Makani

» see makanipower.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

I work on autonomous aircraft for a living, so this is one of the few things on this site I can read as an engineer rather than as somebody remembering a website. Makani is the closest thing to a professional grave I have written. Everything hard about it is hard for reasons I recognize: holding an airframe on a commanded path in real wind, with a tether, for hours, unsupervised, with money riding on whether the controller holds.

The company started in Alameda in 2006 out of a kitesurfing crowd. Saul Griffith and Don Montague came from that world; Corwin Hardham was the engineer who became CEO. The observation underneath the whole thing is almost embarrassingly simple. On a conventional wind turbine, nearly all the energy is captured by the outer part of the blade, and nearly all the steel exists to hold that outer part in the air. Cut away everything that exists only to hold the tip up and replace it with a cable, and what is left is a wing flying circles at the end of a tether with rotors on it, sending power down the line. Google.org funded it early through the program it called RE<C, renewable energy cheaper than coal.

Hardham died suddenly at the office in October 2012. He was 38. Google bought the company on 23 May 2013, seven months later, and moved it into X alongside the self-driving cars and the balloons.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually flew ~

The M600 was the serious machine: a 600 kilowatt carbon fiber wing, 26 meters across, with eight rotors along the leading edge and a tether 440 meters long rated to a quarter of a meganewton. It took off vertically on those rotors like an oversized quadcopter. Once it was up it swung into crosswind flight and ran fast loops on the end of the line, with the same rotors turning backward as generators and the power coming down the cable. It first operated in December 2016. In August 2018 the team moved testing to a site on Hawaii's Big Island.

Two things about that flight profile are worth saying plainly. It is a beautiful piece of control engineering, and it has no forgiving failure modes. A conventional turbine that loses its controller stops. A kite that loses its controller comes down.

~ norway ~

In February 2019 Makani left X and became a standalone Alphabet subsidiary, with Shell taking a minority stake and a partnership aimed at putting kites over deep water, where fixed turbines cannot be founded and floating ones are ruinously expensive. That is the market that made the whole idea worth the money.

In August 2019 they flew the first offshore test, from a floating platform off the Norwegian coast. The kite was lost during it. That is not automatically fatal for a research program, and the team said as much at the time, but it happened in the same year the parent company started asking harder questions about how long the road ahead was.

~ the day it died ~

On 18 February 2020 Alphabet announced it was winding Makani down. Astro Teller, who ran X, said the road to commercial viability was much longer and riskier than they had hoped and that it no longer made sense for Makani to be an Alphabet company. Shell said it would not take the intellectual property forward either, citing the economic environment, which in early 2020 was about to get considerably worse. Fourteen years of work, and about twenty people left in the building at the end of it.

~ what got left behind ~

In September 2020 X did something unusual for a shut-down moonshot. It issued a non-assertion pledge over the entire Makani patent portfolio, so anyone can build on the designs without being sued, and then published the rest: the flight controller code on GitHub, years of raw flight logs as a public dataset, a technical report on everything that was learned, and KiteFAST, the simulation tool for modeling this class of aircraft. The company is gone and the work is not, and for a field with maybe a dozen serious teams in it worldwide that release is worth more than another year of Alphabet funding would have been.

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