why we are yeah aiming to get as much as operational hours as possible to get rid of all these details and to validate our controls validate our health supervisor and get a reliable system in the end. Maybe if we compare ourselves to wind turbines

I don't know a few of you were here at the AWEC two years ago then we had Henrik's D-style saying well it was very simple we just put our first system there we welded it together and it just worked well maybe not for 20 years but at least for a few months and then

something broke. I think it took of course a very long time for us compared to that first welding of a wind turbine for the first product but how will this look like later on? My experience or my ideas a little bit, wind turbines are getting smart now.

We had to be smart or we have to become smart before we can sell our first system. Is that something where you say well it took us a long time until now but once we have it it will be

very simple. Do we have advantages compared to wind turbines? Yeah I mean what what we see like once it's working in a wind field with a given setup that's repeatable so we just have to cover all scenarios. Yeah I would say that we are on a fast track developing new energy

technologies. There was 10 million wind turbines in the US before on the 1930s and there have been wind turbines around so it was not Steve Stahl invented the wind turbine even if he did something very important and for solar also it took 50 years from the first PV panels in the

1950s until 2000 so but we never had as powerful resources as we have now to develop new technology and I think we are advancing quite fast. It would help to get more capital maybe into the especially when we are entering into the engineering phases where we have a lot of

homework to do with competence that exists out there that is known solving problem that is quite common so but I think we are on a fast track. I think we're just lazy that's why it's taking so long. We like to sleep in late and that kind of stuff but no I think so obviously

we are working on an intrinsically unstable system which means that you can't switch it off and then sit back and then start it again if something goes wrong you are immediately in an

off nominal situation that needs to be handled and I think that's for a large part due to the let's say the threshold level of your development before you can actually proclaim to have prolonged operational timelines so I think that the threshold for getting a

first series to work is way higher than in wind energy. Having said so I think that what has been proclaimed a number of times already if your game is to convert steel into software and software is intrinsically non-linear in its scaling your effort builds on the last

generation and so it has the potential to have an exponential improvement compared to your last iteration which is fundamentally different from conventional wind turbines which ultimately depend their scaling only on material so I think that's where our unique selling point might be.

Thank you. Stefan maybe for you simpler we now just discussed why it took maybe a little bit longer. You just described that probably the first airborne wind energy system has been sold so if we look at an industry that's a major point is to first have a product

and then be able to sell it. Can you say something more about your product when we look at you know how ready is it what are the characteristics what does the customer in your case the niche

customer demand and how were you able to convince them to go airborne? Okay we had the advantage that we had always developed products in close cooperation with the market uh it was in the case it was the case in the shipping industry and as well now in the last

five six years together we see with the markets where we wanted to place our product first it's important to design the product to a market if you have already a working system that's in

flying system now since 12 years and also fully automatic and also so it's a little bit easier so we can could concentrate more on the market before starting design this containerized solution for this special market and there we don't compete with solar or wind power in this

market we are competing with diesel generators and that is the focus of this market. When we now start as development for the one to two megawatt unit then already the kite systems already existing we had already a 400 square meter kite

with two two megawatt propulsion power and but there we have to focus again to for us known but also a little bit new markets that is the offshore or near shore market and there are additional requirements where we have seen the Makani so this is a spa boy this has to

be developed and this has to be you know safe and also from the movement calculable so that you know that your heave compensation system can work with this and all the things we did that already for the shifts but it's also eight nine years ago and normally so you say every

