Ah, it's longer.

Maybe let me just work.

Does this work?

The floor is yours. Good morning, everyone. Eric Lang here. Oh, good. You can hear me? Excellent. I hate it. Trying to understand when it's quiet. Thank you to the organizers for having me this chance to present to you some of the thoughts I have.

I have to say I'm not an airborne wind expert, but I will bring a perspective I hope will add something for you all. I'm at the University of Dayton Research Institute in Ohio, the United States. And we have about 750 people. Mostly our work is for the Air Force.

About half of our people report to the Air Force. But we do do commercial work, which kind of gives you a sense of us being a nonprofit defense contractor, largely. And I'm in the power and energy division. And my role there is to lead our projects on global energy solutions for the military.

I've done several of those with solar, wind, generator testing, forward operating bases. So my hope is to talk about how the deployed application of airborne wind might look.

So in a traditional wind situation, you're trying to optimize your cost of energy, minimize it. And so you've gone to larger projects. And maybe you'll pay a little more for smaller ones. But it's really just cost of energy in long term. But in a deployed application, there's a different emphasis. And that emphasis is more about mission capability

and minimizing the deployed resources. So this is a concept of optimization that I will try to build out in this talk, where the defense in disaster has really different requirements. And those different requirements have different design results.

This work is not just mine. It's this team of other researchers at different US energy labs. And I'd like to acknowledge their contributions here. It was called the D3T project. And they produced, over the last three and a half years, several documents that you might find useful.

One of them was this performance specification, which is a draft that you might use through the procurement process for actually getting purchased by the Department of Defense. We also produced a design guideline looking specifically at things you should consider when designing a turbine

for a rapidly deployed situation. So I refer you to those documents. Another study we did is we looked at how deployed wind might fit into a microgrid in a military situation. And this is a time series simulation and optimization where the objective was to look at the proper allocation

of resources for a given regime of solar or loads or wind resource, what would be the right number of generators, solar batteries, and PV, and how that would optimize out. So I'll refer you to that analysis. There was a section on airborne wind in that analysis.

And another analysis that was done was looking at this foundation. So we looked at a number of concepts for rapid deployability. And those things could be translated over to some airborne situations. So you be aware of that. You're probably all aware of the NREL Airborne Wind Report. And I also wanted to draw your attention to the fact

that last week we held a workshop. We had about 100 participants looking at deployable wind specifically. And the takeaway I'm hoping you're taking here is that there's a fair amount of activity in this deployable wind concept. And we'll just see where that leads. So as a teaser here, since this is the Business Development Group, I wanted to put this news release up here

where almost $500 million was spent on small generators by the US military alone. So it's not as big as the markets I'm hearing some of you talk about in the Philippines or wherever it might be. Islands, big utility scale, there's lots of markets.

But this one is less cost sensitive, right? Fuel can be up to $450 a gallon. This is numbers, orders of magnitude higher than what you're going for. But you have to meet certain requirements. So just quickly, the advantages can be obvious, the higher winds,

the lower logistical burden, less mass to move around. But the technology isn't as developed. So this is part of what this conference is about, is advancing that. Everyone here probably understands this map and what I'm getting at. But the point I want to stress here is it's not just more energy capture. It's a bigger geographical area where wind can be viable.

And when you're doing military planning and deployment, if you say it's only a small number of places, they're not going to be interested. But when you say it can be everywhere or almost everywhere and a reasonable availability, that changes the story significantly. So part of my analysis here is the logistics burden. I want to go through a little bit of that.

The military, they use 20-foot shipping containers, which you guys are already using in your industry. But they also use these 463L pallets that are part of the air cargo shipment, two of those pallets per container or that can individually be moved. So that's the unit of measure of logistics that we need to be considering here.

And they have the rest of the system, the trucks and everything else. So if you don't meet this, you're going to be really fighting an uphill battle to get your technology adopted. Oops, excuse me. So unit, it was also the fuel. This is what you're competing against. Why not just use diesel? It's going to be the answer.

So you get 250 gallons per truck load. And it's a dangerous mission and it takes up resources or personnel to get there. So setting a baseline, you can get about four generators on one of those trucks. And let's say an average load of 50%, that's 120 kilowatts of power being produced on a truckload of generators.

I'd point out that they also have these 800 kilowatt generators that are about a 20-foot conic. So I'm not going to go into that, but just so you know the space. For Airborne, I took a number of 100 kilowatts in a 20-foot container.

I assumed a 30% capacity factor. I know these are just, you know, for instances, we can go easily into more of that. It takes about four truckloads to get your average 120-kilowatt load then. But it only takes 30 days before you have a breakeven against diesel fuel. Unfortunately, we have a lot of missions in the military

that are longer than 30 days. So this is when this becomes viable from a logistics point of view. So something to think about. It's not money payback, it's 30 days. And I've summarized these results in this kind of a key simplified graph where, you know, if you look at the, here, this is, you've got one truck of generators

and one truck of fuel, and then every day, every 10 days, you have more trucks, and there it goes. If you look at the Airborne system, you need four trucks to get started, and you just need four trucks. So after 30 days, you have your breakeven point in logistics. And, you know, for solar, you're over 100, and maybe we've made some, you know, pretty good assumptions on a towered wind turbine.

