I was ready to be all sceptical too, but I actually came away from the site quite impressed.
They seem to say that their wing tracing out the movement of the tip of a turbine, as well as operating at higher altitude will increase efficiency. They also have dynamic control systems to deal with variable conditions, increasing reliability.
As for your windfarm density reasoning, I think the vast majority of potentially viable land is currently unused, so achieving high density is not an issue now (although it might become one in future); there is more than enough land area to go around. Also they mention as a selling point of their system that it would be much more suited to deep sea locations than conventional turbines, opening up even more space for potential exploitation.
Concerning the need to build a scaled-down prototype, I think they mentioned somewhere that the pictures on their site are of a 10kW prototype :-)
About the liability in case of failure, they mention that they have implemented redundancy of systems on the wing itself, so in case of wing failure, it can still be brought down safely, and in case of tether failure, it can fly autonomously to a predefined location.
The only thing I don't understand is how they prevent the tether from getting all twisted up while still transmitting power through it (although I'm not a mechanical engineer, so there's probably a relatively simple solution to that) :-)
As I said earlier, I'm very impressed. This has got me excited.
Thanks for digging further, I read most of the site and I missed the 10KW prototype thing (it is the sensible thing to do, and I'm glad they did it).
The reason why I'm skeptical is because systems that are 'far out' in wind power have been proposed over and over again during the last decade each with even better on paper performance than the last one. Then as soon as a full scale model is tried it turns out the economies aren't there any more for some subtle reason (and sometimes not so subtle).
The wing tracing out the movement of the tip of a turbine makes the wing a turbine, there is no way around that, and as such it will be governed by the same laws, there are no exceptions from that. 1MW is not just 2 orders of magnitude more complicated than 10KW, it is probably more like 3 or 4. I've hand built a 2.5 KW machine, I'd be very careful to extrapolate my hard-won knowledge to a machine that is only 4 times as powerful.
For lower power levels a slipring arrangement is customary to avoid twisting up the cable inside a windmill tower, at higher power levels the mill is usually steered in such a way that the cables will not tangle.
I'm very curious how this will develop, I'm a huge fan of renewable energy but I've been around the awea boards long enough that I'd like to see some longer term results and at higher power levels before getting really excited. I do sincerely hope they succeed, time will tell, and google backing these guys is simply awesome.
They seem to say that their wing tracing out the movement of the tip of a turbine, as well as operating at higher altitude will increase efficiency. They also have dynamic control systems to deal with variable conditions, increasing reliability.
As for your windfarm density reasoning, I think the vast majority of potentially viable land is currently unused, so achieving high density is not an issue now (although it might become one in future); there is more than enough land area to go around. Also they mention as a selling point of their system that it would be much more suited to deep sea locations than conventional turbines, opening up even more space for potential exploitation.
Concerning the need to build a scaled-down prototype, I think they mentioned somewhere that the pictures on their site are of a 10kW prototype :-)
About the liability in case of failure, they mention that they have implemented redundancy of systems on the wing itself, so in case of wing failure, it can still be brought down safely, and in case of tether failure, it can fly autonomously to a predefined location.
The only thing I don't understand is how they prevent the tether from getting all twisted up while still transmitting power through it (although I'm not a mechanical engineer, so there's probably a relatively simple solution to that) :-)
As I said earlier, I'm very impressed. This has got me excited.