Full story by Matylda Czarnecka here.

Milestone 4 stipulated autonomous transition from crosswind flight to hover mode. In this demonstration, the wing moves rapidly from high-speed, circular flight back into stationary hover flight and remains stationary for over a minute before landing. This demonstration shows the wing’s ability to regain stationary hover flight before landing to a perch.

Makani first met Milestone 4 on September 1st. During the short flight, the wing transitioned autonomously from hover into crosswind flight, performed six loops and, at a command from our controls team, autonomously transitioned back into hover. While hovering, the wing remained stationary, supporting the fully extended tether for over a minute under full autonomous control.

After working with the software for three months, Damon has concluded that the design process with NEWPAN is faster than that with fully coupled Navier-Stokes simulations, but comes at the cost of a greater dependence of results on manual gridding and reduced accuracy for non-lifting surfaces, such as the fuselage and tail boom. Many aspects of the code are highly accurate and useful for the generation of good aerodynamic designs. It is especially powerful when it comes to design iteration as it allows inverse designs on 3D configurations. However, the viscous modeling still requires careful checking on a case by case basis, and gridding is time consuming.

With recent insolvency and setbacks headlining in the renewable energy sector, and nations questioning whether their carbon emission targets are possible in the current economy, it seems like an especially hard time to be green. Putting recent events into perspective and pointing the way for ambitious and altruistic renewable energy capitalists, Powering the Dream gives us a history lesson that reminds us that we’ve been here before.

If you believe, as we do, that humanity must find sources of power that do not require burning stuff, more interesting than early wave power experiments or electric streetcars (though they are still intriguing) was the path Madrigal sketched out from the mess of policy and the morass of public opinion to an anthropogenic future of energy production balanced with nature.

Despite our present economic woes, because of breakthroughs in materials science and information technology, the time to develop ambitious technological projects really is now. Madrigal writes,
“It may be the wind and sun’s very imperviousness to human control and denaturing that has made them little-used energy sources. They do not fit into the modern project. At best, they will be a half-tamed naturalized power source. But information technology may be able to flip that disadvantage into a powerful positive. Understanding how to use the wind (without controlling it) may both improve power production from renewable energy flows and also provide a new model for how we can live in our human reconstructed world without destroying it.” [emphasis added]

Powering the Dream posits that new renewable energy projects, far from being a drag on the economy, show us a way out from the rock we’ve pushed ourselves under. Definitely worth a read.

A photo of Andrea’s real copy of the book, demonstrating what happens when you carry a book everywhere for a month, in your bike bag, with your coffee.

Energy Now, a weekly TV news magazine based in Washington DC, came out to speak with Corwin and check out our turbine. The show they produced was an hour long look at the future of wind power. You can watch the entire story or just the section on Makani on their website.