You're getting near 250. So it really shows the difference there, and this is why I think it's very justified to aggressively get into the development and research of this application. So I'm gonna return to my theme here of mission capability versus deployment resources,

and build out some discussion on the mission capability in each of those topics in a little more detail here. Okay. So obviously, the first mission is produce energy, but traditionally, wind, you think of kilowatt hours, but I want you to think in terms of other things,

like how is that power delivered? Is it grid forming? Is it grid following? Can it do both? Is it flexible? Can it do multi-voltages? All the rest of that. That's what's gonna be required to meet the deployed military application. And of course, power is the other part of your electric bill, and it's not just the energy content.

And I believe these systems are gonna have to be hybridized with batteries, and there's some great advantages that come with that from a power availability and an efficiency point of view, and a ballast point of view. And then there's other mission requirements. You're gonna have to have environmental standards that are maybe higher than a lot of wind,

temperature, electromagnetic pulse, all those kinds of things. And then the cybersecurity, there's a technical report, a tactical microgrid standard that's been produced, which is the goal to make all these energy systems in the military context meet certain standards so that different systems can be interoperable.

And then there's other mission adders. These are all selling points for you into this market, radio communication link surveillance, maybe even material handling. Here we have how they ship and move things around, and there's this nice electrical forklift that has 250 attachments. You can imagine deploying that and getting a lot of more function

out of that one piece of equipment. I'd love to see a small airborne system that's put on there to recharge that, just to give you some ideas of how to think creatively to add mission capability, because they buy mission capability, not kilowatt hour graphs. So on labor, we go to the resources side. We've got setup and takedown,

and it really needs to be super fast, super simple. I mean, you can't go far enough with that. It should be as easy as flipping on a generator. It should be automatic, at least, if not autonomous. And you should invest a little energy to keep it aloft if that cuts down on taking attention away from the real mission.

And maintenance needs to be reasonable, and training. This is one of the things that stopped some projects in the past. Everything was perfect. They just didn't have training within the military personnel to handle a piece of equipment. So you need to have it be basically very simple to operate. And there's lots of good ideas out there.

I'm sure you guys can think of many more to accomplish this, but I've seen this system where they can just drop it on the ground and ready to go. I mean, this is the level what we're talking about here that will work, and I think it's achievable. This is a demonstrated capability here.

Land area's gonna be a big one also. So inside the fence, as they like to say, can't take up much space. That's protected. It's very precious space. So I think it's gonna favor a vertical takeoff or short takeoff systems. There's more space outside, but it's not protected, which is a problem of counter-attack, right?

And above in the airspace, there's gonna be conflicts between air operations, and it might be nice if there's some coordinated, sophisticated systems that allow multiple airborne assets to use that space together, and then also work with the aircraft. And kind of to wrap up here,

I wanted to say, I personally got a strong interest in seeing if we can get a test site in the United States. I live in Springfield, Ohio, and there's a special use airspace there that's for autonomous beyond line of sight drone operations 200 square miles with an associated air traffic control system. Its purpose is to test and certify autonomous, see and avoid kind of systems for flight aircraft.

Why can't we be using that to provide a solution that, you know, a technology solution that avoids this airspace problem that you're facing in airborne wind? And there's also the Reese Technology Center and Idaho National Labs to consider. At Idaho, they've got lots of space that's restricted to ground, so they're open to the idea

of having some airborne testing. So here are the contacts for the people still operating on that project I'm on, and here's my contact, so thank you for your attention. Thank you. So thank you very much, Eric.

Are there any questions? Quick ones? Dylan? Wait a second for the microphone. Thank you for the presentation. First I wanted to say maybe interesting because you're talking about rapid deployment.

During the lunch break, there's a student team from TU Delft presenting live with a video stream, an energy kite system on an electric pickup truck. So that might be interesting related to this topic. And then my question, I was wondering what you thought about actually with this saving the resources, because I can imagine when there's no wind,

you need something else, and because it's rapid deployable, they need to keep the diesel trucks or whatever other backup system always ready to deploy, right? So how much could you actually save there on the resources by going into kite systems or something like that for rapid deployment? Well, you save on all those truck trips.

I'm not sure I got your question. Presumably, you don't run the diesel generators, you run them off the battery system, and they're just doing that with the diesel generators with the battery hybrid with diesel. So you save fuel by efficiency. So the idea is you would get rid of as many supply convoys as possible

in the deployed environment. Yeah, no, I get that. The thing I was mainly talking about is the fact that you, well, before you actually deploy them, you need to be sure that you always have a system as well for regions that are not that windy or something else. So you have something ready, like you need the space to keep the other trucks

as well ready before they actually deploy. So you need two types of systems. Oh, yeah, it's capital inefficient. Yeah. Yes. But they don't mind. That's the point. They don't mind. They want mission capability,

and they can write zeros when you have mission capability. Okay, thank you. And they do. But materially, not efficient, no. That's the purpose of the talk is to make you think, ah, maybe I don't have to be so efficient. Thank you. Guido.

Yes, thank you very much. It's here. Hi. We heard presentations on Narvik before that there were some airborne wind energy systems going up in the Afghanistan war. And there was also mentioned that the risk

that the diesel trucks will be taken as a bomb or that they get catched by the Afghanistan warriors or the Taliban so there's a high risk that these trucks are gone. Did you consider this as well? You mentioned that the cost for the diesel

is 37 USD per kilowatt hour. But does that consider the additional risk by transporting the diesel? No, I mean, it's hard to put a comparison to life and risk, right? But it's understood.

And actually, in the military leadership, like half of US casualties recently, last 20 years, have been in supply convoy. So it's an extremely important point you're bringing. All the more reason. It's just another important motivator. Thank you.

I think we have to continue. Can you please keep your questions for the lunch break? Because we are already way over time. So thank you very much, Eric.