12 Stephan Brabeck SkySails GmbH & Co. KG Veritaskai 3 21079 Hamburg Germany stephan.brabeck@skysails.de www.skysails.de
Enterprises and Prototypes
Stephan Brabeck SkySails
Airborne Wind Energy is one of the last unexplored natural energy resources besides conventional wind turbines and so-lar energy. The first AWE technology visions drawn in last century resulted in several developments by teams all over the world. Form the initial research teams small enterprises were founded in the last two decades.
Stephan Brabeck describes the learnings of a small enter-prise starting with big visions on its way to becoming an eco-nomically independent company. As an example, the history of SkySails will be investigated and the different steps of the companies’ development with the individual technical and commercial challenges will be explained.
A short overview about the different AWE technologies will be given in advance of the session.
About Stephan Brabeck:
Stephan Brabeck, as technical director (CTO) of SkySails Gm-bH, has leadership oversight of research and development, manufacturing and service. He was born in Cologne in 1962 and earned an engineering degree (Dipl.-Ing.) from RWTH Aachen University where he majored in aerospace engineer-ing. Stephan Brabeck is an internationally renowned expert for ship propulsion. Before joining SkySails’ executive board in 2005, he was employed by Schottel, a manufacturer of ship propulsion systems for 14 years as development engineer,
director of R&D and acting managing director. An avid sailor, he contributes in-depth expertise, years of management ex-perience and exceptional market knowledge to the company. About SkySails:
SkySails is a green shipping pioneer and the first mover in the development of products that increase energy efficiency in the shipping industry. Since its founding in Hamburg in 2001, SkySails GmbH has been the market and technology leader in the field of automated towing-kite systems and the proud manufacturer of SkySails wind propulsion for ships. As such, SkySails has acquired years of experience and ex-pertise in the collection, measurement, analysis, and trans-mission of fuel-consumption, propulsion and weather data on seagoing vessels.
This formed the basis for developing the SkySails Perform-ance Monitor for shipping that was introduced commercially in late 2011 and starting the development of an airborne wind power generation system in 2012.
SkySails employs 50 people from a broad range of disciplines and specialties, including sailors, shipbuilders, naval archi-tects, software developers and management professions, all of whom support our customers in making fleet opera-tions more profitable, while simultaneously reducing harm-ful emissions.
