While in the US our brilliant leader is trying to reopen old coal mines.
That being said, there are American companies that have been working on flying wind turbines for quite a while.
We have working models. The difference is the Chinese can say “make it happen”, and they do it. In the US they say, “Gimme lots of investment capital and how can I profit massively off of this?” so it goes nowhere quick.
Maybe we should call them “AI power dirigibles” and people will put some money into it.
Ugh. Well, Makani was the company I was thinking of. They started in 2006, Google bought them in 2013 and shut it down in 2020. Fucking Google...
Helium is a non-renewable substance which there is a global shortage of. I wonder how much it takes to lift that thing 😅
Wouldn't hydrogen be better for lifting something like a wind turbine.
Yes, but I think hydrogen likes to go bang 🧨💥
No worries, that only happens if there's a spark, like for instance some static electricity. Shouldn't be a problem here, surely this thing won't generate any of that.
Not necessarily. It's not about the boom factor alone - hydrogen is a small atom, and so under pressure, most commonly used materials are permeable to it. It leaks through every material. It really takes something as solid as steel pipes for hydrogen atoms to not work their way through and escape. So while hydrogen would be cheaper to produce at scale, it's also constantly leaking out of any container.
For wind turbines, static electricity and storms would be huge risks as well, so the application of a floating wind turbine would not be ideal.
Yeah, that's what the folks who designed the Hindenburg thought as well.
Not once we get fusion reactors up and running, then we’ll be drowning in that sweet sweet helium-4
Helium may not be renewable but we can manufacture it from things like boron
People in the UK, mainly the coffin dodgers mind, bitch about how ugly wind turbines are they’d loose their shit about these. They seem to prefer the beautiful and discreet electricity pilots it seems.
Oh no, they don't like pylons either. They just want coal plants in poor people's gardens and subterranean power cabling.
tRump will shit himself (again) when he sees this!
We need better propulsion methods than Helium...
...but we don't exactly have other lighter than air alternatives.
What about a really big kite?
Well, there's hydrogen, but that has its own downsides. Like it's a bit explody, for example.
Not to mention that the flames while combusing are invisible by sight. It's also really difficult to keep contained and if it leaks it has ~11x the impact of CO2 per this article.
I used to like the idea of hydrogen as an energy medium but all of its attributes combined just make it really infeasible to use except for immediate applications.
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