10 years you do that to do the same again so so the problem as i i see is competing with a conventional wind power from the price price wise and there is my recommendation to all of us keep it simple that's important because simple saves money thank you

um okay who wants to be next to sell the system who will be next to sell a system you was it once or will no we we sold a system in 2017 it's not in operation but

we funded it and the customer paid and they got the bank loan and a lot of important things happen but we we are working on the next sale delivery hopefully next year so if at least

there's a market if the product is there you already have the market to the customers i still wouldn't call it a commercial market so but it's to get someone to pay for the technology it's also important milestone so i i believe in the week grid off-grid market i think it's it's a market with a very high market risk which is why they are using diesel today

it's challenging market but i think ebon wind can really solve a lot of the problems there by increased capacity factor that's a problem for so long and wind and not at least that we have far less material bond to the site which means it can relocate the plant during its lifetime that's

that's i think it's an extremely important value proposition in that market yeah maybe neil can you i mean you have a pretty complex machine will you sell that would you sell it when will you sell it yeah we're focused on the the offshore space and we're

i'm not ready to make an announcement today but we're working hard to keep in mind our long-term commercial goals and and to move as quickly as we can to to achieving those commercial goals and the the m600 will be a product that's the size of

is that already clear the the exact number or the exact specification is not set in stone but it's certainly at the in the in that ballpark in that range we don't so the first

one it's not a it's not a whole new iteration or a new a new start no and and that will be you look at the offshore so that is you won't go for any other niche than offshore floating that's uh presumably i would say again we're we're focused on the the long-term commercial market

that is the offshore uh wind space as as the the overall goal and and we're going uh as rapidly as we can to commercialize in that in that direction yeah like i said in my

it's a very nice windy location and before we go there we want to be sure that we deliver something nice so yeah as soon as we have it ready we can deploy okay thank you so

to to get there both to the product and well then also to the market what do you think what would your company need most money partners time

people yeah what do you feel in in the next one two years what will be what are you working for let's start with neil again if you chose a bad place uh i think all those are great ideas i think uh certainly industry partners are

important we've had a great partnership with shell this that's been been very productive i think of course additional capital and people i think all of us on the panel would agree more resources in general can help you go faster and solve more problems

simultaneously um yeah i would say all those things are essential to to moving the technology forward i don't think i'm mcconnie's unique in that at all you guys want to take that yeah wind would be also nice

and a feed-in tariff that you mentioned would help us to deploy the system next to our office which makes it a bit easier than moving all across one ocean with a lot of additional difficulties involved so yeah yeah i think that's important to to work together

with customer and also government to to redefine minimum viable products so so that definition can meet our technical status in an earlier point of time that would be really helpful and that's why

i think that we should have something onshore and not in the week with off-grid market but something maybe a little bit more artificial where there is low operational risk and there's no market risk it's just about doing the basic stuff that would be the most best place to start i think and the fastest way to accelerate the technology further and thus we could have

been two years quicker if we would have the money at the right time and now we have the money and we are looking for people employees okay i think that was an announcement for people

here in the audience i think i just look at the the time so we started with 20 minutes delay so i i think let's start with the questions from the audience and is there anything i i have a lot of additional questions but

yeah hello this is gonzalo sancia from universidad calistro de mari in which specific area do you need help from academia

if any i'm not sure i got the question could you in which specific area do you need help from academia from the universities is that who who are you asking any any of you any of them you need any help because i i you said that you are willing to collaborate but

i sent emails to some of you in the last few years showing the capabilities of my group i cannot reply so i don't know if maybe the quality so maybe you've got your answer already i don't know no i think something important was mentioned in an earlier debate there but

whatever to to to really show the impact of airborne wind energy is something that everyone would benefit really from so so more research on that more publications around how how this technology can can can change the world and impact the world which specific area

help in dynamic do you have in control we need help of manufacturing no i think that specifically in those topics there is no real consensus yet i mean look at the different system dynamics or system architectures that we are seeing here today so if anything

help in modeling simulation would require some sort of consensus on our end i think if i would resource studies so there is not a lot of data available high resolution data available

long time series on the kind of flight levels or you know altitudes that most of these systems are operating at and so to make a sufficient strong link between available wind measurements on the one hand coming from wind turbine lidar data and extrapolating or expanding that to

