A Techno-Economic Analysis of Energy Kites

Structural load tests on the Makani M600 (29 June 2017)

Servicing the Makani M600 prototype (26 October 2016)

Preparing the Makani M600 prototype for a flight test (10 October 2016) 182

Nicholas Tucker Senior Systems Engineer

Makani at X 2175 Monarch St. Alameda, CA 94501 U.S.A. ntucker@x.team x.company/makani

A Techno-Economic Analysis of Energy Kites

Makani / X

Over decades, wind turbines with ratings measured in 100s of kilowatts have long since made way for systems in the MW range, with offshore systems poised to soon reach 10 MW. What lessons can the AWE industry learn and apply from this? Makani has been exploring many factors that drive wind energy economics in our own mas-sive scale-up from a 25 kW demonstrator to a 600 kW en-ergy kite, the M600.

Makani utilized the knowledge gained while developing and testing our 600 kW energy kite to inform a techno-economic systems model for Makani energy kite con-cepts. With ongoing testing of several prototypes and re-finement of our designs, we continue to look ahead to what’s next and optimize for future design iterations. This talk will review our techno-economic systems model, a toolset developed to evaluate and refine a range

of energy kite concepts. In the model we consider five key areas to evaluate the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of a system: capital cost, performance, mass, balance of plant cost, and operation and maintenance cost. Build-ing on lessons from the M600 development, we have created cost and mass models for each sub-system that scale with rated power and other key parameters. Per-formance analysis methods, validated by full-scale flight test data, have been developed to evaluate the energy production.

This techno-economic model has been used to inves-tigate sensitivities and optimize the design of Makani energy kites. This has allowed for trade studies across the entire design space, with some interesting findings.