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Comment by scblock | Hacker News Reader

I feel like a broken record (to myself) because every time I see these concepts I immediately conclude they have no viable commercial future and are a waste of everything except enthusiasm. That's too negative, because that's how some of the old coal guys still see wind in general, but it's not completely crazy. History shows that something like this will get 5-10 years of development money, make a small scale working concept (maybe), and then go nowhere.

I guess I don't know what the answer is. Pursuing new ideas is worthwhile, but I don't expect this company to have real commercial success.

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Welcome to innovation and human progress. This is how it works, lots of experiments, a few winners. It's impossible to know what will win and what won't, so our goal should be to get as many meaningful tests going as possible.

This process is the answer ....

Well there have been dozens of kite energy companies in the last decade and they didn't make it

Yup. That might be because it's never going to work. Or it might be because it's just not the right time.

What are you talking about "history shows"?

There's plenty of technologies that we are using today that previously failed. Like touch screens, now they are everywhere. And pretty much ever single technology had naysayers saying it wouldn't work for one reason or another.

And yeah most of the time the naysayers are right. Most attempts to innovate fail.

But maybe in 20 years these could completely replace traditional wind turbines and people will see them as the non-viable technology.

We don't know. Hence the need for research and development.

The history of "innovative" renewable energy development ideas of this general type over the last 15 or so years. Wind energy is my field, and I pay close attention to these ideas because I find them interesting. It's also why I'm so negative at this point: exactly zero of the ideas I've looked at have become commercial, and very few are still in active research. Most have quietly died.

I'm not remotely disagreeing with the general need for research and development. But I am firmly of the opinion that it should be research and development, not something planned to go from concept to commercial with an aggressive timeline like this.

Maybe venture capitalism is just not your thing, I get it. Still, substantive reason, not paralyzing cynicism, is why I come to HN.

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