590
'Windmill': China tests world’s first megawatt-level airship to capture high winds
(interestingengineering.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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Technology
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Hmm interesting. I don't see how it could be economical as an emergency-only power source. To build them and store them for occasional use seems pretty unappealing. Surely if you had them, you'd use them to generate electricity/passive income.
You could think of them as easily mobile power systems, available to respond to emergencies, but used wherever is convenient the rest of the time.
So yeah, they'll still be a hazard for air traffic, but luckily we do have an established solution for that, the blinking red light. Also, controlled airspace around airfields.
The article literally says its for earthquake relief which absolutely makes sense. The lines are down and power is needed for emergecy operations and I can see how this would be useful.
Yeah, I get how that's their intended use, I'm just saying I have my doubts about that business model. If this is their pitch, I don't think they're gonna sell many.
The thing is, they will be expensive. And it's not an expensive service, it's an expensive product. A state or a nation will have to buy a bunch of these, likely for hundreds of thousands each. And then just sit on them millions of dollars worth of energy infrastructure just sitting around not generating energy... Then when it's time for them to be deployed you have a whole bunch of government workers saying "uh, I've never set one of these up, where's the user manual?"
If instead you had them in regular use, when it comes time to deploy them in an emergency, you'd have people who actually know how to use them. Plus you could be generating power with them wherever extra power might be needed.
Well maybe its a dead end then. You'll have regular use of highly inefficient alternative with a huge maintenance overhead just because an emergency might happen some day?
Cool tech but entirely impractical and probably will never be deployed at any scale higher than a demo.
It has emergency quick deploy flexibility but seems economical as permanent installation too. Where emergency power can charge 50c/kwh+ instead of 10c/kwh, relocating quickly is much more power/profitablity than gasoline generators (which cost 50c/kwh in just fuel costs which also need emergency transportation).