Kitemill: From Minutes to Hours of Autonomous Operation 2017

Lode Carnel CTO Kitemill Lista Fly og Næringspark

Bygg 104 4560 Vanse Norway lc@kitemill.no www.kitemill.com

Kitemill: From Minutes to Hours of Autonomous Operation 2017

Kitemill Airborne wind energy holds the premise to be the low-est cost renewable energy technology and has been in-vestigated for almost 15 years. Already in 2015, Kitemill showed autonomous operation in all production phases of our technology. Despite its potential, the technology has not been demonstrated autonomously yet for an ex-tended period which is a requirement to convince large energy companies. Therefore, Kitemill has during the past two years prioritised the robustification of its con-trol system going from proof of principle towards steering its kite turbine over longer periods of time. This presenta-tion will give an overview of our technology choices and show the development during the past years.

The implementation of new sensors, electronics and hardware has increased the continuous autonomous op-erational time from 15 minutes in January 2018 to more than 2 hours. The pictures below show both the nav-igational data from the kite (KM0: 0,8 m2_{, 6 kg, 5 kW}

peak electrical power) under several production cycles. Also, the impact of a change in wind direction on the pro-duction pattern is shown. The bottom left picture is the produced power data as a function of the testing time showing both the production (positive power) and return cycles (negative power). After a certain amount of time the negative energy from launching the kite is

compen-sated and the kite turbine produces net energy even in only 7-8 m/s of wind (bottom right picture). These re-sults implicate that Kitemill has now a pilot plant that can be demonstrated for visitors if wind conditions are adequate. Future work will focus on scaling our current system (KM0) towards a size (KM1 ś KM2) that can com-pete with other energy technologies but in parallel keep the focus towards demonstrating a 24-hours automatic autonomous flight.

Navigation data (top left) ś influence of wind direction on naviga-tion data (top right) ś Power producnaviga-tion and energy producnaviga-tion as a function of time (bottom left and right)