The voltage being sent down would have to be really high to avoid loss going through such a long and probably thin cable. Like the difference in voltage loss going through a 100' romex cable of 10-gauge wire with 12v DC vs 120v AC - you just can't do it with 12v DC because the loss is far too high, but it's no problem with 120v AC.

Magnify those losses times 500 for your 5000' cable... maybe you need a 5000v line... then you have a dangerous high-voltage line flying around in the air. High-voltage transmission lines can arc to ground if they find a path, even though they're insulated wires.

But I guess those guys probably know about that stuff too.

I don’t know ahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!

• Operational altitude: 4,921 feet
  So precise
• Weight: Under 2,204 pounds
  Um... so 2,203 pounds?

Altitude: 1500 meters

Weight: Under 1000kg

Feeling like like Hindenburg up in here

I wonder if the way they tested it to get those higher numbers was something like finding a field where birds were roosting with windmills present, then fire off some massive fireworks at night and assume any bird that died did so because of the windmills.

Assuming they didn't just pull the numbers out of their ass and actually designed a bad faith experiment that could inflate bird deaths.

Your home also has Walls surrounding the wires.

Depending on how the turbine is set up, it could generate AC power instead of DC. I believe they even have several options on how to do this.

I bet if these get used that soon after there will be new extreme maintenance videos that make those cell towers look like nothing. Probably some guy hanging from a powered cable climbing device, showing the things on the ground getting smaller and smaller, occasionally taking a puff from an asthma inhaler because they were told an oxygen tank would cause weight issues (it's actually about financial issues), until enough people die that they realize it's cheaper to pay for oxygen than training new workers.

Makes so much more sense that it was originally in metric but looks weird translated to imperial.

They should've went with football fields instead, and weight in washing machines

Or when you need really impressive numbers for weight: oak leaves.

Maple leaves in Canada. Ha ha just kidding because they use metric like the rest of the civilised world.

This is an extremely promising innovation, and company plans on bigger designs already. But the total cost has to include an automated roof opening shelter for storms, that can open and close in medium winds before the high winds come. This makes the ground footprint higher than traditional turbines, even if agriculture can be done when there is no storm and roof is open. Perhaps 4 thethering strong cables could permit it to survive a cat 1 hurricane when hugging ground without a roof, but it is more weight to lift normally.

USB-C

what’s the magnet phone charger with no metal contacts called then?

that’s what i meant…

em dash em dash

It's because the precision is overstated in the conversion to imperial. If they're going to convert units they could at least give the correct significant digits. It should have read (if one insists on not just leaving it in metric):

• Operational altitude: nearly 1 mile (1.5km)
• Weight: Under 1 ton (imperial or metric. Take your pick, it hardly matter.)

Qi? Maybe Apple reused the term for the phone charger too, but it was originally for the MacBook pros, then later MacBook airs, and the whole line, besides an annoying usb c only model or two.

That’s annoying as hell if they did that.

1. That's solar
2. Not every storm has hail, but every storm has high winds
3. The potential risk here is an untethered 1 ton floating turbine crashing down somewhere

doesn't this use elevations compared to sea level? while the elevation of this turbine is compared to local ground level