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Saw this in Big Hero Six. It's a crazy concept. Hopefully it works.
It looks like a boss bloon from BTD6 lol
This is totally breaking loose and heading toward the nearest city in the final act.
Very interesting development. Especially that it can be deployed in disaster zones to provide energy - if there is a strong foundation to anchor it, probably.
Very cool, and definitely worth switching too where it makes sense.
But there is no mention of cost, so it probably won't be cost competitive with regular wind for a while, which sucks.
But the silver lining is that this is among the first of this type of power generation, and it will only get better and more efficient as the tech is built upon.
They did mention 30% cost savings. (these claims are easy to exaggerate though) While already useful scale, the advantages would grow with higher scale and high volume automated production.
Cities are going to start looking like San Fransokyo (Big Hero 6) soon. Seems like an excellent idea though. If it really gets pursued, I wonder how it will interact with air travel, since I would imagine you would need no fly zones around these, at least at a certain height.
With a traditional wind turbine, if the wind speeds get too high, the turbine locks the rotation and feathers the blades. For the airship however, people will have to manually take it down and later erect it again. Hopefully they get to it in time, otherwise it's going to violently take itself down and/or fly off. Either way, that is a bunch of extra cost incurred on a regular basis.
Strikes me as an impractical solution.
A wind turbine automatically feathers. Why can't the airship automatically raise and lower itself?
With modern forecasting, getting it's height right shouldn't be too hard?
Why can’t the airship automatically raise and lower itself?
It doesn't just need to be lowered, that would leave it exposed still. It needs to deflated/reinflated every storm, while also having someone strap the carefully folded deflated bits down, or put itself into a very expensive massive hangar every storm. Are these possible, yes, but again, it needs to be economical, not just possible.
Weather has always been a severe issue with airships. It's the main reason you don't see them filling the sky.
That looks like a giant...
Austin Powers sketch
Shira, get me my god damned tea!
