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Comment by datadrivenangel | Hacker News Reader

60 square meters of kite surface area is a lot of pull. 5 square meters can be enough to pick up 100kg in the right wind conditions.

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Based on the numbers from the article: 40 kW * 80 s / 500 m is 650 kgf.

So maybe it will work. Still I feel like as soon as you get a moment of calm it will all break. The wind may be very reliable in places but is it ever so reliable that you don't get moments of calm for hours at a time?

When there is a break in the wind, you reel the kite in, creating apparent wind.

You can, but in that phase, you're expending energy without generating any.

The diagram envisions the kite also being connected to a battery, diesel generator, and solar PV installation.

The real question is not if the kite installation or renewable installation is 100% reliable, it's a question of how much does it cut your total diesel consumption. US military loves renewables because it reduces the amount of fuel they have to move.

Yeah I see this as making a lot of sense for armies as a first customer. Highly mobile, reliable energy supply you can set up anywhere (assuming their claims are correct)

I never saw that in the Army, but maybe I was in the wrong kind of unit. I wouldn't count on good continuity between statements of the upper officer corps (political appointees) and the operational realities of the line of business personnel. Just like any big organization.

A sailboat typically flies about 5 - 8 square meters of material in the sails, pulling 3 - 4 tons of material around the world ..

This doesn't seem right to me, in my experience a 3 - 4 ton sailboat is around 9m long, which has a sail in the 20 - 40 m^2 range.

A 5 - 8 square meter sail is really teenie tiny.

Yeah, that's sailboard territory, or a small dingy with no intention of going fast.

Robotic boat, a large tank, some power-to-storable tech, a power generating turbine beneath the waterline and a huge kite. Just send it out on the oceans, to cruise aimlessly wherever the satellite uplink suggests favorable weather and have it head home when the algorithms assumes that remaining tank capacity might get filled up on the way back. Most attractive post-fossil future ever.

Unfortunately, unattended power-to-anything is very much a far away dream, despite all delusions of being able to do it large scale on Mars. All other technology is basically ready to go, and the "lateral lift" of a fast-moving boat is a perfectly adequate substitute for mooring when it comes to tapping wind on the high seas.

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