well let's say the next few hundred meters above that would probably be very helpful and maybe to to add on that so we also realized that this is the one topic where it's easiest to to join the industry because it it concerns us all so we started as airborne in europe together with

university of bonn and tio delft a study on this so i think there it's yeah we should talk afterwards i i would like to ask a question to all of you and particular urban winter europe i think

what really kicked off wind and solar in the world was actually feed-in tariffs so it's uh developing market forces that pull and not push i mean at the moment we are in the push situation governments subsidize projects and then there is no commercial interest afterwards so we need to get to the pool and i think what thomas hartlow mentioned

yeah we need feed-in tariffs probably to kick off a technology like this and i i predict that we won't be able to compete with wind in the next 10 years so my question to everyone here in the panel and to the audience is would you be in favor of a feed-in tariff of

say 300 euro per megawatt hour something which is realistic i think to pull off this technology and would you be willing to lobby for it well i think we've seen last year with the achoris assessment and the conclusions and recommendations coming towards the european

committee that there is a realization that any uptake of energy technology would require a phase of subsidized production to what level those feed-in tariffs or whatever scheme it is need to be implemented is probably a matter of debates between governments but i do think that

that broader realization also towards the broader public is important i mean we've seen the public opinion flip on wind energy due to the feed-in tariffs and i think we should learn from that as well and not repeat the same mistake and maybe at the same time it's essential so it's

a matter of balancing so indeed i mean we do try to do the work of lobbying in brussels and there we got the one question is not well why are you so expensive or or you know you are late or well show us that it works and i think really once we show that it works whatever that

means we could ask that also when does it work when is it proven that it works there is a realization in europe that this could be a game changer of course different people in different departments have different views on this but and we are

of course also working to help to this realization and then we would have to ask well what is the right incentive but to ask for a 300 euro subsidy for technology where

we cannot produce the first products yet i think would be a little bit immature but indeed there's this realization and and this is part of why we are here to to work for for some kind of support scheme thanks i think it would not be illegitimate to ask for

specific feed-in tariff for an emerging area of technology especially as in fact the risk will be limited if you ask for a given capacity so it's not open-ended as where the feed-in tariffs at the beginning and second because if it doesn't work you won't pay

so the risk is not for the government that put on the feed-in tariffs the risk is for the developers and the problem will be to get money from the banks at an acceptable rate if the technology is not proven i mean one of the big reasons of the success of solar and wind

today is that it's well proven and therefore you can borrow for a very low rate nowadays but over 10 years or 15 years or sometimes even more but this requires first a demonstration so in fact you're just about to enter the valley of death right between

good luck between developments between research and and diffusion you have the development phase where you need more and more money to make bigger and bigger and longer and experiments but it's where it's precisely difficult to to get the money but indeed

feed-in tariff would not be out out of the discussion i think and you don't need to have 180 governments doing that you need to have a handful of them that's that's enough

uh so i i think we could try to contribute a little bit at the ia we you know you may know we have about 40 uh technology collaboration programs um one on the wind uh i i heard that the uh

at the last uh executive committee meeting uh olan snell made a very good presentation so they started discussing creating a new task on airborne wind energy from my experience

the implementing agreement well the technology collaboration program that's a new name i know best was solar paces it was created in 77 and has been very instrumental in bringing together the industry and governments and allowing for the uh an essence of the uh the birth of the

concentrating solar power industry in in california in the 80s and then in spain and then elsewhere because it's a place where industry and governments can discuss together about the regimentation the regulation the uh the barriers that they face etc and try to find

some common grounds between industry and governments so i i'll do what i can in the little time i will stay at the ia uh to to help uh the ia wind technology collaboration program create this new task with a few governments and hopefully a few uh sponsors from the industry they start

by claiming a little money but i think it would be an interesting uh it would help it could help thank you thank you that's kiddo litch um a question i would like to address directly to stephan uh stephan we have seen that sky sales has been in very shaky waters

