Kitemill: Past, Present and Future
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Part Number | 38 | |
Number of Parts | 43 | |
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Contributors | 0000-0002-4112-841X (ORCID) | |
License | CC Attribution 4.0 International: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
Identifiers | 10.5446/51050 (DOI) | |
Publisher | 0000 0001 2097 4740 (ISNI) 0000 0004 1936 8139 (ISNI) | |
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Production Year | 2020 | |
Production Place | Berlin, Germany |
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00:00
Lecture/Conference
01:06
Commercial vehicleModel buildingShip naming and launchingPickup truckWaffenleitsystemTurbineMechanicRail transport operationsOutsourcingSurfingFinger protocolCommitteeRail profileBusBass (sound)FirearmEngineGentlemanCapital shipEngine-generatorSchiffsdampfturbineCardboard (paper product)LastCruise missile
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:01
First, I will share my perspective. What we are doing is to introduce the fourth energy technology since Second World War, as I see it. First, it was nuclear, then it was conventional wind and solar, and now it's airborne wind energy.
00:20
Of course, we have ocean energy, but it's about to happen. We are not competing, but we are not walking in the footsteps neither. I will tell you why this is relevant later. I will talk about KiteMail, starting with the past, Luda had an excellent presentation about the technical status, and I will talk more about strategies and what has been important
00:46
for KiteMail in the past. It's not necessarily the only way to do it, the right way to do it, but hopefully it's something you would like to hear, and then I will talk about the present and the future, which is more ideas that I would like us to share.
01:03
It's good to have the opportunity to come here and present it. The first past strategies, when we established KiteMail back in 2008, we said that we will source the best competence in the world. We started with soft kites also, as mentioned, and we signed an R&D contract with Bruno Leggiono,
01:25
the inventor of kites for kite surfing, and the holder of the most profitable patents within kite surfing so far. This project lasted for more than a year, and in that time, we contracted also Kongsberg
01:46
Innovation to design our control system, and Kongsberg Innovation gave us access to some kind of attack in Kongsberg defense and airspace, which developed the first fifth generation cruise missile for a fraction of the cost that was anticipated possible,
02:04
so it was great engineering resources and a pretty large project we initiated there. Then we started with vertical start and landing, as mentioned, and we sourced competence in California. We found Transitional Robotics, which is a small company of previous employers of Makani Power
02:29
and before that, Joby Energy. So these guys have been working with vertical start and landing for airborne wind applications since 2007, and it was great competence to add to the team.
02:43
At this point, KiteMill was only three employees, and there was a lot of R&D happening, and it all happened outside of KiteMill, and we had a very big need to share the risk with the suppliers that was more competent than us to evaluate the risk, and we solved
03:05
that by issuing a sweat for equities deal, so we aligned the interest to succeed, and from that, there was a strategy that worked very well for us. And the last R&D strategy that we think is really important is to keep fixed test campaigns.
03:26
So in the beginning, we test maybe twice a year, and you came to the test site and you realized that what you have been preparing for was not the most relevant things, and that's not a good thing. And we started to test one week a month, and that turns out to be an excellent way to do it,
03:45
because you build up an enormous momentum in the team once a month. Everything has to be ready for the test campaign, and then we go it, and we spend long hours during that week to do testing. A very good strategy, and now we are increasing by testing more alternate weeks, and we will
04:04
soon get into continuous operation and have continuous man test sites. I will talk a little bit about some operational risk. When we started in Norway, we followed four large wind energy startups, having
04:20
found greater R&D budgets than we have today, and they were all unfortunately failed or about to fail. So in order to get any kind of funding, we had to explain why we will not do the same as they are doing. And we found one mistake that they shared. They all tried to introduce large-scale wind energy technology into the market.
04:46
And this is something we also seen earlier. We saw Boeing and NASA do the same thing in the wind energy industry in the 80s. They are not turbine suppliers today, while Vestas have introduced 19 models, less than one megawatt.
05:01
So that was a winning strategy. We also figured out that among the top 10 turbine suppliers, we could trace back all their product back to 250 kilowatt scales by acquisitions and license agreements. So we figured out that if you are going to introduce a larger model as the first commercial model than 250 kilowatt, you are doing something unprecedented.
05:25
And that makes us think, and we think that the reason is that we have to focus on operational hours. Before we scale up, we have to bring a lot of operational experience along.
05:40
And we are looking into this large commercial project coming up in Horizon. For instance, the repowering of offshore wind turbines starting in the mid-2020s. If we can put a kite turbine on top of the foundation, perhaps we can extend the lifetime of the offshore foundation with as much as near 20 years.
06:05
But these projects are large. So the first one, Hundsre I in Denmark, coming up is 80 turbines. And if we expect 80 kite turbines to last for, to operate for 20 years, that will accumulate up to something like 10 million operational hours.
06:21
And I don't think it's possible to get an investment decision from any investment committee or board unless we have maybe at least 1 million operational hours when we come to that point. So, and this is, this is of course challenging when we're looking three,
06:42
four, five years ahead of time. Then there was another thing we realized pretty early, and the energy market is politically enabled. There is a lot of nice market mechanism. But when it comes to introducing new energy technology, that's always politically based.
07:02
And back to the opening statement, this is something that really deserves political backing. And I think, of course, I agree with everyone saying that the off-grid market is a good place to start. We can compete one to one, and we can offer value propositions that are really relevant and good.
07:25
But when it comes to reach something like the repouring of offshore wind wave, we have a very big gap to cover. And the best way to cover this gap would be if it came some real large incentives for airborne wind.
07:43
Let's say that at least three, maybe as much as ten companies, got the ability to put as much as 150 plants each into operation. That would be something meaningful. And it wouldn't only be important for the company there and
08:03
then, it would be much easier for us to raise fund upfront if this kind of incentives came in place. And if you look into the history, you see that all energy utilities or all OEMs are born global.
08:21
All of you will be born global. That means we have to go wherever the incentives are the strongest. And I think it would be rather a new thing if it comes up on new energy technology, which not one country in the world decided to enable and to put the necessary incentives in place.
08:44
This picture is taken in China. One of these three large wind parks with more than 5,000 wind turbines. A lot of solar also. So this is real incentives. We welcome any incentives anywhere in the world, but
09:01
we would rather like it to happen in our home market. So this is why we will work with policy recommendation now and we will encourage all of you to be good ambassadors for airborne wind energy and help us to do the same. Thank you.