Just because Bitanica gets it right, doesn't mean the broader world understands it.

His complaint is that too many people think of it as a 'degree to get coding' and it's more than that. You seem to agree with that, though maybe room to quibble over the nuance of what more it is or how it should be described.

Yes, it does need an exclusion zone, it is laid out in their page:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthekitepower.com%2Fthe-f...

They also note that the flight zone can be used for multiple purposes, subject to limitations.

While Agrivoltaics is a thing, trying to discuss how much power output per area becomes tricky. They are splitting the sun between the crops and panels and so that ability to get 10kw in 40m2 becomes who knows how much more land depending on which approach is selected. It's just a statement that sparse panels might mike good shade for livestock, or that being at a *super* suboptimal angle allows enough light for the plants, while tanking the efficiency of the panels so you are spending way more per kw than deploying them optimally.

Of course, while they mention agriculture, their main scenario seems to be a medium term rental for a project site, which they tout as quick as a big diesel generator but without the emissions. So they are thinking about not needing a project to deploy the solar before doing the actual project when compared to solar, and then having to take down the solar. I'm not sure, practically speaking, the "green" ness is enough to move people away from the status quo of big diesel for such projects,particluraly since they do need the flight zone left clear of structures and the "potential" flight zone seems like a big risk for any construction you might do, even if you could spare the "flight zone" from active work.

It's interesting that India is a democracy and has managed to do this 5 years ahead of their goal. Their goal wasn't as aggressive as China's, but still.

It's a good sign because it proves that democracies can do this kind of thing. Of course for India it's been a massive benefit. Not just cleaner air, but lots of jobs in manufacturing and installation. It has helped develop their energy grid too, improving it and getting power to under-served areas. They have new micro and mini grids too.

It's a shame so many developed nations haven't taken this huge economic opportunity.

Probably the difficulty of connecting them to the grid. Most places there is paperwork to do, so they end up not being very temporary or agile.

It may be possible to improve the car parks with solar panels to use as shade, and the installation of some chargers.

Agreed, the move to call them "reasoning" models annoys me.

They basically just go "generate even *more* text and only provide the last bit. Basically to write a story about what "thinking" about the question would look like, which does seem to produce marginally better final output at the expense of an order of magnitude more tokens expended.

But then you look at the "reasoning" chain and you'll see mistakes that, if it were really a reasoning chain, would propagate to next step of the "reasoning" process, but frequently they are anomalies and the next text is generated as if the previous text said the correct thing.

Seems to be that they established that expending more tokens and disposing of most of it causes better results, and that the content to be ignored cosmetically resembles a reasoning chain when it's all correct and consistent, but the errors don't propagate in a way that would be consistent with that truth.

I think the point was that with solar, that area can have bulidings or "I don't care about what's underneath", but it can't be deployed and have the land also be used for farming. In the kite scenario, the land can do double duty for some things, like agriculture, so long as you land and secure the airfoil during times when you want people in the flight zone.

So you give up 20m2 to get 100kw of wind power with a large 'no people should usually be here' area, but plants, sure. To do the same with solar, you'd need about 745 m2 of non-farm land available, though that can include roof tops, though angle may be suboptimal.

Looks like they claim 30kw for current product, and 100kw for an iteration coming soon, rather than 10kw. Also for 10kw, we are talking about 40 square meters of area, and the base station for these is about 20 square meters, and yes this is still comparing just the base station of one to total footprint of the other, and if we compared total deployed area, then solar *easily* wins in every factor except for all I know cost.

However while the total area may be pretty large, the area doesn't have to be as cleared or denied sunlight. So you might get to ignore the overall volume for some applications. So it might be fair to compare the ground station footprint to solar footprint.

For example you have a farm where the land is valuable for crops, but you could abide an airfoil around when the fields aren't being worked, or are being worked by pure automation. When you need the flight area worked, you can probably easily land the airfoil for that duration, and then return it to operation when that is done.

Conversely, useless in urban or suburban scenarios but solar is trivial to deploy there.

So if you have a bunch of effectively wasteland, I think this is unlikely to make any sense. But if you have a nuanced land area where people don't need to be, but you do want the land for other purposes, I could see this kite scenario playing out.

But also multiple houses' worth of typical consumption. Could be useful for something like a festival where they would traditionally have diesel generators on-site.

They don't have DMCA like laws though. Reverse engineering and breaking copy protection is still legal in the UK, for example.

These are not for long term use, they are temporary installations, highly portable.

The output is max 30kW, with a 100kW version coming. Doubtless more expensive than solar and fixed wind turbines too, which is why their business model appears to be hiring them out for short term projects where significant amounts of power are needed in locations that are off-grid.

I agree, it looks somewhat marginal as a product. It's very hard to compete with solar power. They claim they will have a 100kW version soon, but even so... The portability and near zero set up time are probably the biggest selling points.

You don't think that farm land is at a premium?

I looked into it, and their design is clearly focused on a particular market: portable, tens of kilowatts scale generation. Because the system only has the footprint of a large trailer, it can be deployed more widely, or where land is at a premium. The example they give is farms that want to produce power but don't want to dedicate as much space as is required for solar panels in that power output range.

What they don't mention is how it compares to a fixed wind turbine, for customers like farmers who can install one.

Fortunately there are plenty of alternatives in more sensible legal jurisdictions.

The West should be providing them with help here. Instead of just trashing all the computers at the factory, they could have introduced subtle errors into the drone's flight control systems, damaged the batteries, made them randomly explode when turned on. More like what was done to Iran's centrifuges.