a lot of years and now you make a tremendous comeback where i congratulate you too and it's very very good to see how sky sales now is developing and a few objects ago you made the talk and you gave some hints to startups and to somebody who just is just thinking about making

or founding a startup and which i appreciated at that time very very much so from your point of view right now we said come back uh are there other hints you wanted to share or to to give to somebody in the auditorium who is just thinking about funding an rve company or

has just funded his new startup and uh also if the other uh participants from the panel could address one or two points which they think which is very important if you're just building up a startup or if you just have built it up a startup and if you want to give

them two or three points how to which mistakes they should avoid i would appreciate that very much okay at first never ever give up that's that's important and um on there i think there are two stable factors in our in our history we have from the beginning uh when we started

with the ships we have uh one or two investors which are constantly uh have been on our side private people private money and on the other side we made also several experiences with

bigger companies investing money or wanted to invest money and so that is we have seen that we as a company are too small to fit in their picture of a startup so i would recommend look

for private capital and that is one rule the other the second rule is care of your team we had bad times and but all i think about 30 people joined us through this time on and off working or not working waiting for working again and that it was

only possible that we cared about our team all the time before and after that is very important

be aware that you're naive both in time and money so multiply the amount of time you expect this to take by 10 multiply the amount of money by 100 you're close maybe a follow-up

question on uh on the previous topic about the field in terrace so i think it was very nice in presentation from serif filibert that you showed that actually there's other means to reduce the co2 emissions and that the focus is not only on energy our electricity but we should also think

about co2 emissions so um if maybe um as an alternative to the feed-in terrorists if there are specific means to use airborne energy technology to reduce co2 emissions and to get actually a co2 taxation or get basically the help in funding through this reasoning so what

what would be the position from the different panelists on this so how could that the co2 discussion be put strongly in focus and maybe that helps to get more money from government through that discussion well i think one thing i really liked is is also from from stephan the

the product on the ship which is a niche market in itself definitely you won't put a wind turbine there and it it directly replaces diesel so i think that could be a really really interesting

one um maybe if i if i could rephrase your question a little bit one of the really great and and maybe then this could also be the final round i think um the what we had a little bit a problem was from 10 years ago the big the big theme was renewables are too expensive

right so we need cheap renewables and this was why a lot of us came into airborne wind energy now we have this great great news from the other renewables well if you are competing and just had your study out where you showed five years ago that you might be able to produce at

six kilowatt cents that study doesn't look so good right now it will look even worse in five years so i think if you look for the basic points well no matter how cheap wind is we will still need you know much less material but does this impact the whole airborne wind energy

situation from you how do you look here in in in the future um or does it only make mean we have to speed up a little bit maybe slightly related i think that's um

uh we've seen that there is interest from a large industry partners recently with between mechanic and shell and i think that those parties themselves will have a future vision as well

that might not necessarily coincide with our internal world view and so the let's say the realization of um power to power to gas conversion has been made by the people that have the biggest problem from their internal markets and i think that that's that's a collaboration or coexistence

will probably help you shape your future vision more than discussing it within an internal audience then one last word to you you open it you can close down the

we are a little bit so maybe we should not talk to about true feeding tariffs because it's it's it sounds bad now to governments but if you look at the comparison with pv i mean it started 10 years ago as being the most expensive but it has

potential to go to be the least expensive and we have to make the same case and say what we need in between is some procurement by some governments uh which is massive compared to our scales uh or the scale of the industry today which which is not massive compared to the

need of the of the countries of the systems which is 10 megawatt or 100 megawatts so it's it's again if it won't work you you do proc competitive procurement and if it doesn't work you don't pay so for the government should be a no-brainer and if it works then it can prove maybe it won't it

won't work but if it works it gives a novel possibility that indeed extends far to the possibility to decarbonize the global economy thank you very much i will take that just as you said it so airborne wind energy is the pv of the wind industry so uh to a great future thank

you very much for your time and now we go to the posters thank you for all the time