The Trillion Dollar Drone

Google shares this belief in the cost-cutting power of wind drones. Google calculated that less than 16% of all the onshore US sites are suitable for economic wind energy production with wind turbines. For wind drones this figure more than quadruples, 66% of the United States become viable.

The higher capacity factor does not only lower the price, it also increases quality. The intermittency of most renewable energy sources causes a lot of concerns. Electricity grid operators face the challenge of matching the fluctuating production of renewables with demand. Current scenarios foresee the necessity to invest billions into stronger grids and energy storage. If wind drones can produce with a capacity factor of 70% as envisaged by E.ON, they could replace coal, nuclear and gas power plants without the necessity of massive new investments in grid and storage. Grid and distribution costs already make up for the greater part of our electricity bills. The high quality of wind drone power could become a decisive factor, even more important than its low cost.
 

Time to Market

The first wind drone prototypes are in operation. But when will they be market ready? Soon. Sooner than many other autonomous drones. The reasons: simplicity, safety and the law.

Various drones have various tasks which vary in difficulty. Wind drones are the ones with the easy job. They fly the same simple pattern, say a circle, over the same space over and over and over again. Conventional wisdom has it that robots and drones will first get into the dull, dirty and dangerous jobs. Sorry, wind drones, we cannot get you dirty and dangerous, but when it comes to dullness it is hard to beat your job.

Flying the same patterns over the same area means that the sensors know exactly what to expect, that the software has to know only a few flight patterns, and that the only variation can come from different weather, namely changes in wind speed and direction. And if the wind drone has to land for inspection or due to extreme weather, the landing site is also always nearby.
   

Safety (Makes Them) First

No matter how simple a task, something can always go wrong and in case of flying objects the result can be a crash. To be a commercial success, every drone will have to prove that it is safe.

In the beginning wind drones will only be installed in controlled areas in the countryside, or over the sea, where unauthorized access is not allowed. If the public cannot access the flight area, the public cannot be harmed. This is the simplest recipe for safety. Amazon on the other hand might find it difficult to deliver its parcel to your doorstep while keeping a safe distance from people.

Wind drones also have a built-in safety feature that is unique to drones: They are kept constantly on the leash, pardon, tether. So even if all controls go out of control, wind drones can only crash within the area of the tether and will not do any harm outside.

Stationary operation and the strictly defined flight area of wind drones not only increase safety on the ground but also in the air. Wind drone parks can be included in air maps and turned into no-flight zones for low flying air traffic, just as wind parks are today. Air regulators have already honored the additional safety and special features of wind drones. A draft decree of the European airspace authority EASA has an exemption for wind drones (and other drones on the tether) allowing them to fly higher than other drones without the same restrictions [8]. And under the new EASA “concept of drone operation” the degree of regulation will depend on a specific risk assessment for each use of drones. In case of operation in segregated areas, where drones do not pose a risk to the public, the operator might even approve its own risk assessment. Airspace regulators worldwide are currently working on regulation for drones. They will mostly use comparable flexible concepts, since applying existing strict regulation standards for manned aviation to drones would choke off the respective national drone industry without any safety benefits. So wind drones are not only safer in practice, but this additional safety in the air and on the ground will lead to much lighter regulations. This will make them faster, easier and cheaper to build than other more hazardous and therefore stricter regulated free flying drones or aircraft.
 

Huge Market

The strongest argument for wind drones is their potential market: it is huge.

To begin with, the global wind turbine market is a large market. Its volume amounted to USD 80 billion in 2013 [9]. Its growth rate averaged 25% per year over the last decade [10] and the market will continue to grow strongly. But wind drones are not limited to the existing market for wind turbines. A look at the top 20 global companies with the largest revenue as compiled by the Fortune Global 500 list illustrates their full market potential:



Energy is big business. But wind energy is still minuscule and accounts for less than 1% of total global energy use [11]. This will change. And it is mostly a question of competitiveness. Onshore wind turbines are on the brink of becoming competitive with coal and natural gas. This so called grid-parity has been reached in some regions. It means that wind energy is already the cheapest source of electricity even without subsidies. Add wind drones’ potential to slash these costs to one quarter, add steadier production and add their ability to be deployed almost anywhere.

This means that wind drones cannot only compete with wind turbines in their niche but will become the cheapest source of electricity. Cheaper than coal, gas, nuclear and hydro power.

And since electric cars are on the rise, the electricity produced by wind drones will be able to play in the energy major league and compete with oil as a transportation fuel. And oil will have a hard time competing, even at the current “cheap” oil prices. Taking into account the inefficiencies of the combustion engine, oil at US$ 60 per barrel is still a more expensive source of power for a car than the electricity produced by today’s wind turbines. Based on the analysis above, oil would have to sell at a quarter of that price, below 15 US$ per barrel to compete with wind drone energy on a pure cost of fuel basis.