Kitepower B.V. team in front of their 60 m2kite (29 August 2019)
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his wife Elke Büdenbender in discussion with Johannes Peschel during their visit of TU Delft (17 May 2018)
Harvesting energy at the former naval airbase Valkenburg (29 August 2019)
Light trace of a pumping cycle in the night sky (11 October 2018)
Johannes Peschel Director Kitepower B.V. Kluyverweg 1 2629 HS Delft The Netherlands info@kitepower.nl www.kitepower.nl
Kitepower and the Journey Towards 24/7 Operation
Johannes Peschel
Kitepower B.V.
Kitepower is a leading start-up in the field of airborne wind energy, developing innovative and cost-effective al-ternatives to existing wind turbines by using kites to gen-erate electricity. Kitepower’s mission is to develop a com-mercial airborne wind energy system with a 100kW nom-inal power output that can supply 450 MWh/year in the Netherlands before scaling up to bigger sizes. This unit shall be integrated into existing (micro) grids, potentially in combination with solar PV and batteries, to reduce diesel consumption and CO2 emissions in remote areas to validate the commercial viability of airborne wind en-ergy.
To reach this goal, Kitepower’s approach is to ‘go out of the office’ as soon as possible and test the system un-der real life conditions. For that, Kitepower develops and builds the simplest, cheapest and safest system that will reach the goal. Their current system includes a 2nd gener-ation ground stgener-ation with a 180kW electrical peak power, a 2nd generation kite control unit and a 60 m2kite of the 6th generation. The 3rd generation of the ground station has a peak power of 160kW, and the 6th generation kite (100 m2) is available for testing with the first batch of kite operators already trained.
From the beginning of 2018 until October 2019, Kitepower has performed 92 flights on 65 days at their pilot site in Valkenburg with kites from 25 m2to 60 m2, and with ground windspeeds from 2 m/s to 12 m/s. One aim of these tests was to simplify the system and improve the operational manual such that trained kite operators can operate and maintain the system with ease. Another aim was to establish a remote monitoring platform that can
be used by Kitepower staff to supervise the systems any-where in the world. Last but not least, they aimed to fur-ther automate the tuning of new kites by testing them in various operating conditions such as rain, fog as well as low- and high wind speeds.
Currently, Kitepower is focusing on operating the Kitepower system for longer periods (see figure) while increasing the power output and reducing the effort for supervision. After this phase, Kitepower will be able to implement more pilot systems in and outside of the Netherlands.
This talk will provide an update on the milestones that were presented on the AWEC 2017 and a summary of Kitepower’s recent test results as well as the planned next steps towards completing the Kitepower mission: a com-mercial Kitepower system with 100kW average electrical power. 2016 Q2 Q3 Q4 2017 Q2 Q3 Q4 2018 Q2 Q3 Q4 2019 Q1 Q2 Quarter 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 Da y s
Actual flight days per quarter Cumulative flight days
